BLDD BIM BLOG

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

EXISTING ROOM NAMES ON DEMO VIEWS

This is another quick little trick for putting existing room names onto a demolition plan. Because of how the Phase Filters work in Revit, you can’t get existing room names to show up on a demolition plan… it automatically defaults to show the new construction rooms. So here’s what we’ve done:

Duplicate the Existing Floor Plan view for each floor plan and call it “FIRST FLOOR PLAN – ROOM NAMES” as an example…
Set the PHASE FILTER for the view to SHOW ALL and the Phase to EXISTING.
Under VISIBILITY GRAPHICS, turn everything off except for ROOMS (under Model Categories) and ROOM TAGS (under Annotation Categories).
This will create a view that has just the room names as seen below:

Now… here’s the trick. You are going to put this view “on top” of your normal demolition plan view on your plan sheet. You may have to do a little bit of aligning before you turn everything off in visibility graphics to make sure that the correct room is in the right space. This is what you end up with. The image below is a "demolition plan" view with a "room names" view on top of it on the sheet. The draw back is that if you want to move a room tag... you need to do it in the sheet view to make sure it doesn't overlap any keynote, dimension, etc.

WARNING!!! When you’re all done with this and you want to edit your view from the sheet… make sure to click on the correct view. Since these 2 views are essentially on top of each other, you may click one and not realize it. Also, make sure you duplicate your view when doing this… otherwise you’ll end up with views where you want the walls and floors and doors on and all you’ve got is room names.

MAKE IT EASIER TO SEE DEMO WORK

This is a little trick that I've used when I have a lot of demolition keyed notes to put on a drawing. It's hard sometimes to differentiate between the new walls and the existing walls. After a while it all starts to look like the same mess of black walls/toilets/doors/etc. Here's a quick way to help you get thru that. Turn all of the demo items to RED.

It's easy to do...

Go to the MANAGE TAB and click on PHASES at the far right.
On the menu that opens up, click on the GRAPHIC OVERIDES TAB.
Then for both Demolished Projection/Surface Lines and Cut Lines... click on the little box that has the dashed line in it.
CHANGE THE COLOR TO RED FOR BOTH LINE TYPES.
This will make all the demolished items in your plans red and easier to see.

WARNING!!! Make sure to go back and change these BACK TO BLACK BEFORE YOU PRINT. These red lines don't print to pdf well and wouldn't show up on printed sets very well.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Autodesk Cloud Rendering : Revit Rendering made simple and fast!

To start, download the Autodesk Cloud Rendering Add-In for Revit 2012 which can be accessed upon logging in at Autodesk's Cloud Rendering webpage:

http://rendering.cloud.autodesk.com

Once installed, open the project you would like to render out of, and click the Online ribbon button. From there, you will find the option to "Render in Cloud," select this.

Find the view you would like to render and modify the limited selection of options as necessary.

The upload, surprisingly, takes less than a minute before Autodesk's cloud computers get to work. You can monitor the progress by going back to the Autodesk's Cloud Rendering Webpage.

http://rendering.cloud.autodesk.com/mygallery.aspx

After what had initially taken 36 hours on our dedicated rendering computer was done in less than 2 hours.

Self illuminated materials will not render nor will RPC objects that were not part of the Revit release.

From what I understand, Cloud Rendering is only available to Autodesk Design Suite Subscription based customers and there may, or may not, be a limit on how many renderings each license is good for.

I should also note that I had turned on all of the lights in the project for the cloud rendering, alternatively, for the internal rendering I did, I only had a limited selection of lights on. Crazy.

There is also an option to do a panoramic rendering which I am looking forward to trying out next..