New Revit Forum

So as most of you are probably aware of AUGI seems to be tanking rather quickly and there have been many searching for new places to go for a resource and to connect with fellow Revit users. "Revit Forum" is very well laid out, and the development team seems to be very quick on getting changes, wants, and fixes made to the forum.

There also seems to be many Revit users already starting to use this forum, so if any are interested in finding a new place to connect I would highly recommend this forum, and I hope to see many of you on there!

"North Symbol on all Plans"

I recently read a post on AUGI and I thought it was an interesting way to automatically put a north arrow on all your plan drawings. Draw your North arrow as a shaft object rather than an annotation. Seems like a pretty simple solution, and rather innovative. Thanks to David Harrington for the post on AUGI.

I am trying to get some things together from a project in college, but I am hoping to have a post soon on the power and setback to Revit Scheduling.

Revit and Construction

So I have recently started working at a new firm. I used to work for an Architectural firm/Construction firm, and now work for a structural firm. The things I am doing for the structural firm are all construction related, such as rebar shop drawings, steel stud lay out designs, roof construction sequencing and weights, and similar. What has been noticed the most about doing this type of designing with Revit is that there is still a lot of development and improvement with Revit that would make using Revit for shop drawings much more efficient.

The first area would have to be rebar. By pure time, volume, and frequency, rebar shops are something that could easily take off in Reivt and have a fairly high impact on construction cost and time. There are three major areas that would significantly improve creating rebar shops in Revit:

1. Placement of rebar around openings and non-squared edges
   *Right now there is not a way to easily take rebar around openings and along non-squared edges.
   
2. Tagging of rebar sets.
   *Rebar is fairly similar to a beam system in its looks and how it functions, it would be great to have a tag that recognizes this and would act as the beam system tag does by placing arrows to the extents automatically of the rebar set.
   
3. Customizable schedules.
   *This seems to be the simplest yet most helpful, it would be extremely helpful to have better control of schedules in Revit so users could make Revit populate a Bar Mark rather then a user generated mark. Not being able to convert a number to text and not being able to use bend types and bar sizes in formulas are each humps when trying to force Revit to automatically populate a Bar Mark. For example if a bar is a #7 17A bar, there needs be a way to combine these to 7-17A that is both able to be scheduled and tagged.
   

Scan to BIM from BIM Manager

I noticed a new post on a colleague's blog today about bringing scanned point clouds into Revit. I feel that this is a great opportunity for numerous expansions utilizing the Revit platform anywhere from high end industrial work to building remodels. I think this also could have a great impact on as builts and also facilities management.

http://www.avatech.com/solutions/building-design/product-details.aspx?product=90

http://bimmanager.blogspot.com/2010/11/scan-to-bim.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BimManager+%28BIM+Manager%29

Apple's 3D Head-tracking for BIM

Since tomorrow Apple is said to be holding a press conference tomorrow I figured I needed to get this published beforehand.

Apple is in the works of creating and patenting a head-tracking system that would manipulate the screen based on head positioning...http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/construction/apple-3d-the-ultimate-display-for-construction-plans-1121809/. This link, published by Houston Neal, shows an example of how Apple is trying to program the technology for use with BIM.

Though I still am trying to picture how this would play in takeoffs and estimating with interfacing programs such as Revit -> Autodesk Quantity Takeoff -> and Sage Timberline, I do see a great benefit for this type of system as an addition or in great competition to programs such as Navisworks, Synchro, and others.

Thesis

Hello all, thanks for the heads up about my last link...filedropper removes files with slow activity, so hopefully dropbox will do a better job of hosting my file.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3837393/Thesis.pdf

This link will take you directly to my PDFed Thesis

Please be courteous if forwarding on or utilizing any of the information from the document. If anyone has any questions, comments, or issues with the file please let me know. Please also leave comments on what you think.

Thanks

Grant Doherty