Mouse Hotkey

I recently came across a pretty cool tool called StrokeIT which attaches shortcuts to your mouse and how you gesture. Now I am the type that love using my keyboard short cuts and so to me I feel that this would be a little too different for how I prefer to Revit, but it is still a really cool tool and many out there may find this a nice alternative to browsing around for tools on tool bars and using the keyboard.

Below is a video of how it works. You can also see the video on this forum. I am not sure why the video is so blurry on here?

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