Yesterday I attended the MEP track of Excitech’s Spring User Forums. It’s possibly one of the best such gatherings I’ve attended. All the talks were interesting in their own right and together they did a great job covering the key needs, goals, and recent developments for Revit MEP users.
Among the talks was Gary Ross excellent presentation on Electrical Design for the UK with Revit MEP, where he showed us the new customizations and additions that Revit MEP 2012 has seen for the UK electrical market, an area in which he played a big part while working for Autodesk (he’s now working for Capita Symonds). It might be worth pointing out the other side of the coin with the latest release of Revit Structure, where the UK customizations have seemingly disappeared.
Revit Server and its alternatives were thoroughly covered, and Carl Collins from Arup showed us the Excel/Revit link tool that allows you to drive any editable parameter in a project from a spreadsheet and viceversa, as well as to view all non-editable parameters.
David Shepherd of Excitech gave a fast-paced presentation on Revit families that covered an incredible breadth of material. I’m always learning about families and this occasion was no different. I also got some ideas to blog home about, so stay tuned for some of those in the near future.
There were presentations by Johnathan Ward on Vault and by Phil Palmer on MEP projects, and one on point clouds and surveying services. The latter included a live demonstration where we were all scanned in 3D in a couple minutes. The machine doing this could capture a million points per second! A glitch focused the beam on one of the attendees and he disappeared in a puff of smoke, which was also amazing. Jokes aside, with Revit 2012, support for point clouds and accurate survey data in your projects has never been easier.
There were a number of other talks I won’t go into, but there was one in particular that I wanted to highlight here. Stuart Barcock and Andy Robins of MAP Software gave a talk about Driving Fabrication from Revit MEP with FABmep+.
For years I used CadDuct Solids (now called CADmep+), which is where I started creating content and what later led me to become interested in content development for Revit. Being as it was at the time a CAD-only product, and being immersed in Revit myself, I lost sight of MAP over the years. Stuart and Andy’s talk on a newer piece of software called FABmep+ put them squarely back on my radar.
Andy showed us a Revit MEP project with duct, piping and cable trays. He then exported it to FABmep+ where the model got all the manufacturing info, allowing for the fabrication of the duct, the creation of piping spool drawings and more. Then, with a few clicks here and there, he brought all the new fabrication geometry back into Revit – including system duct runs cut to standard lengths and all connected! But better than me explaining it, go and check MAP’s FABmep+ page and see for yourself. If the connection between Revit and fabrication was holding anyone back, FABmep+ looks like it’s the answer you’ve been waiting for.
After a full schedule of interesting talks and following British tradition, we all hit the pub for a couple pints. Great day, and many thanks to the team from Excitech for making it happen!
