Our small, yet dedicated Project Vasari team has been working hard on a new Labs release, which will be dropping VERY soon. Keep an eye out on Twitter, Facebook, and/or ProjectVasari.com. Our focus for this release has been on usabilty which includes new direct face manipulation tools and creating/editing in a perspective view. Yes. You heard that correctly.
see more details on our wiki site.
_tom
Way back in the day, while I was finishing up my undergrad in architecture, I obtained an "unofficial" minor in Quake 2. After many hours of running through dark abadonded bases shooting at my studio mates, I began thinking: what if we put away the guns and used this to visualize our designs? I was told to shut up and guard the extra rocket ammo. Afew of us began experiementing. The tools at the time were very rudimentary - to say the least. Fast forward to 2003 and myself and some of my former battle buddies even started toying with the idea of creating a company to create architectural walkthroughs using Epic's Unreal engine. The graphics kept getting better and the tools easier to use, but licening the engine for commercial use made it prohibitive. We probably would have spent all of our time playing instead of working anyway. Fast forward again to today and we have a proliferation of great tools to create near-real quality renderings that you can actually walk through. I ran across Twinmotion over the weekend and was impressed by their videos. I have not yet had a chance to try it out, though.
Check out their aptly named blog, The Rendering Killer for more (Frame's modern house lives on!)
Jon Brouchoud at the Arch Virtual blog recently posted this beautiful walk through of the new Rutgers Business School building by Ten Arquitectos using the Unity game engine (see video below.) He also has some good tutorials and a downloadable kit for learning how to create these kind of walkthroughs with Unity and Revit. I have personally been working a lot with Unity and I find the engine to have the right balance of power, usability and cost (can't beat free! well, they upsell you for advanced tools, but still!) One of the paid features is the ability to publish your game (or walkthrough) to iOS or Android. Unfortunately, you have to navigate Apple's annoying provisioining labyrinth if you want to actually view it on iOS. But, if you or your intended audience have an Android device you can easily publish and freely distribute your walkthrough.
While not real-time quality, Brouchoud also has many great examples of using Second Life (yeah, remember SL?) to do design reviews. I like this very real example of seniors reviewing design options for their community space. Let just hope they don't wander out too far into SL, they may be shocked by what they find.
I am dissapointed to find VERY few examples from AEC customers using our very own Showcase offering for real-time rendering - from Revit sources or otherwise. Its not that the product is incapable. Far from it, if you check out their community, you will see some astounding examples from the engineering and industrial design space. To all you BIM-heads out there - is real-time rendering part of your arsenal for impressing clients and performing design reviews? If so, what tools and techniques are you using?
_tom
We are happy to announce that, just after three months since the initial release, we have an update to Project Vasari on Autodesk Labs. We have been working hard to deliver on some features that we were unable to get to back in November, fixing bugs, and more importantly: delivering some new experimental analysis features. So text annotations, metric templates, and STL export are now available. We have also further isolated Vasari from potential Worksharing badness by automatically detaching a work-shared RVT file upon open.
Now on to the fun stuff. We have had the distinct pleasure of working with Dr. Andrew Marsh of Ecotect fame for this release. He has developed two prototype analysis features based on Ecotect technology. The Wind Rose tool allows you to visualize wind speed and direction data in your models for different seasons and times of day. The Planar Solar Radiation tool lets you perform solar radiation analysis in the external spaces within and around your site. Both of these tools continue the trend of visualizing analysis data directly inside a BIM. We also had the pleasure of working with an excellent team in our Shanghai office that has been porting over the Maya "Nucleus" physics engine to work with native Revit masses. In what I believe is an Autodesk Labs first, we have a coordinated launch of two Labs tech previews with one integrated in another. So now inside Project Vasari you can play around with applying real phsyical forces such as gravity and wind to mass surfaces!
Have you been using Project Vasari since the initial launch? Did you pass it along to some of your colleagues not yet initiated into Club Revit? One of our goals with Vasari is to introduce the concept of BIM and parametric modelling to a new audience that may be intimitated by Revit. I am curious to hear your about your experiences with this. Did this spur a larger conversation about BIM and analysis in your office?
_tom
Quite a few comments on my Revit as a Database post from last week focused on the fact that Microsoft's various versions of 64bit Windows do not include or support a driver for connecting to an Access database via ODBC. The good news is, Microsoft appears to be changing course on this in the upcoming release of Office 2010. Their download site includes both 32 and 64 bit beta versions of their data connectivity component driver. I tested this out in Vista x64 with Revit 2010 x64 and the Office 2010 x64 beta and it works. The bad news: you will have to wait for Office 2010 to ship and many of you do not have a say in when your office upgrades.
_tom
This post marks the beginning of an exploration into a little-known new feature of Revit: RDB Link. Well, not exactly a feature, but an add-in that was developed in-house, released on Autodesk Labs last year and "graduated" last month to a subscription bonus tool. Revit has been able to export to a number of database formats via ODBC for some time, but it has always been a one-way trip. RDB Link now allows you to edit that exported data and import it back into the RVT file, all without closing Revit or the database! Since being released on Labs, I have not seen any examples of this tool being put to good use. I have been playing around with RDB Link since a recent customer visit highlighted two problems that I thought the tool could be useful for: driving irregular column size/placement and scheduling level heights in a large tower project. The following video shows how these two tasks could be completed with RDB Link (albeit on a very small test file.) Have any of you tried this tool? What are some other uses you can imagine?
_tom
In this entry I would like to focus attention to what was done to another mechanism for visualization of Revit Models - Export to DWF.
Prior to the 2010 release, our DWF implementation was divided into two parts: 2D export was done through our graphics engine and 3D export was done independently by traversing the model and trying to "guess" what are the correct attributes for every node in the scene graph. This was leading to a lot of errors and justified user complaints about the output quality. Because of this and other problems, we didn't have the ability to combine 2D and 3D data into one file.
After a lot of requests from our users we were given the task to redesign and improve the DWF export to comply with the following five goals:
We were able to achieve those goals, although though there are couple of items left for improvement. I hope those changes will be helpful to our users and their everyday work.
_tsvetan
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