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.
Family Feedback Mechanisms – Part 2
Wouldn’t it be nice if your manufacturer-specific fittings would highlight themselves if they are set outside of the product’s catalog specs? Wouldn’t it be even nicer if they were highlighted without stopping your workflow as you lay your pipe runs? Then your manufacturer-specific fittings could even be used as generic or custom fittings as well.
Revit Families Mix for AU 2011
As part of our virtual booth at the upcoming Autodesk University conference, we had to create a 1-2 minute video giving an overview of our company and what we do. We decided there was no better way to communicate our story than by showing some of our Revit families. After submitting the video to the folks at AU, I thought it would be nice to share it here.
Family Feedback Mechanisms – Part 1
Revit families are by nature pretty flexible. Even if you build a family to work with only a given range of sizes or in particular positions, a user can often find ways to use the family outside of those intended contexts. So sometimes it’s desirable to have a way of highlighting the fact that a family is outside of an acceptable range, or that it is positioned wrongly, e.g. a face-based family meant for walls that’s being placed on a ceiling. If you can’t stop a user from using a family “incorrectly” —and it may not be incorrect, just not recommended or optimal —then the next best thing is to provide some feedback to the user to indicate what is happening.
See You at AU?
The big show in Las Vegas is on the horizon! Autodesk University 2011 kicks off in less than three weeks, and I’m happy to report that Jose and I will both be attending this year’s event. We’re looking forward to taking the plunge into a sea of Revit sessions during the week, and I’m sure we’ll come up with plenty of riches to share with you through this blog.
New Sample Families
We’ve been working on some updates to our website over the last month, and late last week we finally pushed a few of them live. We brushed up our copy on various pages and tweaked a few layouts, including our Get a Quote page, all with the aim of making it easier for visitors to understand what we do and to get in touch with us.
The Death of the Family Types
As most Revit users know, a family that has types can be created in one of two ways: you can create the types within the family (which I’ll call “built-in” here) or you can create the types in an external txt file called a type catalog. For quite some time now, I have been pondering over the use and future of built-in family types. The more families I do, the more built-in family types just don’t seem like the right way to go. They feel more like a shortcut.
Shared Parameter Standards Part 2 – What’s a Manufacturer to Do?
There are a number of standards offering a list of shared parameters for manufacturers to make use of when developing families for their products. But which standard should a manufacturer follow? I will argue that none should be followed, but that all should be taken into account.