Inside the Factory

Seek, and ye shall find

Hi folks.

Sorry for the week of silence, we've got a number of interesting projects going on at the factory and things have been moving quickly on items I'll detail in Future Posts^TM.

One feature you might have noticed in Sundial is the search box in the Type Selector. The fun part of creating a feature in a portable way is that you get to use it in more that one place. If you're an electrical engineer using Revit, you've probably clocked a fair amount of mousewheel time to get to the panel you want to locate in the model. Instead, start typing in the new search box, and watch as the list starts narrowing down.

Sometimes it's the little things that people love the most. One customer testing this feature and the related "recently used" feature said...

 “Wow, I can use most recently used too. That’s really nice too! That’s cool, I like them a lot! That’s a really big improvement, oh my goodness!”

Try it and let us know what you think!

Anthony

What's New in the Revit Sundial API?

Another entry in the category of "Imagine if you will..." (meaning you can't really kick the tires in a hosted preview) are the enhancements in the Revit Sundial API. By request from a developer, here's what's new...

Major API additions

ComponentRepeater

New Methods

• ComponetRepeater.CanElementBeRepeated - Determines whether an element can be repeated using the RepeatElements method. 
• ComponentRepeater.RemoveRepeaters - Removes component repeaters from the document, but leaves the individual repeated components in their respective locations and hosted on their original hosts.

Dimension API improvements

Dimension class

The following new members have been added to support adjustment of the text location and corresponding leaders of a given single dimension:

• Dimension.Origin  - returns the origin of the dimension (the middle point of the dimension line that makes up the dimension).
• Dimension.LeaderEndPosition - a read/write property representing the position of the dimension's leader end point.
• Dimension.TextPosition - a read/write property representing the position of the dimension text's drag point.
• Dimenson.IsTextPositionAdjustable() - indicates if this dimension is supported to get and set TextPosition/LeaderPosition.
• Dimension.ResetTextPosition() - resets the text position of the dimension to the initial position determined by its type and parameters.

DimensionSegment

The following new members have been added to support adjustment of the text location and corresponding leaders of a given dimension segment in a multi-segment dimension:

• DimensionSegment.LeaderEndPosition - a read/write property representing the position of the dimension segment's leader end point.
• DimensionSegment.TextPosition - a read/write property representing the position of the dimension segment's text's drag point.
• DimensionSegment.IsTextPositionAdjustable() - indicates if this dimension segment is supported to set/get TextPosition/LeaderPosition
• DimensionSegment.ResetTextPosition() - resets the text position of the segment to the initial position determined by its type and parameters.

DWFExportOptions

New  Property 

• ExportTexture - sets the option to export textures in 3D DWF files (default true)

PanelScheduleView

New Methods

• PanelScheduleView.GetCellsBySlotNumber () – Returns a range of cells for the given slot number
• PanelScheduleView.CanMoveSlotTo()   - Verifies if can circuits in the source slot to the specific slot.
• PanelScheduleView.MoveSlotTo() - Move the circuits in the source slot to the specific slot.

View3D

New methods:

• View3D.CanResetCameraTarget() - Checks whether the camera target can be reset for this view.
• View3D.ResetCameraTarget() - Resets the camera target to the center of the field of view. 
• View3D.CanToggleBetweenPerspectiveAndIsometric() - Checks whether the view can toggle between Perspective and isometric.
• View3D.ToggleToPerspective() - Toggles the view to perspective.
• View3D.ToggleToIsometric() - Toggles the view to isometric.

Minor API additions

BaseExportOptions

New Property:

• BaseExportOptions.PreserveCoincidentLines - Allows export to preserve coincident lines

ElectricalSetting

New Enum:

• ElectricalSetting.CircuitSequence - Gets and sets the circuit sequence numbering schema

Workset

The new static method:

• Workset.Create()

creates a new Workset.

WorksetTable

New static methods:

• WorksetTable.RenameWorkset() - Renames the Workset.
• WorksetTable.IsWorksetNameUnique() - Checks if the given Workset name is unique in the document.

The new method:

• WorksetTable.SetActiveWorksetId()

sets the active Workset.

Application

The new property:

• Application.BackgroundColor

allows read and write of the background color to use for model views in this session.

ScheduleDefinition 

New Properties:

• ScheduleDefinition.ShowTitle – Indicates if the title will be displayed in the schedule.
• ScheduleDefinition.ShowHeaders - Indicates if the headers will be displayed in the schedule.

Thin lines options

A utility class ThinLinesOptions is added that contains the setting related to the Thin Lines options which affects the display in the UI.

The static property:

• ThinLinesOptions.AreThinLinesEnabled 

defines if the 'Thin Lines' setting is on or off in this session.

Let us know what you think!

Anthony

So, When's Sundial Coming Out?

Veterans of Autodesk conversations know that 'deskers get all squirrely when a question starts with "When".

That happens for some good reasons around regulatory controls in the USA concerning predictive statements by publicly traded companies, restrictions that don't always obtain for companies based elsewhere in the world or in quite the same way in every situation for every American company. Find me in person sometime at an industry event and ask about this, and I guarantee I can bore you into glancing hurriedly at your watch and suddenly remembering an urgent appointment.

However, some folks are getting excited about some of the things they see in Sundial, and wondering whether they'll actually be able to use the new features in production. For example, the PDF hyperlinking in the export sure sounds like a great feature to some customers. They can't actually try it out in the hosted environment, so that enhancement for now remains in the realm of "Imagine if you will...", or in other words, maybe not the most compelling demo ever.

So, I think I'm safe in the regulatory environment in which we function to say the following:

1. Sundial features could be available sooner than you think.
2. They might become available in a way you don't expect.

To the legal scholars with whom I occasionally discuss my public comments, please note I say "could" and "might", allowing sufficient uncertainty that I actually predict nothing at all, but only, perchance, speculate.

I'll also say that the Revit team and Autodesk are committed to finding innovative ways to get as much value to our committed customers as rapidly as we can.

More later!

Anthony

 

 

Putting Editing in Perspective

In Revit Sundial's What's New, you may have noticed this entry...

• Perspective views: Certain modeling capabilities are now available in perspective views: (See Work in a Perspective View.)
  • Editing tools: Move, Align, Pin, Unpin.
  • Reset Target tool: Restores the position of the camera target to the center of the field of view.
  • Toggle between the perspective and parallel representations of the 3D view.

Editing in perspective views has long been a customer request, so when I asked about it among the old-time Reviteers, most reactions were something like...

"Well, no one ever really tested it. We could try turning it on and see what breaks."

So, it turned out a number of things broke, which is maybe why we haven't just tossed it off sooner than this. A number of issues that turned up are fixable, but not immediately.

What Sundial has is what didn't break or was easily fixable. It could be possible to do more on this in the future. Interesting? Vital? Boring because you use 3DS Max for important visualization anyway?

Try it out and let us know!

Anthony

 

 

What's New in Sundial?

Hi everyone.

Judging from the heat coming off the servers in the last 24 hours, a lot of you have given Revit Sundial a try in the hosted environment. If you'd like to read about what's different in Sundial, click here for What's New.

In What's New, you'll see mention of Dynamo as a feature -- sometimes documentation visits us from one possible future, and we can only marvel at the modern wonders of time travel.

More information later today!

Anthony

REVITalizing Inside the Factory

We’re back!

Two years ago Inside the Factory went… well, inside the factory for a while. Recently we took a walk around the old place, blew off the dust, and did some remodeling, because we wanted to offer some news about what we’ve been working on.

The Building Authoring product team at Autodesk, (which includes Autodesk^® Revit^® and its nifty trademark symbols that Autodesk Legal^TM loves so much) will be using this blog to provide updates on Autodesk’s Building Information Modeling (BIM) product lines. A number of folks on the Revit team will offer insight from the Factory floor into what we're working on and introduce you to some of the people behind the products.

To get things started, we’re providing everyone within reach of this blog the opportunity to test drive a hosted release preview of Revit called Sundial.

Autodesk Revit Sundial provides enhancements to Revit that are not currently included in the commercial release. We will be highlighting the many improvements in blog posts over the next days and weeks.

For those of you who try the release preview, please drop in here at Inside the Factory and let us know what you think. The hosting technology we’re using for the preview is itself experimental, so if you run into issues accessing the test, we’d like to know about those as well.

The quantity of available simultaneous sessions is limited, so you may run into delays if there are many people trying to access the preview at once. We'll keep the preview available for a few weeks, so please try again if you can't initially gain access.

Because this is an early in-progress release, there are no guarantees all the features you might see or read about will appear in a future release of Revit. Please keep this in mind when making any future purchasing decisions.

Try Autodesk Revit Sundial

Anthony A. Hauck

Senior Product Line Manager