On a recent trip to San Francisco, I finished some medical equipment families for a customer that also happens to be based in that fine city. The families in question are among what I like to call “the fun kind.”  The first was a scanner from Siemens, the Artis Zeego. This wasn’t the first time we’d encountered such a family. Back when we were still using Revit 2008, we created a similar family for the Artis Zee Biplane System. Now as then, the new Zeego family allows all the movements that the real Artis Zeego scanner supports. According to the customer, the family is intended for presentation purposes as well as for reviewing the main positions of the robotic arm, the doctors and the windows overlooking the operating room. This time around we used Revit 2011 to create the family, and a number of improvements over the years allowed for more realistic shapes without an increase in file size. The old Artis Zee was 3.8MB. The new Artis Zeego family is “only” 1.7MB and includes a few extra touches, like dealing with the cable tubing and rotating parts. A few types were created within the family to speed the selection of the most common positions.

I’m currently in Kuwait in a short consulting trip. This morning Miles Walker just pointed out a blog entry by David Light about the pi() function in Revit. Alfredo Medina first posted about it in AUGI forums.