Inside the Factory

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

More fun with WebGL

I posted about a year ago about the rising trend in using WebGL to create hardware accelerated 3D graphics inside compliant browsers without the need for plugins. Well, this trend has really exploded. For some Friday fun I am posting some more examples of WebGL being used in innovative ways – but the keyword for 2012 is interactive. Developers are getting serious about making interactive 3D tools using this technology. Note: the latest version of Firefox 10 or Chrome is required. Sorry folks, no IE allowed here.

First up, Michael Dewberry, a Principal Software Engineer here at the Factory whipped up a WebGL exporter for Revit in just a couple of days. Unfortunately, this is not available publically (the devs here are using it to test new export APIs) but I got to play around with it, so I decided to export the geodesic dome I was working on last month.

3v version.  2v version. and the RVT file if you are interested.

Last year I played around a bit with WebGL myself and created this little “modeler.” It does not do much, but I was teaching myself Javascript and I wanted to see if I could create something semi-interactive.

 

123D Make, from our colleagues over in SF, is really fun. You can import a model and it will cut up the models into slices and lay them out on a template for cutting with a laser (through a service bureau) or by yourself (carpal tunnel alert!) Login required – but you can use your Autodesk services login. Worked better in Chrome for me.

 

TinkerCAD has come a really long way since I looked at it last year. Check out the breadth of projects people are creating with this fairly robust modeler. I also love the idea of “challenges” to help you learn. Login required.

 

I wrote about 3DTin last year. It also has come a long way from offering just blocks (ala Minecraft) to a new slate of really nice primitives.

 

Of these last three, Sunglass.IO has the slickest user experience. You can drag and drop your own models right onto the browser to load them. There is also a real-time collaboration aspect (which I have not yet tested.) However, I could not find out how to create new geometry. It seems like it is more like Design Review with real-time collaboration at this point.

 

I just ran across Shapesmith.net the other day (login required). Unlike 3DTin and TinkerCAD, it does not have direct manipulation of objects. But it DOES have some limited parametric control. Combine the two and you will really have something…

 

Revit Spaghetti

Back in September, a little Revit add-in named Dynamo made the rounds through the blog/twitter-sphere. Dynamo is an early exploration into programming for Revit. It was created by Ian Keough, Solution Architect at Vela systems. Ian developed some serious Revit chops while working as an engineer at Buro Happold. He created Dynamo in his spare time and released it as an open source project under the Apache license on gitHub. Dynamo allows you to place and control family instances hosted on points using a familiar node wiring diagram interface – instead of having to write code. The installation is a bit wonky, so here are the steps:

1. Go to the Dynamo repository on github.
2. Click on DynamoInstall or DynamoInstall_32bit (depending on your Revit install)
3. Click on Release
4. Click on both the msi file and setup.exe. For each, click “View Raw” and that will allow you to download the file
5. Run setup.exe and restart Revit. I will post instructions soon on getting it going in Vasari.

Ian clearly admits: It’s incredibly buggy, feature incomplete, and completely undocumented. Regardless, this little science project is really cool and has generated a lot of interest internally as well as at Autodesk University last month. If you were were not lucky enough to attend Matt Jezyk and Zach Kron’s “Energizing Supermodels” course at AU, stay tuned. We will soon share some more cool stuff you can do with Dynamo. In the meantime, I put together a short video to introduce the add-in and show how to get started.

_tom

Powerpoint for Prototyping

I recently wrote a series of posts on one of our sister blogs about how we use Powerpoint as a user interface prototyping tool.

Powerpoint for Prototyping - Part 1: Outlines the various levels of fidelity we work with, ranging from sketch to fairly high fidelity interactive.

Powerpoint for Prototyping - Part 2: Provides some detailed examples including Powerpoint tips and tricks.

I am re-posting here because it gives a bit of a window into how we do design within our group. I am also curious to hear if and how this type of interactive and mixed-media presentation style is applicable in your work. What kind of innovative techniques are you using to collaborate with your colleagues and clients?

_tom

 

ProjectVasari.com is live!

Like everything with Project Vasari, our new community site ProjectVasari.com is a bit of an experiment. Our goal is to create a "sticky" community where people can gather, ask and answer questions as well as share their experiences using Project Vasari and it's base technology (Revit conceptual massing and energy analysis tools.)  So why a dedicated site? We were not happy with Facebook (no threaded discussions) and Autodesk.com is too generic. We wanted to create a site that has a singular focus - which Ning.com delivered. We were able to get the site set up in a matter of a couple hours. So come on in and join the discussion. You can use an existing Google, Facebook or Yahoo account to login (no need to create a dedicated login.)  And I almost forgot, we have a new bug-fix release on Labs. So if you have downloaded the Vasari Tech Preview 1.1 before March 1, you should go to the Labs site and grab a new download.

_tom

Palette and Element Creation

Some History

In 2011 with the introduction of the properties palette we implemented more pre-setting of properties on placement.  Internal these are called "Dummy" elements since they are not real until an instance is placed.  They are stand-ins like crash test dummies.

Take the case where you are drawing a duct.  The reason that you can set the size and elevation of the duct is because a temporary duct is “created” (maybe not placed, but created) and you are actually setting the size and elevation of that temporary duct. When you go to place another element those “last used” properties are remembered from that temporary element and those becomes the defaults for the “next” element to be placed.  The same is true of wall base offset.

Prior to the 2011 release, for most “loadable” categories (the categories which support loading an .rfa file as the thing being placed, which is different from things like duct, pipe, and wire) MEP didn’t implement these “temporary” elements. As an example of this if you start 2010 and start to place an electrical device and go to instance properties, you’ll notice that the dialog is completely empty (no properties, nothing, type properties are there, but nothing for the instance).

The Issue
As implementation of the properties palette began; people noticed that for a number of categories the palette was empty, which completely negated its usefulness when placing certain dummy-less elements. The solution was perceived to be quite simple, since we already had it for other elements. Unfortunately in the case of face based families, there is both a type parameter (Default Elevation) and an instance parameter (Elevation). From above, the rule is for placement to remember the last used value, so if Elevation was previously set to 18” it’s going to be set to 18” next time as well (regardless of what the Default Elevation parameter says). 

There were additional issues that have been identified but are really the same problem. There are a number of people who, for different family types supplied different instance parameter values. For example on a Lighting fixture I have a parameter called "Load" and it is an instance parameter. I have two types for this family, a 2x4 type and a 2x2 type. In family editor, for the 2x4 I set the Load value to 96, and for the 2x2 I set the load value to 50. This worked fine in 2010 and previous releases, but because of the new rule about remembering instance parameters, when I change types the load value will NOT change, as it is now remembered. There affected all the verticals but might have been most visible in MEP since it used this “lack of functionality” more than others generally did. This is a case where we gave MEP users the ability to specify instance parameters before placing the instance, which they’d never had before, and of course might have loved, but it turns out to be otherwise.  There is a phrase about how roads in the nether regions are paved with good intentions.

The Solution

For the web update 2 we enabled an ini setting to adjust this behavior.

To do this:
Browse to wherever you have Revit installed and open Revit.ini with your favorite text editor. Search the file for the term "UserInterface". If a string of "UserInterface" is found it should be in brackets, and if it is, somewhere below that (but before another bracketed term) enter the string"ResetInstParamsPerTypeFor2011DummyInst = 1"(sans quotes) on a blank line
If the term "UserInterface" is not found then at the end of the file paste in the following:
[UserInterface]ResetInstParamsPerTypeFor2011DummyInst = 1

I’d like everyone who can to set this and continue testing as normal to see if there are any issues.  It mainly affects certain types of loadable families.  The ini setting will be valid for all alpha releases as well if you are participating there.

So far the setting appears to address the issue for those who were affected by the 2011 change.  To make the fix permanent we want to ensure it does not adversely affect people who were not seeing the issue and so we would like more people to enable it.

_erik

Making Project Vasari

 

Yesterday was the day. We officially launched Project Vasari on Autodesk Labs. I thought I would give everyone a behind the scenes look at how this all came about.

Genesis

As we said in the teaser, it started as a simple question: What if we reduced Revit to its essentials? Followed quickly by: What would it look like? What would we keep? Who would it be for? This evolved into the following goals:

• Create a simplified "on-ramp" to introduce building information modeling concepts to students and young designers
• Focus on the conceptual modeling and cloud-based analysis work flows
• Create a "sandbox" where we can experiment on new features and concepts
• Deliver this as a technology preview on the web

Design Tenets

The following design tenets were our guiding principles as we began conceiving of what to make

• Let users get their hands dirty faster
• Reduce modality
• Focus on teachable moments
• Progressively disclose complexity
• Build a community

Personas and Storyboards

A persona is a one-page narrative that describes a fictional user based on user data we have gathered. After interviewing and surveying many students, we distilled that data into Gabriel .This helps us keep the team user-centered. As we face various decisions, we must ask "what would Gabriel   think of this?"  We also wrote a series of scenarios - stories with Gabriel as the main character. These act as the basis for some early sketching and storyboards (note, not all of these ideas made the final cut.) 

Being Agile

In addition to the previously mentioned goals - we also wanted to see what a small team could do in a short amount of time. By "small", I mean one product manager, five software developers, two designers and one quality assurance analyst/blogger/mad scientist. By "short time" I mean six months from inception to delivery. To do this we adopted a more agile team process called Scrum. I won't go into much detail, but to put it simply Scrum is like IPD for software development: A cross disciplinary team co-locates to increase collaboration, breaks down roles to foster innovation (QA helps with design, designers do some coding, etc.) focuses work on a central information repository (in our case, the source code and a wiki) and shares equally in the risk and reward.

So, isn't this just Revit with a bunch of stuff removed?

Yes and no. Yes, it is Revit at its core. But no, we did make some progress in some areas - primarily related to our design tenets. Ultimately, Vasari has become a platform to experiment and take some risks - something that has become difficult when trying to get the larger Revit out the door each year. So what's different?

• A smaller, less imposing user interface.
• Access to massing tools is more streamlined. Were you asked to switch visibility mode when creating a mass? Were you asked to name your mass when you created it? Did you actually have to create the mass at first?
• You can double click to edit an in-place mass and double click to stop editing it. My personal favorite.
• When you are editing an in-place mass the background changes color and non-edited masses become transparent.  Notice I said reduced modality, not removed. We follow Jef Raskin's definition of modality, that is, an interface is not modal as long as the user is fully aware of its current state.
• Levels and reference planes are now visible in 3D in the project environment. This allowed us to keep the experience primarily in 3D, with little need for 2D views.
• The product is delivered in a nice, compact, single executable. No licensing. No big installer wizard.
• Realistic views have edges turned on by default.
• And our dirty secret? Much of the look and feel was achieved using a plain ol' Revit template.

What's Next?

I can't say. I know, I know - tight lipped as usual. Actually, it is because I really don't know. I do know that we have generated a lot of ideas (stories in our backlog, to use Scrum terminology.) Now that we have some time to breathe we will listen to the feedback that comes back from our target demographic, sift through the backlog and decide on what to tackle next.  Until then, come join us on Facebook and Twitter where we will continue the conversation. 

_tom

A video introducing Project Vasari's features:

 

Calling all Boston area students

Are you (or do you know) a student of architecture in the Greater Boston area? If so, we are planning a usability study for early October to examine some new and unreleased software. The study is taking place on October 5th and 6th in downtown Boston. If you are interested in signing up for one of our time slots, please visit or forward our recruitment survey page.  Sorry, no professionals (internships, etc. are ok). We will have other opportunities for you later!

The Ribbon Process in Four Minutes

Designing and implementing this overhaul of the user interface required a considerable amount of research, data analysis, interaction design, and visual design. I put together a four minute video that was presented to the senior Autodesk executive staff last month. It briefly describes some of the design methods that we used while integrating the ribbon into the three Revit products. This video highlights a few themes that will persist through our blogging on the topic:

• Using data to make design decisions
• Developing prototypes and iteratively testing them with customers
• Leveraging design patterns to create flexible and extensible designs