RTC Australasia 2011 - Gold Coast - Registration open

RTC (Revit Technology Conference) 2011 is now open for registration, it will run from Thursday the 26th of May until Saturday the 28th of May. This year it will be at none other than Jupiters Casino on the Gold Coast

The quality of sessions looks to be another level again this year, with notably longer LAB sessions

To ensure you get a spot in a LAB session, it would be a good idea to sign-up ASAP

Once again there are way too many good classes to choose from, but a couple that jumped out at me straight away are:

GenerativeComponents: "Capturing the Concept" -Lars Moth-Poulsen
A two hour LABS session!


Revit's Top Model - Conceptual Massing World -Stephen Taskin
Stephen in my opinion is one of the masters of complex forms, and I loved his class last year

Construction Families for Structures -Adam Sheather
Defiantly looking forward to seeing what Adam can do with families


Advanced Geometry -Phil Read
Not even a description yet, but this class should be good!

 And a little self promotion, I have a session on day one titled "Structural Families Overview'
This session will be targeted at all levels, and will go through every imaginable setting for structural specific families, and how they can change your documentation and model.

So don't wait, get on the website and book your seats now!

See you there..

RTC Website

Reset 3D viewpoint after orbit

Following on from my post about orient to view and using the steering/navigation wheel interface to gain access to more options, there is another neat feature only available through the navigation wheel

If you have ever created a snapshot 3D view that you want to place in your documentation, you have probably accidentally orbited in the view which would mess up the viewpoint you are after, but also affect any text you have placed in the view

3D view setup for documentation

Result after accidental orbit

A simple undo will not work unless you happened to change something else in the view at the same time, the simple orbit isnt recongnised by Revit otherwise

But you can reset the viewpoint through the steering wheel

Steering wheel undo option

You can also assign a hotkey to this command in your keyboard shortcuts, it is currently unassigned by default

As someone who doesn't use the navigation wheel, I would love to see this option added to the view cube

Orient to View - Weird Revit

Another year is well underway and we had our first REVIC (Revit Users Group of Victoria) meeting for the year on Tuesday night

The first topic of the year was on Visual Presentation, starting right at the nuts and bolts of view properties, Object Syles, VG overrides etc, through to workflows for Isometrics etc.

One thing that popped up again, was the amazement that people are not aware of the "Orient to View" tool in a 3D view

Whenever I am modeling in a project I am constantly using this tool to get a cropped 3D view of the area I am working on, instead of clumsily orbiting around a model that fills multiple sheets

Something that I have grown to accept though is that we only have the view options shown in the image below

Which is plans, elevations, sections & other 3D views, but no detail views...

Dont forget there is a difference between "Sections" & "Details"

 But at last nights REVIC meeting, a wise voice from the back of the crowd slipped in a secret that I certainly had not come across, when the "Steering Wheel" option was added Autodesk decided to change the way "Orient to View" works, and accessing it that way actually gives you a full list of views in the project, including detail views! See the image below

Unfortunately, it doesn't break down the list into sub-groups, which on larger projects leaves you thousands of views to sort through! But handy if you need a cropped view of a detail

Thanks for that one Chris!

Structural Connection Families - Hidden Lines

Working more and more with 3D connections, something that has always been a little odd to me is that Structural Connection families dont behave how you would expect

A very common but simple connection detail is highlighted below, a simple cleat plate connection (cleat highlighted in red)

3D view of face hosted cleat plate, with family set to "Structural Connection"

 If we then cut a section or take a callout at the far face of the connection at the connection location, we dont see the cleat plate. It doesnt matter how we configure the view settings, the cleat plate will not show. Ideally the cleat plate would show automatically following the functionality of all other "Structural" elements when set to a view discipline of structural

Section or callout taken at connection location

 So the next approach I try is to set my discipline to "Co-ordination" which allows me to use "Show Hidden lines"

But with the family set to "Structural Connections" I cannot actually select the cleat plate family, it is simply not able to be used with "Show hidden lines"

If I then edit my cleat plate family, and set the family category to "Generic Model" show hidden lines will work

Example of hidden lines displaying when set to "Generic Model"

 This workflow is something that I have used without stopping to ask why it doesnt work as "Structural Connection" but recently I submitted it to Autodesk support, I am likely not the first, hopefully we can see a fix in the near future

AUBench - Workstation Benchmarking

Going back a few years now there was quite a following on AUGI with the technically minded Revit users sharing a benchmarking journal file, I dont know the exact origins, but I believe Phil Read first presented it at AU2007 which was when it first appeared on AUGI <Original AUGI Link>

The way it works, is you can essentially take any Revit Journal file, which is a log of each command in a Revit session, which you can then add markers and timing points which will write to a text file once complete. You can then use the identical test file on different machine builds to compare the results of time taken for each task

Over the years I have used the principals from the original AUGI AUbench files and created my own structural specific benchmark tests with my own custom Journal files. It was a huge help in creating our current spec of machines, testing actual tasks on each spec machine and seeing results was a great thing for the IT management to have in front of them when speccing the machines.

Recently over at revitforum.org, the AUbench has taken a new life, with a new standard benchmark file, with a new neat addition of a script file which will run the test multiple times and then create a results file showing the average times from the test.

Check out the thread here  http://www.revitforum.org/showthread.php?351-New-AUBench

Unfortunately, For RST users, the standard benchmark journal will crash at the change curtain panel type point of the journal file, you can remove this section and it all works fine. But your times are only comparable for the first sections of the Journal file compared to the Architecture results

A copy of the modified RST version of the benchmark file can be found in this <Post>

You also need to ensure that PressDrag is enabled in your Revit.ini file, there are plenty of blog posts about setting this if you are unsure

It might just be the help you need to convince the boss of an upgraded machine