All Things BIM / DC

Autodesk will release the 2009 versions of Revit Architecture, Revit Structure and Revit MEP on April 15.

This past week I was in Vegas attending speaking at the AGC conference and ended up staying at the Palazzo hotel, which is the expansion property to the Venetian. The Palazzo is a much larger hotel than the Venetian, more really good customer service, though the hotel is not as nice. The rooms of both hotels are very similar, though you can tell that a lot more time and money went into decorating the Venetian. That being said, if AU 2008 is held at the Venetian again and I could choose to stay at the Palazzo, I probably would. Both hotels are connected, but the walk to the conference area from the Palazoo seemed to be shorter than the Venetian. There was not a lot to see in the Palazzo, but I took a few pics of what I thought was interesting.

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David Light authors the Revit blog has an interesting article on running Revit on the Windows Vista operating system. I am using a MacBock Pro and using VMware Fusion to run Windows Vista. When time permits I will run a pre and post Revit benchmark to see if I see a performance increase using David's findings.

Today I was conducting a project review of the BIM and I came across something that was having an impact on the performance of the project that I thought I would share. Several views in the project were set to either 3/32" or 1/16" scale with a detail level set to Fine. The problem with this is that the views in question did contain and information in elements that required a Fine level of detail. Setting the level of detail to Course made an immediate impact on loading those views. So, something you might want to look at. You might also want to consider looking at the level of detail in your families. That can be a performance killer. Daniel Hurtubise of RevitIt has also suggested that ou also might wanna consider seting the view to coarse or medium but overwrite the display of CERTAIN elements to be fine through Visibility/Graphics.

The following is from a recent email from: Deke Smith Mr. Dana K. "Deke" Smith, FAIA Executive Director, buildingSMART allianceTM National Institute of Building Sciences 1090 Vermont Ave, NW, Suite 700 | Washington, DC 20005-4905 (202) 289-7800 x142 cell (703) 909-9670 direct (703) 481-9573 www.buildingsmartalliance.org BIM is transforming our industry and we find ourselves each having to invent the transformation one office at a time. This is not a SMART way to work. While we can collectively help each company make a successful move to BIM there are some significant collective efforts that need to be accomplished at an industry level. Items such as coordination of manufacturers information to be pulled into a model, coordinated and comprehensive education, standards, foundational technology and best business process practices, to name a few are needed. These things cannot be accomplished by one office, one company, association, or industry segment. Accomplishing these thin

Marie left the following comment on this Blog topic and thought it was important enough to share with all. Potential for reduced write performance for Riverbed WAN links when working with AutoCAD 2007 DWG files Published date: 2008-Mar-12 ID: TS1082827 Applies to: AutoCAD® 2008 AutoCAD® 2007 AutoCAD® Architecture 2008 Autodesk® Architectural Desktop 2007 AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2008 Autodesk® Civil 3D® 2007 Issue In March 2006, Autodesk changed the DWG file format for AutoCAD 2007 to make it more compact and improve performance for AutoCAD users. Autodesk’s customers widely welcomed this change and almost all AutoCAD users have enjoyed improved performance. Solution However, Autodesk and Riverbed have recently received reports that some customers using some WAN acceleration appliances, including Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, have experienced noticeable reductions in write performance when working with files saved in the AutoCAD 2007 “DWG” format. One of the side effects of the DWG format

Well, there has been another sighting. This time in Canada. But it appears that Phil's trip to Vegas took a lot of out him. I just happened to be in Vegas this week speaking at the Association of General Contractors (AGC) conference and I spotted Phil just hanging out at a Starbucks.

I normally would not do this, but a friend of mine has a daughter that was recently diagnosed with a childhood cancer. Like most of us, money is tight. If you get a chance, please visit Lily's website to send her a note or to make a small donation. Thanks.

We all use it, we all complain about it and there is very little we can do about changing Revit Architecture. But the one thing that we can do is vote as to the new features that we would like to see Autodesk incorporate in the next release (2010 - as 2009 is already in beta). If you are an AUGI member, you can cast your Revit Wish List Ballot and help shape the ext release of Revit.

I was at the AIA Large Firm Rountable CIO meeting this pasgt week in NYC and one of the discussions was the problem with the AutoCAD 2007 file format and the problems that it has created for WAN Acceleration tools like Riverbeds. I am not going to try to get into all the technical details, but apparently the AutoCAD 2007 file format uses a new compression scheme that basically reorganizes the file each time you save. Because of this WAN Accelerators are not able to identify patterns in the file as well and WAN Acceleration is severely impacted. Autodesk and Riverbed are aware of the problem, but Autodesk has not provided a fix at this time. It was suggested at the meeting that if Autodesk could provide an option in the next release (2010 - as 2009 products are in beta) that would allow the user to disable the new compression, this would resolve the problem. This is an issue on all the AutoCAD based applications, such as AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD MEP, etc.

T he free 3D/2D ShareNow add-in has been updated to work with AutoCAD-based vertical solutions. This applies to the 2008 product line that is available now and the 2009 product line that will be available soon. The 3D/2D ShareNow add-in allows you to share your design with others with one easy click. While in AutoCAD, Inventor (or Inventor LT), or Revit, you click on a ShareNow icon and see your design in Project Freewheel . The ShareNow team created some YouTube videos that show ShareNow in action: INVENTOR: Publish to Project Freewheel from Inventor video (2:05 minutes) AUTOCAD: Publish to Project Freewheel from AutoCAD video (0:49 minutes) REVIT: Publish to Project Freewheel from Revit video (2:20 minutes) So download ShareNow , give it a try, and let the ShareNow team know what you think: Labs.Freewheel@autodesk.com . Is it easy to use or what? This was originally posted on BIM & Beam