Inside the Factory

Project Vasari 2.5 - Coming Soon

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

Bucky Bim

I sit next to Zach Kron here at the Factory. One thing Zach and I talk quite a bit about is the “hands on” approach to parametric modeling in Revit/Vasari vs. the more abstract approach of applications like Grasshopper and Generative Components. Zach calls this the “geometers” approach. That is, using good ol’ fashioned drawing techniques to define the base geometry and relationships. This keeps one very close to the actual geometry, versus the abstraction of spaghetti diagrams and the inaccessibility of code for those of us without comp-sci degrees.

For a while now I have been somewhat obsessed with the notion of building a parametric geodesic dome in Revit. I was originally inspired by David Light’s winning DesignByMany submission for Bucky’s Dymaxion House (which, by its geometry, can take advantage of standard divided surfaces. I quickly found that geodesic domes cannot be built using stock divided surfaces.) Also, I just love geodesic domes. I visited Bucky’s own Biosphere in Montreal this summer and committed myself to figuring out a way to build one in Vasari without writing any code.

The following video shows my technique, including an aspect of 3D snapping to surfaces that was pleasant surprise to me (and Zach as well!)

Coda: After building this model, I came across George Mokhtar and Iwan Peverett at BimAcadamy  who took a very similar approach. Interestingly, they generated their icosahedron as a pseudo solid using formulae. This seems a bit more efficient than my technique of stitching the intermediate components across the golden rectangles.

Another Coda: And just last week the BIM Troublemaker made some trouble with a stellated dodecahedron in Revit (sweet!) Yet another (probably more efficient) way to explore building this dome.

_tom    

 

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

Real-time Rendering

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

Friday Fun: Tweaking Parameters with Sliders

As many of you may have already noticed, Vasari 2.1 just dropped yesterday. Even though we have been launching a new version of Vasari about four times a year since November, we still wanted a way to get some new cool stuff in front of users even faster. So, as part of this release, we also launched a Works in Progress page on our wiki. The first (of hopefully many) WIP is a small add-in created for Vasari 2.1 by our summer intern that launches a modeless window with sliders that represent all numeric (number, length, angle, etc.) parameters in your model. It works in both the project (by selecting instances) or in the massing family editor. There are a few bugs, including one that will crash the entire application when switching between two open files - but that is what puts the "P" in WIP! So we recommend not using this on any production files. Which BTW, goes for Vasari as a whole anyway, since it is a tech preview.  Have fun! 

 

_tom

Autodesk BIM Workshop

We are excited to announce the launch of the Autodesk BIM Workshop. This online experience was created to help prepare the next generation of architecture, engineering, and construction management students for professional practice. The site has an abundance of learning material, videos, and exercises designed to educate on BIM and sustainable design practices along with Integrated Project Delivery concepts.

Lego fun with Inventor Publisher

Some fun for a Friday afternoon. Check out what the the Autodesk Inventor team is doing with the Inventor Publisher product and its accompanying mobile viewer. Once the cool factor of "wow, Lego instructions on the iPad" wore off (I mean, c'mon, I survived my youth with paper instructions - or no instructions at all!) I started thinking of other applications of this technology. I posted last year about some early work in the "mobile Revit" arena from third party developers. The comments back then seemed to indicate an interest (if not a full-fledged need) for mobile access to views from a Revit model. Instead of trying to view an entire BIM in a mobile device, could you see using a tool like this to view, communicate, and verify shop drawings (shop models?) for on-site installation?

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:

 

We've been busy

_tom

Interactive Facades

Or "How to improve on a Gehry design."  Somewhat off-topic, but I have a thing for these animated facade projections that have been appearing over the past couple of years. This recent one is particularly cool:

The LightLine of Gotham from seeper on Vimeo.

File under "If and when I get some extra time:" Use a Revit model to design and simulate a facade projection using the new Analysis Visualization Framework. Then hook the visualization up to a hardware system using openFrameworks and arduino to drive the projection. Or, one could project real-time data visualization about the building's energy and/or solar performance right on the facade - a public display of green-ness (or lack thereof.)  One can dream.  

Here are some more fantastic examples:

Architect Simone Giostra talks about GreenPix - a media art LED wall that is powered by the sun. Extra cool: they have built a free tool for simulating your own videos. The user interface is kind of clunky, but it demonstrates how one could start to simulate these types of installations using a 3D model.

UrbanScreen does some amazing work 

555 KUBIK | facade projection from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

 

Also from a couple of years ago, this is a bit more fanciful (made with After Effects not actual projection) but I love the decidedly low-tech approach

 

Modules from endemic project on Vimeo.

_tom

 

Revit Conceptual Analysis Videos

Five new video have been posted on how to use the conceptual analysis tools available in the subscription advantage packs.  Applicable to Revit Architecture and Revit MEP all videos can be shared on a single page here and are summarized below:

Choosing the Project Location and Weather Station

Describes how to specify the location and a weather station for the project, so the correct climate information will be used during energy analysis.

Using Automatic Form Rationalization

 

Demonstrates how intelligent energy settings are used to rationalize the mass form into mass surfaces and zones for energy analysis.

Changing Energy Settings

    
Demonstrates how you can modify energy settings to change zoning, glazing, and skylights before performing energy analysis on the model.

Customizing Form Rationalization

    
Demonstrates how to use custom form rationalization to maintain the design intent by creating custom zones and glazing layouts.

Performing Conceptual Energy Analysis

Demonstrates how to start a conceptual energy analysis and view the results.

_erik

 

Revit 2011 Update 2 and Subscription Advantage Packs

The Revit 2011 Web Update 2 Service Pack is out and described in detail on the Revit Clinic site.

Be sure to grab this update as it's a prerequisite for the 2011 Revit Subscription Advantage Packs which are released right on its tail.

Here are some videos that provide an overview of what is available in these packs:

Subscription Advantage Pack Demo: Revit Server Extension

Subscription Advantage Pack Demo: Revit Conceptual Energy Analysis

Subscription Advantage Pack Demo: Revit Extensions for Revit Structure 2011

_erik

New Training Videos Available

There are a few new videos posted for Revit Architecture and a redesigned video landing page. These new videos are also incorporated into our existing “Getting Started with Revit in 90 Seconds” and “Getting Started with Revit Architecture in 90 Seconds” series on the Building Solutions YouTube channel.

Before the MEP users gather outside the factory with pitchforks the next batch of videos will include some for that vertical.  The user assistance team plans to continually improve and refine the video offerings.

Here is a list of the new additions that can be found here:

Working in the Revit Environment

• Managing View Windows
• Controlling Visibility and Graphic Display

Design the Preliminary Layout

• Adding Levels
• Adding Grid Lines
• Controlling Visibility of Datums

Add Basic Building Elements

• Placing Columns

View the Model

• Creating Section Views
• Creating Elevation Views

Present the Project

• Rendering a View with Artificial Lighting
• Rendering a View with Sunlight

As a result of usability feedback we received the following videos were redesigned :

• The Adding Levels and Adding Grid Lines videos replace the Adding Project Datums video.
• The Creating Section Views and Creating Elevation Views videos replace the single Creating Section and Elevation Views video.

Also are there other topics/types of videos you are interested in?

_erik

Bill Buxton on the parallels between architecture and software design

I just finished watching this video of Bill Buxton speaking at the MIX10 conference. Buxton is the Principle Researcher at Microsoft and worked extensively on design applications at SGI and Alias (in the pre-Autodesk days.) Recently he has gotten a lot of attention in the user experience design circles from his book Sketching User Experiences (well worth a read.) In this talk, he makes some parallels between architecture and software design. Having one foot in both software and architecture worlds, I think often about these parallels, so I was intrigued. A number of people have written and spoken on this topic, but mostly with a focus on the how Christopher Alexander's pattern language methodology has been subsequently adopted by the software world. Buxton takes a slightly different tack. He talks about changing the culture at Microsoft so all projects have business, technology and design having equally represented. "For every project you need the same depth and same level of creativity from each of these three professions. Each is essential. None is sufficient on their own. Their success depends on how they intertwine and work together." Sound familiar? If you replace business, technology and design with owner, builder and architect and you realize the kernel of what he is talking about is similar to Integrated Project Delivery. Of course, I do not think the Seattle Public Library was designed and built using IPD, but he illustrates that user experience design is behind the curve of even "traditional" the design/bid/build process because in most software shops, developers still call the shots primarily. This is mainly because user experience design as a  discipline is very young (measured in decades, not centuries.) Thankfully this is changing rapidly in the software design industry as design continues to take on a more central role in the development of new products, including at Autodesk. Buxton makes another important point: we don't want to turn the tables and have cranky designers calling all of the shots, either. We must form collaborative teams where all three disciplines have equal say, equal stake, and take equal risk so we can all fail or succeed equally. As many of you are with IPD, we user experience designers are entering into a new paradigm where collaborative teams are the norm and all three disciplines are expected to be able to be conversant at a minimal level about the other two. If people are co-locating, talking more, and sharing a central model (be it a BIM, software code, or other database), I think only good things can happen. The closest analog I can find to IPD in the software world is Agile development... but that is a topic for another post.

Bill Buxton, speaking at MIX10 - the first 15 min or so is his presentation and the rest is discussion with the audience.

_tom

Video Tutorials

The Revit 2011 video tutorials are live on Autodesk.com and the Autodesk Building Solutions YouTube channel. These brief introductory videos present concepts to help the new user explore the Revit products.

Links to documentation pages on Autodesk.com:

• Revit Architecture
• Revit MEP
• Revit Structure

Videos on YouTube can be played full screen and include closed captions (click CC to toggle the display).

Playlists are provided for the “Getting Started with Revit in 90 Seconds” series.

Revit as a Database Part 2

This is a follow-up to the video I created back in February. In response to a user request: "I wish I could reference the total from one schedule as a calculated value in another schedule." True, that is not doable in Revit. But it got me thinking, I bet I could do that in Access using Revit DB Link. Here are the results.

Keep in mind, this is a very simple example. I would like to hear feedback, especially other "real" uses you could find for this.

Revit as a Database

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

Uncovering the Revit Subscription Advantage Pack

Harlan Brumm (from over at the Revit Clinic) has posted a couple of videos on the Autodesk YouTube channel "uncovering" the many features in the recently released Subscription Advantage Pack. We are curious to hear feedback about your experience with the new features.

The Revit Update

The Revit Extensions

Video Tour

For those of you not on the Beta, and have not yet gotten a chance to use the new release of Revit, here is an official video preview. I know I promised to stay away from marketing material, but this video does a great job of highlighting all of the new user interface functionality.

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