What has been keeping me busy.....

So, I've recently (6+ months) been busy working on designing a house with my wife. Of course, we're using Revit, though I can't claim that we've done anything revolutionary. Our 2,800 sq ft house is a 60mb file.... I think I've modeled a little too much detail :). Enjoy some of the 2009 renderings.

Join me @ AU!

I will be attending AU yet again (my third time). I'm looking forward to a couple of things already. On Monday there is a "Design Computation Symposium" being hosted by Autodesk and the AEC solutions division it will be chaired by Robert Aish. This should be very interesting as Robert worked for Bentley helping to develop Generative Components, now he is working with Autodesk.

The other thing that I'm interested in is the AU Unconference. In its second year, last year was very well received, the sessions were open and allowed for great discussion among peers. You can vote for the sessions you think will be interesting here: Vote

For more info on Unplugged visit the website.

More phase issues (graphics)

Hello again,

Another issue I found while running the education session last week was dealing with the results of a new insert in an existing wall.

When you place something like a door into an existing wall object, lines for the door, show up in your existing floor plan views, and there is a quasi selectable "infill" object. I also do not remember seeing this behavior in previous versions of Revit.

Inserts in Existing Walls

So I realize I've been lapse on my posting of late. Mostly because I haven't much I'm in a position to share. That said. I was recently running a week of education based on our new curriculum and we (the class and I) ran into a really odd error that we had not seen previously.

Specifically the class was focused on Phasing in Revit. We were going through how you can add a door to an existing wall. In our case, we had already deleted an existing door from the same wall object, and there was an infill portion of new wall where we had removed the door. As part of the class we had changed the wall type of the infill, and we had made it larger then the existing wall. When we placed a new door, the new door took on the dimensions of the new wall infill, and the existing wall was not cut.

With a little bit of playing around, we determined that the door was hosted to the new infill wall, and that by using the "Rehost command" in the options bar we were able to host the door properly to the existing wall. I will warn you that getting the door to rehost properly can be tricky. The behavior of hosting to the new infill seems to be consistent, as students saw the same behavior, and I was able to re-create it again too (admitedly all on the same project file). The training file was started in 2008, before being upgraded. None of remeber seeing this behavior previous to 2009. I do know that Autodesk has had some sample file(s) with this behavior, and they used it as a puzzler at AU2008, however in that case it was a plumbing fixture, not a door.

So, the short is, the behavior is not completely new, but I don't remember it being as prevalent previously. So take this as a word of caution.