A couple weeks back, I attended a meeting of the London Revit User Group where Paul Fletcher from ZBP and Through Architecture presented Beyond BIM: Cooperation for a sustainable future. Paul seemed to be a man of strong convictions who had no qualms creating some controversy when discussing where we’re heading with BIM and the tools we’re using to get there. I very much enjoyed his talk and especially liked his focus on the Information in BIM.
Big Picture Revit Families
We recently finished some retractable projection screen Revit families for Stewart Filmscreen, based in southern California. These are the kind of screens installed in the ceiling of a conference room or auditorium, where you might barely notice the screen is there until someone hits a button and it gracefully descends from a sleek minimalist enclosure. Since the screens are recessed products, the bulk of the work was in modeling all of the different canvas sizes and image areas available for each of the two models.
A Primer on Materials in Revit 2013
We’ve recently been working on a project involving the creation of custom materials for system families. This gave us a good chance to test out the latest interface and features for materials in the newly released Revit 2013. There are a few significant additions in terms of functionality, most of which have been covered in good detail already by Daniel Stine over on AECbytes, and in broader terms by others such as David Light.
Nested Families and the Case of Disappearing Connectors
When a family with connectors is nested into another family, the connectors get ‘lost’ in the host family. They have to be recreated in the host to appear in a project. This is the case even if you are nesting a shared family. This behaviour is akin to a project being linked into another one, where the connectors from the linked project won’t be available to the host project.