reviting

Press Release from Autodesk regarding the Revit 2009 Suite of applications:

Autodesk Launches New Solutions for Building Information Modeling

Some potentially extremely exciting features include:

Revit Build 20080101_2345 is available from Autodesk.

The Google Trends tool can provide an interesting insight into the changes and constants in user search patterns. I have plugged in three of the main BIM solutions (that come to mind) to see the results:

Google Trends: Revit, Archicad, Microstation, BIM

What useful information can we gather from this graph?
While most of what we can extrapolate from this graph is subjective; it is fairly coarse, there are no numerical values associated with the y-axis (search volume); we can see a steady increase in the number of people searching for Revit. The other two solutions have been established in the industry for some time before Revit entered the market, and we see a fairly consistent search volume, with a slight decline for Microstation.

What do Search Volumes Mean?

Keynotes seem to be a bit of an unused or mysterious tool to most new Revit users. It is, however, extremely useful.

Keynotes are a simple method of associating a number or code and a name to any object (sort of like your little black book). Names and numbers are specified in a plain text file with a single 'tab' between the Number and the Name.

To locate your default Keynotes text file, create a new project and select Settings -> Keynoting... and note the 'Full Path'. Once you have created your own Keynotes file you can specify it here by clicking Browse...

In this example we will be creating a new Keynotes file and using it within a new project. You may also want to check out the default Keynotes file for reference.

In this series of Tutorials, I will be going through, in detail, each element of the Revit Interface, and describing some common terms.

1. Menu Bar - This area will be familiar to you from the use of just about any software on a Windows system. These menus and submenus will provide access to every function available within Revit Architecture. I will obviously not list each and every function in depth here, instead list and summarise some interesting points.

Revit Architecture's built in structural beams can be a nightmare in some situations. The problem is that beams just don't seem to want to butt up against one another correctly, especially at a corner join. The default behaviour has the beams joining center to center and cut back so as to allow for a post/column at the corner.

The Problem:

If you try to schedule these beams, you will notice that the length of the horizontal beam will be taken from the blue dot, regardless of where the triangles (Start and End Extensions) are dragged to. You can try dragging this dot but it always seems to want to join to the adjacent beam and any amount of aligning will leave you blue in the face.

The Solution: