SCRUG 8/17/2017 dRofus

The August 2017 SCRUG (South Coast Revit User Group) met at the Irvine California offices of Little Diversified Architectural Consulting.

Food was supplied by Super Mex. Cheese enchiladas and chicken enchiladas. Thank you to our sponsors... Kelar Pacific, Microdesk, & U.S. CAD.

Brok Howard of dRofus presented. He emphasized that his company was not trying to remake all the Revit Addins or tools inside Revit Architecture. Nor are they trying to have a huge feature set.  It can be used as a Revit content management solution and admittedly, it is clunky. 

dRofus leverages the existing tools in Revit to help designers focus on design. Their cloud based solution is a database that has bi-directional communication with Revit. dRofus can create and push shared parameters into Revit files. However, not all information needs to be in the model. The examples showed how an owner's requirements or an architectural program can reside outside Revit. With dRofus and Revit side by side one can have a list that depopulates as objects are placed in a Revit model. 

Many today use checklists to verify and confirm the correct number of items wind up in the Revit Model. For example: furniture, rooms, equipment, and so on. With dRofus a single click can place all the required revit families in a room for later adjustment. All the stuff lands at the room origin point, so use with caution.

One can compare square footage in dRofus and have a spreadsheet of what the owner asked for to what is actually in the model - with live updates. 

dRofus also can create an IFC file from the Revit model to allow visual navigation of the Revit Model inside a web browser. With the model objects in a list on half the web browser, one may easily click in the list to highlight in the 3D what is where and see it on the other half the web browser. 

Doors & Door hardware can be managed in dRofus. It can grab the relevant data from Revit and be manipulated and output to specifications or pushed back in. 

One opportunity that dRofus presents is designing the building requirements and specifications into a standard before any modeling actually takes place. In this manner is seems similar to the programming phase of a typical project. By placing the requirements into dRofus, it integrates with Revit and can facilitate increased quality and speed in design. 

USC BIM Conference 2017, "BIM 2017: what's next?"

I attended the eleventh annual BIM conference at my alma mater. https://arch.usc.edu/calendar/bim-2017-whats-next-sold-out

Here is what I learned:

1. More and more firms are bringing visualization into their design work flow
• Virtual Reality
• Augmented Reality
• Reality Capture is replacing site photography
• 3d Printing
2. Machine Learning and Internet of Things bring valuable data to the design process
3. Grasshopper, Dynamo, Lumion are software to leverage what computers are good at to improve design outcomes
• Do analysis to better understand the performance of design
• Grasshopper can create visually complex designs using math and small repeated elements like bricks
• Dynamo can gather data from the design and automate repetitive tasks
4. The number of tech companies involved in VR and its technologies is extensive - Vive, Samsung, OculusRift, HoloLense, ...
5. Some VR tech allows live design - move equipment in space, add objects,
6. A virtual dissection table allows doctors to perform operations in a virtual environment using full body scans
7. A structural engineering firm used scripting to model every structural steel connection on a large project; they used Tekla to analyze and optomize the structure to identify and eliminate steel that was redudndent; the Tekla model was used by the fabricator

I already knew, and it was reinforced:

1. BIM helps designers make better design decisions and create better constructability
2. Sun studies optimize overhang performance
3. VR of virtual construction saves over building full scale mockups (Operating Rooms, Hospitality)
4. Each stake holder has different priorities, design teams must analyze the priorities and seek to maximize the satisfaction across many dimensions of priorities
5. 3d laser scanning is used for as-built visualization and to help design in existing structures; it reduces field time; one project is estimated to have saved ~$900,000 in change orders

If you have any questions or would like further discussion, please comment on the post.

SCRUG 5/2017

5/25/2017 SCRUG was held at the offices of LPA. Thanks for hosting.

We had a smaller group this month ~18 people. The dinner from Super Mex was provided by our sponsors. Dessert was donuts - sorry I missed the brand. Thank you Microdesk, US CAD, & Keller Pacific.

Introductions were short with only a couple of new people. Welcome to the group. Once again, A. Jay Holland, Chair of SCRUG led the discussion and introduced Brent Ramos from Assemble.

Here is the summary of what Assemble does:

• It makes your Revit model accessible by people without the full software.
• They can view the model, sort the items, examine the parameters, group objects, save views, change display colors of objects, make limited changes to parameters that will be saved in Assemble, changes can be exported and pushed into Revit 
• Versioning: Assemble assigns version numbers to each upload, can do comparisons, show and list what has changed.
• 100% Cloud based.

Brent had a user, Connor Burke, a senior estimator/project manager from McCarthy, explain how they are using the website/software in the design/build and IDP part of their business. 

1. McCarthy tested many software packages and web services before choosing Assemble.
2. They add data to the model, like pricing, RFIs, 
3. "If the model is built correctly, it cuts estimating time from two weeks to two days."
4. They use it for coordination, QTO, QC, daily trending of changes to the model, 
5. The saved views become a template for future projects. 
6. It is a different work flow from Navisworks.
7. Models can be assembled in Revit then exported as a single model to Assemble or Assemble can combine the exported models. McCarty prefers the first method. 

The market for Assemble is General Contractors, Building Managers, and Building Owners. For design teams it seems like another layer of work and yet it can be  a communication tool. Designers can see what the contractors see, they can use it for quality reviews and tracking of comments in an online solution. 

SCRUG 4/2017

The local Revit User Group met on a day that I could attend this month! Here is the summary...
A J Holland is the current chairman of SCRUG.
He arranges the food and the guests. Thanks Jay!

Thank you to our re-seller Sponsors: 

• https://uscad.com/
• https://kelarpacific.com/
• http://www.microdesk.com/

The dinner was street tacos. Your choice of Beef, Pork or Chicken.
Attendance was  ±50. There were about five first time attendees.

Scott Davis presented. He joined Autodesk ten years ago. First off, he described the development strategy going forward. Autodesk will roll out new features on a quarterly basis. The file format will remain the same. If I understand correctly it will be a huge improvement. Users may have different releases like, 2018, 2018.1, 2018.2, or 2018.3 and still be able to open the other 2018 releases!

The presentation consisted of showing the official Autodesk Revit 2018 new features videos. You may find them here...

Scott showed a few additional videos that are not posted on youtube.com.

Here is the new features list.

Autodesk has been incrementally working on the font rendering. The goal was to get fonts to have consistent heights between Autocad & Revit. Revit 2017 received many font complaints on revitforums.org. With the 2018 release, there is only one gap - fonts in dimensions. Once they update dimensions, the font rendering will be consistent across all text entities (schedules, symbols, labels, text, dimensions).

Last but not least, Scott showed some "coming soon" features:

1. Schedules Browser - allows filters and sorting of schedules in the Project Browser.
2. Collaboration 4 Revit - allows linking of DWG files.
3. Formit - quick material creation and improt to Revit.
4. Multi Monitor Support - tabbed views, drag & drop to second monitor, better manual window arranging.

Want to influence future Revit releases? Try these websites...

http://blogs.autodesk.com/revit/revit-official-blog/
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/idb-p/302/tab/most-recent

FYI:There is contact information for some of the actual developers.

Revit Tip: use etransmit to upgrade a Revit file with all its links at the same time.

Chat afterwards... Now is a great time to join a firm. There are many looking for talent.

Schedule Hack in Revit

Sometimes, in #Revit you want to add something that is just a schedule. Here is a step by step way to do so...
http://www.mattbenimble.com/articles/reusable-schedules/

Only works for Version 2014 and more recent. Behind the scenes what is happening is that you are adding more "headers" to the schedule.

For those that don't need as much customization, here is another way to do it...
https://revitstructureblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/creating-and-controlling-general-notes-in-revit/

SpecsIntact

Since 2013 I have been working with a specification authoring system known as SpecsIntact. This system uses HTML mark up.

When editing the required submittals, they fall into the following categories:

SpecsIntact Submittal categories
01 Preconstruction Submittals
02 Shop Drawings
03 Product Data
04 Samples
05 Design Data
06 Test Reports
07 Certificates
08 Manufacturer Instructions
09 Manufacturer Field Reports
10 Operations & Maintenance
11 Close Out

SCRUG 2/2/2017 BIMSmith

The review of the first part of the meeting seemed so long that I thought my notes on the second part would get lost...

First off, thanks to the sponsors for the pizza, drinks and cookies. Microdesk, US CAD, Keller Pacific.

Jim Balding introduced BIMSmith.com
The website is a new way for materials supplier to get their information to design professionals. Their site went live early 2016.
Everyone in the room has used Revit to build families. System families are a bit of a pain because they do not use the same family editor for creation. BIMSmith is a web based interface to simplify the process. They use drag and drop for placement of wall layers or ceiling layers. They have drop down menus for when choices are limited. Where products are offered by a manufacturer, they are listed by model options. For example if siding is offered in 4", 6" and 12" sizes, those are the only sizes in the drop down menu. Once you are done designing the wall or pick one of the prefab walls in the "drawer", the build button is ready for a click. It takes a while, but the website gathers all the information available for the components making up the new wall, packages it into a zip file and emails you, and places it in your account page. You may download the zip file and find all the goodies.

1. Revit system family in a .RVT (Revit template file)
2. Autocad .DWG
3. Word .DOC Three part spec
4. PDF cut sheets
5. Details if available

Cool Features

Actual Manufacturer products, prebuilt UL listed assemblies, in some cases even screws are a choice, can share creations, 3d view during making process, Earl looks like Don Sutherland

Not so cool

Site is slow, shared parameters not available in web interface, long workflow (create, compile, download, open, copy, paste into project, add shared parameters),

Future Features

Roofs available next, Revit plugin, Pipes, Ducts, 

My Opinion

I will try out the website. Since I am in a company that does not have a mature catalog of walls & ceilings we can use this to build our library & standards. 

Other ideas brought up

WATG and other firms will have shopping malls or department stores. 

1. Revit Template file - has the basics for every project the company focuses on
2. Department Store Revit Template file - one level with all wall types, one level with furniture, one level with plumbing, mechanical, electrical, structural, equipment, kitchens, bathrooms, ...