See you @ AU!

I will be in town as of Saturday night. If you're around and looking for someone to have dinner with, reach out. Private messages on AUGI are the best unless you already have my email or phone.

See you there!

-R
Robert Manna
Burt Hill
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Hacking Vasari

The Best of Both Worlds part II

So I've tooled around with Vasari a little bit, in some ways it is quite liberating because it is so "lite" in other ways it is quite limiting, for obvious reasons.

One of my favorite commands in Revit is "Create Similar". It makes it so easy to create something in canvas without having to go use the Type Selector or do much else, click on the item and use the keyboard shortcut (CS), or right click and choose "Create Similar" from the context menu.

One of the interesting things about Vasari is that its still "Revit" and while they've turned off any number of tools and what not, a command like "Create Similar" is so ingrained, and so low level that it can't really be turned off (not to mention it has its uses in any context in Revit). Its almost like the "sleep" command Data used in TNG to stop the Borg from attacking Earth. Who would think that such a minor little command could wrought such interesting possibilities!

Anyway, if don't have a full blown version of Revit Architectture, but you download Vasari, fear not! Grab a Revit file from any number of locations (AUGI, Revit City, Autodesk) that already has some walls, floors, doors, whatever created in the file, and go to town! You can use Create Similiar to make your own elements, all without the convenience of the commands found in the Ribbon. Now this is not to say you'll be able to do everything and anything, but I do think it would be possible to do some fairly rudimentary modeling in Vasari with "typica"l Revit elements.

If you were really enterprising, you could create a "template" file for yourself with a bunch of elements created in an orderly fashion, that can be used with the CS command to begin modeling what ever you want.

Happy explorations!

We didn't design this one in Revit....

We've built a family, just not in Revit...

Thanks to Steve Stafford for the shout-out. Yes, I'm still planning to be at AU, and yes my wife is a saint. She did contribute to the Beyond Project Templates course, though I'll have to speak for her I think.

See you in a week!

AU Handouts!

One hundred plus pages later, all four handouts for all four AU courses are done! I'm not sure when they will go live for attendees, but the due data for speakers is tomorrow (Monday 11/15). Lab content was due about two weeks ago, so the big push has been finishing up the other three courses. My many thanks to all of my co-speakers!!

Each class is only 60 minutes long, so thanks to my co-teachers hardwork we've packed a huge amount of content into each handout. I figure with a 60min class, we're looking at a 20 - 30 slide presentation at best, since each handout is at least 20 pages that is at most a slide per page!

Enjoy and see you in a few short weeks!!

Cheers,
-R

The Danger of Shared Coordinates

So many people have seen or gotten this error before:

"Linked file File FILE NAME.rvt cannot be saved because it has changes in more than just shared coordinates and therefore can invalidate Local Files owned by you."


What this error hints at is that Shared Coordinates are invasive and indicate that even when you think you've done nothing, something has occurred between linked file because they have Shared Coordinates. What we've seen recently with our project that is in Revit Server is that shared coordinates are very invasive! We've seen a number of "false" locks on Central Files from users who are not actively working on the Central File that is locked. Instead the presence of Shared Coordinates between linked files causes a lock on one of the linked the Central File by a user working in the host file.

To be clear, none of these false locks have caused lost work, or prevent team members from getting their work done. There have been a few delays, but mainly it has left us scratching our heads, attempting to determine:

1. Who has the file locked.
2. How the lock got there in the first place.

Without Workshare Monitor to tell you what is going on in the Central File (and more importantly who is "working" on the file) its a bit more of a challenge to track down the issue. Bluestreak's Activity Monitor does not really help either, because it only reports what has happened, not what is happening.

New toys, free toys!

This caught my attention...

http://insidethefactory.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/11/weve-been-busy.html

I think that it may introduce a few spruced up features, but this is really about encouraging people to get into using the Conceptual (core) modeling environment in Revit. Oh by the way, since it will likely be on Autodesk Labs that means its Free! Install it one whatever computer you want, and have fun. I suspect they're aiming to have live before AU, but that is just a guess on my part, or maybe right after or during.