BIM

Been a while since I've blogged anything about Revit, so I thought I'd share this little gem. It's something we've made heavy use of here at BWC, and it's something that while simple isn't widely known about Revit.

You can make your own Family Templates. While Revit comes with tons of them ready to go, there are things about them that don't always match up to your needs, and you always seem to repeat the same beginning steps with some of them every time you go to make a Family. Well no more! By making your own Revit Family Templates, you can add those redundant steps into your Templates, and even go farther when doing repetitive work.

Let's give it a go! Go to where your Templates are, most likely /Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Autodesk/RAC 2008/Imperial Templates/. Let's pick the Generic Model template, the most basic of them all, and copy it in the same folder. Let's rename our copy 'My Family Template' for now like so:

Cool. OK, here's the only trick. In order to edit the template, simply change it's file extension from .RFT to .RFA. Click OK when Windows warns you that this will change how the file will open. If it's telling you that the file is read-only, click ok, and then change the file attributes to be editable before you go any farther. Now we can open it up in Revit and edit it. Now we can add some Reference Planes, and basic width and depth dims and parameters like so:

And then we save our Family, and then close it out. Go back to the Template folder, and let's change our file's extension back to .RFT. Now when we go back into Revit, and pick File -> New -> Family to make a new Family, you'll see our self-made template file is a valid choice to start from:

And, if we do so, you'll see that those basic things we added to the Family are now just defaults, ready to go every time we need them. Also, you'll notice that we can't delete these things we added. When something is made into a Family Template, it 'locks' the added elements in, so that they are now undelete-able defaults. It can be handy, but also not. Plan ahead, and make a few different templates, and all will be fine.

So here at BWC we've made Family Templates for commonly-sized elements and furniture we deal with. It's made making Families a lot faster, for now I'm not re-doing the same beginning steps over and over, such as setting up basic reference planes, changing the units to decimal inches, setting up views for CNC export, changing all the view's scales to better match the size of the thing I'm modeling, etc. This trick alone probably saves me at least fifteen minutes a day, for as you can imagine we spend a lot of time on custom families. ;-)

You can take this idea a lot farther too, where you make a 'proto-door' that has most everything your common door has, and that meets your standards, and is a lot closer to your needs than the default door template that comes with Revit. This way, you only have to model that last little 20% or so, and you're done. Great when you have to do a whole line or series of products! You can also make some templates for common setups that you like to nest into other families too. For example, we've set one up of a door panel that has a parametric swing. So now, when we need to make a new door, first we make a new door panel, that already has a parametric swing and dimensions, and all we need to do is edit or add to the model to get it to match the conditions we're going for, i.e. a vision panel or a panic bar. Then we make another new Family, based off of a custom door template, that's ready to nest that first panel Family into it, and with a few aligns and locks we've got ourselves fully parametric door, with adjustable swing, yet customized, and done in probably just a few minutes!

One thing we like to talk about here at Because We Can is the fact that we're 'Agile'. It doesn't mean we are just handy with the robot, or that we can catching things when you throw them at us (and jump away when those things are sharp), but it actually goes a lot deeper than that. We use something called 'Scrum' to manage our projects and business.

We recently were interviewed by Cadalyst Magazine, an long running CAD industry publication:

http://aec.cadalyst.com/aec/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=413511

They were interested in our use of Autodesk Revit, and how we leverage it into CNC production to quickly design and fabricate totally one-of-a-kind spaces and elements (for the same price as boring normal stuff).

There aren't a lot of folks using Revit this way out there. Most designers and Architects into CNC are using more model-heavy tools like Rhino or Maya, and haven't started leveraging BIM at all. And most designers and Architects who are into BIM are more traditional firms that aren't directly fabricating and building their own work...

We are still here in Vegas, on our last day, and frankly, it's about time! Jeffrey has given all of his three talks. And luckily only one of them was strewn with technical difficulties including, but not limited to, the light jazz that started playing from the hotel speakers halfway through his talk. That talk seemed to take all the bad luck, as his others went seamlessly, and he received praise from the attendees on all three of the presentations.

All of his talks were taped, so you can watch them by logging onto the AU Online site.

We have been put up at The Venetian, with it's plush accomidations and amazingly friendly service. The interior design of this place is amazing.

This tower here has a long hallway flanked on either side with gas wall sconces. The center of this hallway is a reception area with an amazing ceiling and chandelier. There is so much security here, you have to have a room key to go anywhere in this hotel. Luckily, we did.

We've decided that is the ceilings and lighting fixtures that really hold the personality of a vegas casino- as eye level and below are typically filled with slot machines and a multicolored carpet to hide stains.

The Venetian has a pool that was still open while we were here, even though the temperature high was in the low 50's. I went swimming, and it was *WONDERFUL* as they keep the pool at a constant 85 degrees! And I had it all to myself, as more rational people than I figured it was too cold to be swimming.

They give you heated towels as you are on your way to the pool.

The other day I saw someone vacuuming this lawn. So today I took a closer look at it.

This is by far the nicest and softest, and most likely the most expensive astroturf you can find. I want some for my livingroom!

Even the exit signs are fancy at The Venetian.

Now onto our room... We had 35 people in here on Tuesday night. I'll say it again..... 35 people in our hotel room at one time, and it wasnt even tight! I think this room is larger than our space in Oakland.

The bathroom has it's own makeup table, as well as a separate bath tub, a shower with glass walls, two sinks, and a separate room for the toilet. I could live here. If only it weren't in Vegas!

So something I've done some work with over the years is a rendering engine called Radiance. Radiance is unique amoust rendering engines as it actually calculates the lighting, it doesn't 'fake' anything, so you can get some real design feedback from it. In other words, if your rendering looks bad, it means the lighting or daylighting is bad, and you've got design problems to fix. Most other rendering engines are focused on making a 'sexy' image ASAP (and rightfully so) and so you can't 'trust' the results for it's just faking everything.

However, Radiance isn't widely used because it's slower, harder, and requires you to know something about daylighting and lighting design to get good results out of it (that 'not faking it' comes back to bite you).  That and the fact that it's a very old school command-line Unix tool makes it's learning curve vertical, and if I didn't have a Unix god for a friend to pester with stupid questions I would have never learned it.

I've always felt that Radiance is kinda like the oil painting of Architectural Renderings: It's hard, and takes a long time to master, but will let you produce images no other medium can produce. Most rendering engines are more akin to watercolors, sketches, or airbrushed paintings: fast, loose, easy, and easy to make look great. Right tool for the job and all that, so Radiance isn't used much, 'cept by lighting designers, for most Architects just want a sexy image in the least amount of time possible.

Anyways, the right job came along, and I got to dust off my Radiance skills I haven't used in a while. We've got a project at my day job that's all Leeds and daylit and such. Had to get a good idea if it was really going to behave the way we designed it to, and Max alone couldn't get us there. However, seeing that we were doing the project in Revit, we had a nice, complete, clean model to work from. With a little bit of noodling I figured out how to go from Revit to Radiance with little pain (but a very expensive translator, sadly).

This is a 'falsecolor' image of the interior of the project, showing the lighting levels from the windows and skylight. The colors match that little legend in the corner, so that we now know how much natural 'free' light those tabletops are gonna get. Pretty cool, huh? (god I'm such a dork)

Here's what I do:
1. I export the 3D model from Revit as a polyface mesh to a DWG file, with elements turned on or off to filter out what I don't want in my final Radiance model.

2. I then file link that DWG into Max 8, which allows the Revit materials to remain 'intact'.

3. Revit likes to model glass as a solid plate. Radiance likes glass to be a flat plane. So in Max I select all the glass by going into the Material Library, setting it to only show the scene materials, picking the glass, and then using the very handy 'Pick Elements By Material' button on the Materials Palette. This then gives me all the glass. I then apply a 'Edit Poly' Modifier to the glass, and pick the 'Y' under 'Make Planer'. This 'flattens' all the glass, which as long as it's not horizontal (like in a skylight) fortunately for us has the y-axis pointing in the right direction to make this happen correctly.

4. I then export the model from Max as an .Obj file, with elements grouped by material, no normals, and faces set to quads. I've found this gives the cleanest mesh in Radiance so far, but I'm still tweaking with this to see if it can be better.

5. Then I use the Obj2Rad tool that comes with Radiance to convert the exported .Obj file to a Radiance file. I'm running Radiance under Cygwin using this fellow's wonderful pre-complied binaries. It's the easiest way to get it to work under Windows I've found. Someday I need to set up a 'heavy lifter' OS X or Linux rendering box I can SSH these jobs to instead, get them to run faster (Radiance runs at little better than half speed on Cygwin from what I understand)...

6. Now we are almost done. We need a .Mat Radiance material definition file to go with our .Rad file. what I do is use Awk, Grep, and Uniq to parse the .Rad file, pull out all the Material Names, sort them,  delete the duplicates, and then save them into a .Mat file. Once I get that process smooth I'll post it here, I'm still stumbling with it a little.

7. And now we're done! We just make a .Rif file, a sun definition file, and start rendering away. If we change the Revit model, we simply re-export to DWG, the change pulls into Max automatically next time we open that file, we re-export to .Obj, reconvert OBJ2RAD, and then we're ready to re-render.

Now. Here's a caveat. I'm cheap. so I'm trying to do this with the tools on hand. This company makes a version of Radiance you can use as a plug-in to Max, just as if it was vRay or some other rendering engine. I've used their demo, and it looks keen. but it's almost $2k worth of keen, so...

And someday I'd like to do this without needing Max at all. That would be swell. Gotta talk to some programmer friends of mine...

Revit 9 is out, and here's the five biggest things that rock IMHO:

Keynoting

            All I can say is finally. The material keynoting and element keynoting are gonna really help. And the fact that you don't need to go through lots of hoops to get sheet-specific keynote legends now is a huge plus. This, like the next issue, removes a major stumbling block with Revit, even if it also adds a few minor management issues.

Reuse of sheets

            This solves a major issue that Revit's had for a long time. Namely, reusing old details, sheets, views, and schedules was somewhat cumbersome and inefficient. Now we can save out typical sheets, details, and schedules and pull them in as needed into Projects. No more cutting and pasting. If you pull a sheet in it even retains it's formatting and layout. This solves what was going to be a major issue at my day job, namely how to organize typical content and details and make them assessable to 30 offices. It's funny, problems that are just annoying when working within a smaller context can become real show stoppers when you scale things up to the size of the big G. It's part of the fun of trying to make Revit available to the big G, and make it a success where it's used. There's still plenty of scary, scary problems we have to solve (or that Revit has to solve). But at least this one is solved now.

Material takeoffs

            Revit 9 has a new type of schedule called 'Material Takeoff'. It's basically a schedule limited to just the materials of all elements within a certain Category. This includes materials applied via the paint bucket, as well as the layers of materials used within system families. So, for example, you can generate an area takeoff from the paint on the walls automatically, regardless if it was modeled, embedded, or painted onto the wall. This is going to be very helpful to me personally, for when I design and model furniture and fixtures within Revit I define what materials the parts are as I go. Like on the reception desk that we did, it's just one big in-place family, but the different materials were defined within that so that it showed up properly in section and elevation. Now, I can also get an area of those materials and then have Revit calculate a rough number of sheets of plywood it will take to make that item. All for 'free', no extra work, just off the model that I'm making anyways. I just tried this with that reception desk model, and it came out with the proper numbers. One caveat here is that the area the material reports includes all faces of the element queried. So for this desk I had to halve the calculated area of plywood, for it was counting both sides of the sheets when I just wanted to divide the total area of plywood vs. the area of a single sheet to get a rough number of required sheets. Just something to watch out for.

Animated non-rendered sun/shadow studies

            Not a huge deal, but a nice thing to have. The more Revit Building can do to move towards design-analysis in regards to Architecture the better. I personally would love to see Ecotect-like features added to Revit, so as Inventor can calc out the strength of something via FE, and Revit Systems can calc out air loads, Revit building can calc out thermal and daylight loads so I can make a better building.  

New rooms

            This is going to be another big deal for the big G, for the majority of work here is interiors, and the old rooms were somewhat confusing and limited. Now that they have an actual proper representation within the building model, as well as being smarter, it's going to make our lives a lot easier for test-fits and more. Also it's nice to be able to tag them in section views now.

Five that I would have liked in nine:

So while I like Revit 9, and think there is some serious foundation work going on that is going to play a much larger role in the future (when we're swapping Revit models with the consultants), Here's my little list of things I'd like to see ASAP:

• Fix the elevation tags. It's getting sad that this hasn't been addressed at all for YEARS. They pay a lot of lip service to the fact that Revit 9 was focused on 'Construction Documentation' yet they left the elevation tags unaddressed?

• Simply make Revit faster. Seriously. The rather simple improvement with Revit 8.1's worksets has translated into a direct productivity improvement that's much bigger than any other new feature Revit 8.1 had. I once read a study, done many years ago, that a simple 10% increase in screen regen speed for a CAD system will vastly outstrip any productivity improvement via new features. Revit could be making much better use of the hardware available today IMHO, and with folks wanting to undertake REALLY BIG projects in Revit it's going to become a huge issue for everyone if Revit doesn't start getting faster…

• Have the Inventor team talk to the Revit team and show them how to do a decent OpenGL accelerated UI. Revit could be making such better use of this kind of hardware, and it's a shame that AutoDesk, who has the Inventor team, who are really good at this sort of thing, can't seem to get their act together and share that knowledge internally. Also the Revit UI, while OK, is getting a little long in the tooth. While it looks like 9 did redo some icons to make them clearer, let's just say that it sure doesn't look like a $4000+ package now.

• Get a modern rendering engine under the hood. It looks really bad for Revit to still be using such an old and broken engine, when all the other AutoDesk products are now using Mental Ray. Not a very confidence-building thing to see Revit still stuck with the old engine.

• Fix shared parameters. They work within a smaller context of a single office, but there are lots of big scary problems that pop up when you try to scale that same system to 30 offices. There has to be a better way to do this, and we needed it yesterday. Let's hope it shows up soon...

Here's a sneek peak at a big job we're in the middle of. We're doing a lobby for a local game design company, and we're very excited about it. The overall theme of this lobby is based upon an orginal creative work (a fun PSP game and a neat comic) of this company called 'Death Jr'. It's theme is that you are Death's kid and you've got to save your dad (who's in trouble because of something you did). We loved this image of Death's desk in his study from the comic:

So we proposed to base the reception desk design off of it. We were very excited that the client liked the idea, and we designed and modeled the desk in Revit:

Which formed the majority of the desk. However, we wanted to do some very custom parts for the desk. We mocked up these wings for the front in Revit, but we wanted them to look more carved instead of flat. So I exported the wing from Revit into Blender, and then remodeled it until we liked the look:

And then we exported that model from Blender to the CNC toolpathing software, and then carved it out from a solid chunk of walnut we got from Pals down the street (certiified sustanably harvested, Pals rocks). Those extra bits in the model are to save some of the wood, so we're not carving it all away:

Then we sanded and finished the wing. We're very happy in how they came out:

They were a nice touch to the overall desk.

We'll be posting a lot more photos of this when we're done, but here's a sneak peak of what it looks like now: