RTC NA wrap up, final thoughts

Home again, and back at the office... :-(

RTC NA was great (again) and the organizers deserve plenty of credit for putting on a great show! James does a great overview post on his blog (with some fantastic inside quotes).

In case you have not heard, next year's will be in Vancouver Canada (hence the NA and not USA). As well as the first European conference in Delft Holland and AUS is going to New Zealand!

Now some may be thinking (because I already heard mutterings) that Canada might be prohibitive for Americans because air flights into Canada have a habit of "jumping" in cost compared to a similar domestic flight in the lower 48. Might I suggest you consider flying into Seattle and renting a car (3 hr drive). If you bring your family it will be a great vacation, or if you pair up with some fellow Revit junkies from your area you can split the cost on the car.

The locations chosen for RTC tend to be very family friendly, and its nice to see everyone in such a relaxed and intimate atmosphere. The upper northwest is a beautiful part of North America if you've never visited, and given the time frame (mid July) it should be a great time to visit and make a vacation of it! I know we had a great time going to Atlanta early, hanging out then having some great Revit and BIM conversations and seeing some excellent presentations!

Our own lab went really, really well. As a bit of a teaser for the material you missed out on, this is a short supplementary video I put together for the lab. Start planning now! If I had to choose between AU and RTC, and I considered myself an expert user, looking to learn from the top of class experts, I would pick RTC!

Closing talk quote

"get rid of text. If you're using text you're doing it wrong"

On the boat

We're on the boat to dinner and our daughter has joined us. Off to eat pig on a stick.

BIM washing

Interesting link

http://www.bimthinkspace.com/2011/06/episode-16-understanding-bim-wash.html

Data mining

How to mine data such as wall types and line style use data from models.

We're here!

Checked in and heading to the pool! If you're around look us up, drop an email, comment on the post or find Krista on Facebook.

Touchdown

We have arrived. If you can't tell the sign says welcome to Atlanta.

On our way to RTC

We are on our way! Elephante too!

Vaporware!

So, I feel like I need to say something on the topic of "Autodesk 360". You may have seen recently that there has been another new "360" announcement. The problem I have with 360 is there is no product! It is a best a banner for a number of different products, most of which rely on Autodesk's cloud that they've built out (courtesy of Amazon web-services). If you start to dig into the details, it is all still separate "things". Recent acquisitions Horizontal Glue and Vela Systems for instance are all still sold through their primary channels and have not been anywhere near integrated into Autodesk. "Single Sign On" is more like "Single User ID, sign in multiple times",. If you're a subscriber with access to some of the other cloud services like Rendering, Structural Analysis, CEA, etc. there is no "single" sign on. When you get "into" the "360" website, you still have to log into each unique product.

The issue I have, is people are starting to talk about 360 like it is a product. Even Autodesk's marking material suggests the presence of some "master" 360 product "Autodesk BIM 360: The next generation BIM". If I didn't know better this would lead me to believe I can buy "360", which is about far from the truth as you can get. If 360 were some sort of "master" or "base" program to which I could add modules, then the marketing speak would make sense (and maybe that is Autodesk's long term goal), but here, today its just Vaporware.

My warning to you, if you see someone listing how they've "got" 360, or they ask you to compare 360 to another product, then start asking questions. My response is "there's nothing hear folks, time to move on". If you peak behind the curtains, you're not going to find something you can actually put your hands on. None of this is to dispute that Autodesk does not offer cloud services, my point of contention is that I think the marketing approach to said services is confusing at best and mis-leading at worst.

Hope to see many of you at RTC USA next week!

RTC North America 2012! Oh & Revit 2013

So the veil has lifted for yet another year on the latest release of Revit. I know that David Light will provide a detailed overview of the new features so I'll spare you re-writing my own post. That said I'm very excited by the changes to View Templates and View Types, I view this as critical to help maintain a graphically consistent document set in your model, particularly when working on large projects with big teams. The other big piece that I think many architecture users will get excited about will be the new stair tool (the old one is still there) and some minor improvements in railings. Would we like more, perhaps, but at least we've got something, rather than nothing.

So, the other thing I've been tardy on letting people know about is that Krista, David and myself are all schedule to be speaking at RTC '12 about Stairs and Rails! Of course up until now my class brief on the RTC website had to be intentionally vague, but now I can let everyone know that the course will not be discussing the old stairs and railing tools, but will focus on the enhancements provided by 2013.

So if you have not already, seriously consider signing up for RTC, if last year's is any indication, this year should be fantastic, particularly with a larger audience!

Where have we been?... Busy!!!!

A concerned reader wrote a comment, asking where we went? What hole absorbed us, was everything ok?

The icons all represent something that has been keeping me quite occupied since mid November!

• Since October 24th, I've been at home for a complete week three times. Other than that I've been on the road for business or the various holidays since then (or AU), and will be on the road this week and next. I finally get a break in Feburary while my babysitting heads west for a month of skiing (grandparents!).
• Work is busy for me (keeping me on my toes), lots of things on my plate, and we need good (brilliant) people! Also, I will be speaking at an upcoming online event: BIM Spectrum

• Did you know we have a one year old now! She talks, and talks and walks..... Stairs hold no fear for her!
• We're doing this silly thing called building a house (and managing the construction)! I've posted pics on G+, I'm a bit behind, windows are all installed, rough stairs are done on the inside, and I've been told (as I write from a location somewhere in N. America) that first floor interior partitions were mostly completed today!

House Panels

Our Revit model is soon to be created in reality. The panels have arrived at the fabricator.

Platforms vs. Products

Depending on the tech circles you run in (or keep track of) you may have heard of (or even read) the following post that was made by a Googler who formerly worked at Amazon.

        Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

Who knows if it is/had/or will have any impact within Google, but it is still a great, well thought out post/article/tirade about how to "design" something and quite honestly in my opinion the underlying tenets can be applied to the design or architecture of anything, not just software. If you're designing a building, do you want to design a "Product" or do you want to design something that people will be able to "plug into", make use of, and adapt to their needs? Sorry FLW fans, but in some respects he was a bit of unique genius like Steve Jobs, and most of us are just not that good, we can't design something that will perfectly fit the end user's needs 5, 10, 20, 50 years down the road, the best we can do is design something that will adapt well to meet those needs as they come about.

So besides a commentary on design over-all, why do I bring this up? If like me you're passionate about where Revit can go, and how it can help change the industry, or if you're just really frustrated with its current limitations and what it can't do right now, then I think it is important to look back at Revit's development history overall. Originally Revit was undoubtedly designed as a product. The stories from out of the Factory back that assertion up with no ifs, ands or butts; "tell me what they (user) needs it to do, and I'll (we'll) make a tool". That is very much a product mentality and quite honestly it is what is needed to capture people's imagination and more importantly market share, you need to be selling a product. However as the article makes note of, Facebook somehow someway did a great job of starting life as a product, and then became a platform.

And that, really is the key for Revit, and where we are today. Revit is quite clearly (and has been for the last four to five years) on a path to truly becoming a platform. The unfortunate reality though is that its taken a great deal of upfront investment that you can't see, to make that transition, particularly for a product that did not start its life with the idea to be a platform (the article also clearly talks about how this transition is not easy). The other part is that Revit isn't done yet, if you talk to anyone who knows anything about the API, they'll tell you there are numerous parts and pieces that they don't have access to yet, every year the API grows stronger, but only as feature teams tackle parts of the feature set that need updating, add news ones, or where adding API hooks are easy to add. Furthermore, developers have in the words of the posting started to "eat their own dogfood" in terms of developing against the API, and not creating custom hacks, and data transfers to make things work.

So why should you care (if you don't know already)? First off as Revit continues to evolve into a platform more and more you will see an ecosystem of Autodesk offered services (Autodesk Cloud) and tools as well as third party software tools and services that really start to get at "doing something" with these great models we've got (see my post "Quack!" for where I think the next big development bridge is). Up until recently most API tools were confined to aiding and assisting direct modeling efforts, however more and more there are tools showing up that are all about doing something more with the model data, whether it is Project Storm or Neon (structural analysis or rendering) or Newforma's plug-in (still needs some work) or some yet to be announced tools that I know are coming from developers (exciting stuff coming) or even experiments like Vasari, it is clear to see where things are headed, and none of it would be possible if Revit does not act and breath like a platform and not a product.

So for the Autodesk'ers out there that I know like to browse my blog, pay attention! I think you're already on this track, but this is only further re-enforcement of the direction that you need to head in; and for the users out there, have patience, the more that Revit acts like a platform, the easier (in the long run) it will be for Autodesk to add the new features you want, or have someone else add a feature for you, or potentially have both and you can choose.

A Tale of Two Normals

As anyone who has used Revit to model geometry knows it does not really seem to care about "normals", which if you're familiar with most other 3D modeling software you know exactly what Normals are, even in Sketch-Up! But lets be realistic here, any 3D modeling software has to have surface normals, and occasionally even Revit can be bent to your will....

So, here's the scenario, lets say you have a solid box. If you create a spherical void that cuts the solid, you would expect the result in the second image based on how Revit "typically" works.

But what if what you were looking for was slighting different, what if you wanted the part of the solid that is being subtracted? Normally in the Revit "world" you would say you need to create a void that is on the "outside" rather then just a spehere, to get the result in the third image.

What is I told you that you can create the condition with the same spherical void! You might say, what! How! Well, its seems that normals sometimes do matter in Revit.

To achieve the result in the third image its is all about how you draw the arc that creates the sphere. In the first example the arc is drawn counter-clockwise from the "top" of the axis to the "bottom" of the axis. To get the result in the third image the arc must be drawn clockwise from "bottom" to the "top" of the axis. In this case the differing result is because the normal(s) of the surface that make the void are different based on the direction of the arc, which is controlled by how you draw it.

An interesting little "feature" in Revit/Vasari (to be honest I did this in Vasari), your mileage may vary on what you get depending on what you're doing, but it could be handy and it shows that it pays to pay attention to what direction you draw your lines, even in Revit!

AU 2011

Registration is live, if you missed it earlier, I posted about the classes I'm teaching here.

The first session of the lab filled up quick (AU was in touch with Zach and I two days after early registration opened!). In any case they asked if we would do another session and I'm happy to say that Zach and both agreed to. Everyone really needs to thank Zach's wife as she had to give the final ok. Keep your eyes peeled for the second session for Thursday 1:00pm.

For more info on the lab, Zach has the whole break down on his blog.

It Only Takes a Spark....

It only takes a spark to light a fire (at least that is how the song goes that I learned...). Already the blog-o-sphere  & twitter (so I hear) have lit up with news about Spark. As Steve called it a "Revit Lite" as it were. What I do like about Spark is that while it is a great intro to Revit, it seems to me that once anyone is feeling comfortable with Spark, there is a good chance you'll be wanting to into full blown Revit in order to take advantage of some of the missing features. Speaking of which, here is the run down on what you should not expect to find in Spark:

Missing Revit features in Spark

Obviously Vasari fills some of the gaps missing from Spark, but there is also no clear or defined workflow between the two. Secondly, don't expect to be opening your Rvt file from Revit in Spark, it will be automatically converted to a link for you. This means that you can still at least link in a structure model or MEP model if you happen to be a small arch shop dipping your toes into Revit. There are a couple of missing items that I was a bit surprised by perhaps the most important "trusses". However, fear not you can still create line based families (which can be assigned to structural framing) so go ahead, make your own parametric pre-fab truss, it will probably look better than what Revit creates, and you'll learn how to build parametric families.

Look for a follow-on post in a few weeks where I plan to tie up a number of these lab items into hopefully an interesting (and perhaps compelling) workflow.

Cheers,
-R

A Storm is brewing....

Well, actually it left yesterday, her name was Irene. But the word on the street says a Storm is coming to Autodesk Labs. I think it is interesting that we are starting to see a plethora of "apps" that leverage the model directly out of Revit for analysis. First we had "Conceptual Energy Analysis (CEA)", then project NEON (well not analysis, but cloud based computing for long duration tasks), now we have Elum tools under development (see Jason's and Steve's blogs), Vasari seems likely to continue to the trend of analysis for early stage design, what might be next? What's a big ticket analysis item that could be easily shoveled into the cloud....?

Revit Server Installation/Updating & Mosaic

A Revit Server post to leave you with as I head out on vacation...

I recently ran into an issue with Revit Server that also caused another large firm quite a bit of distress. THe problem is this:

1) User A installs the Revit Server application onto the server OS/hardware.
2) User B goes to either update the Revit Server applicaiton or un-install. If the user runs the Service Pack EXE it reports the program cannot be found. If User B goes to un-install the Revit Server application the Add/Remove Programs dialog does not display the Revit Server application.
3) User A logs into the server and can update Revit Server or Un-install the application from the server.

So, the short story here is that if you only use Windows User accounts that are associated with specific users, then when it comes time to update or remove Revit Server you need to know who originally installed the software on the server. If you have a generic "Admin" account that can be used then that is your best chouice when it comes to installing and patching Revit Server. This "bug" in terms of Revit Server seems to likely be related to the increased security restrictions applied by the Windows 2008/7 environment(s) and how the installer for Revit Server works. This issue has actually exsisted since 2011, so it is not related to the new 2012 installer. In terms of getting it "fixed" I'm not holding my breadth as this issue is likely well embedded into how the software is installed in the first place.

One other note, Autodesk Labs has a new project called "Mosaic" check it out, I think it has some interesting potential if people take to it. It is kinda like a "Google" reader for AEC Tech geeks.

QUACK!

Quack was the term we would toss around at Burt Hill when we would look into the future and attempt to divine what was next. 

What was coming after Revit? Sure Revit is fun and exciting, but its just a tool, and there is always another coming. While the rumor is that there are software vendors attempting to pursue the market share that Revit has solidly locked into, that does not actually interest me that much, because at the end of the day the Revit ship has clearly sailed, and you're either on it or not (for whatever reason) and just as 20+ years later you can buy cheap 2D drafting knock-offs that do what Autocad did those 20+ years ago, undoubedtly the same will happen in the space of 3D modeling for AEC, there are and will continue to be multiple applications that generally do the same thing.

Misc. Summer Post... (RTC, SP, AU)

Three topics in one post today (though that won't help my post count!).

First up, as you've probably already read on other blogs RTC USA was just awesome!! The vibe was great, I learned a few things and it was great to share and network in such an intimate setting. As promised here is a link to the sample file that I created for the class I gave at RTC.

    Panelize This! sample file


Next topic, the Revit Service pack release has gotten a fair bit of press.

If you're a Revit Server user though you don't want to miss the SP that was also released special for Revit Server. This is a separate download from the SP for Revit itself. There a few significant fixes, however the one I consider most important is improved ability to deal with "Orphan Locks" on your models. This has been a problem that has plagued Revit Server since first release, and it seems has only grown as more people adopt Server. This is not a "final" fix, but the patch in SP1 should at least make administration and management easier.

    Revit Server2012 Service Pack 1


Lastly, I'm happy to announce that this year I'll be teaching/helping to teach three courses at AU:

AB4210 - Have it Your Way: Collaboration and Management with Autodesk Revit Server. I'm happy to say I have two co-speakers (Jason Bailey of HDR & Michael Coviello of TRO/JB) on board for this course who bring some great experiences with Server to the table. I feel like I'm just the editor here, helping to present lots of information on the topic.


AB4391-L - Twice Baked: Creating Your Own Adaptive Components and Panels with Autodesk Revit. Yep another lab, and yep Zach is back as my co-pilot. This is a follow-up to what I consider our outrageously successful set of courses last year; Parametrics Laid Bare: Panels and Adaptive Components in Autodesk® Revit® & Au Bon Panel: Baking Your Own Adaptive Components and Panels with Autodesk® Revit® Architecture. If you register for this year's lab we please, please ask that you review both before coming to our door, and the way last year's filled up, you better have your finger on the registration button when the clock strikes midnight!


AB4480 - Way Beyond Project Templates: Appyling Standards for Efficient Document Production in Autodesk Revit. So if you've been following me the last few years I've presented several courses on project templates, standards and the like in Revit. David Spehar has been (one of) my trusty co-speaker(s) for all of it, and this year we decided to switch things up. David is the pilot and I'm the co-pilot. We see this as a third installment of what has been so far a well received series of courses (I'm not sure what we'll do in 2012!) and if you went to or watched the first two, you surely don't want to miss the third (I promise it will be better then Back To the Future III).