export to IES - LFRT follow-up

While at the LFRT meeting I gave a presentation on our use of IES at Burt Hill, specifically I profiled this project. Phil Read raised an interesting question, he has long preached the use of thin basics walls to function as a simple "curtain wall" rather then dealing with the more complex curtain wall tool. However, in discussing how Revit data is ported from Revit to IES he asked how would his "fake" curtain walls be handled. Not knowing for sure, I've gone back and done a simple test. The unforunate answer is, that fake curtain walls don't work.

IES looks to internal properties of objects in Revit to determine if they are a "solid" or if they are transparent. So therefore it knows that a Revit curtain wall should let light through, and it knows that a window will too. However it expects that walls will be solid. The material that has been mapped to the wall does not matter in this case. As you can, once this simple model is brought into the IES dialog, we're left with only one opening that reveals the space volume.

Revit '09 --> Max '09 FBX whitepaper

Autodesk has posted a whitepaper that details the workflow from Revit to Max when using the new FBX format. Given the FBX format's ability to carry a great deal of the Revit meta data and materials information, I would not be suprised if Autodesk continues to expand and develop the use of this format with regards to Revit. I think that what we can in the '09 products is a great first step, but I hope there is more to come.

design visulization white papers: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=10155245

AIA LFRT & MOI!

I've been quite for awhile. Been quite busy really. This week I had an opprotunity to attend the AIA LFRt (Large Firm RoundTable) BIM Implementer's meeting in Seattle. Since it was all the top "bimmers" from the large firms I got to catch up with a number of familiar faces and meet a few more. Phil Read was there, and I finally got to actually meet him! the BIMI group has met twice before in the last two years, and I thought that this meeting was the best so far. This year it seemed everyone had one or more (mostly more) projects under their collective belts as firms, so we had some really good dicussions about a number of topics, from training to content, and even wish lists. It is really quite useful to be able to have these discussions with people who are in similiar situations.

One of the presentations was by a one man software development company called "Triple Squid Software Design". He originally helped Rhino, and after being here and there, he is working on a new project called "Moment of Inspiration (MOI)" it is "sculptural design software, similiar in some ways to Sketch-Up, but also quite unique and different. He uses a couple of industry standard file formats, including Rhino, so it is compatible with other tools. He has only just recently released version one, but it looks really promising. The software is very tablet friendly, as it only uses left clicks, and very little keyboard interaction is required (unless you so choose). Check it out, there is a full 30 day demo, or an infite demo with no save capabilities.

go here for more: http://moi3d.com/