Where have I been ?

It’s been over a moth since I posted something new on my blog. But the reason is the amount of Revit training and events we have been taking care of! At the beginning of the month I flew to Orlando to train a second group of professionals on Revit Architecture at one of our Multi-discipline large accounts. I have also been locally bringing up to speed and working very closely with a Construction / Architecture firm in West Palm beach, and lastly yesterday we were the host of a delicious Latin lunch during Autodesk’s Road Tour at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Our clients are so happy with our trainings sessions that keep scheduling more groups for us to train.
Let the pictures speak for themselves:

This is the Orlando group during a break. They didn’t want to leave their chair and wanted to keep on learning Revit !

These are some pictures of our Latin Lunch, we even had Salsa dancers in the room to spice things up. It was a pleasure for all of us, AEs, to answer questions and to show new features of the 2009 Autodesk products to all our customers attending the event. Keep posted for my next blog on Mental Ray rendering in Revit and 3dsmax Design.

If you were there, drop us a line and let us know if you had a nice time!
crullier@bellsouth.net or crullier@bellsouth.net

Autodesk Resource Center available to customers

Hello again, I want to make available the link bellow to an Autodesk maintained resource page. In there you will find tutorials and application white papers to compliment what you have already learned. Notice the I am linking you directly to the Revit section but please be sure to check out the other disciplines. Happy Reviting !

http://resources.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/Revit-Architecture/tutorials.htm

Taking the Lead one step at a time

I am happy to announce that our mentoring and product knowledge has allowed one of the top Architectural firms in the world to complete their design development drawings in Revit 100% last week!

Just so you know, this is a project that is employing collaboration from Structural and Mechanical engineers. The most interesting fact is that they are all in remote locations and using their respective "flavor" of Revit to contribute to this project. At the moment I can not disclose any more specifics, but I will soon post more information on how Revit has helped the Architect and Consultants get the job done effectively !

Sign up for Basic training, and get more done in less time and more effectively with Revit ! Once you have mastered the basics, let's get together for discussion on more advanced topics.

For more information shoot me an e-mail crullier@ddscad.com, mention this blog posting and receive 100 dollars off your first training ;)

I can't see my rooms...

As you know, when you delete the room tags from you floor plan doesn't necessarily mean you deleted the room objects; They are still there. However, often you will find yourself inserting a room object into a space that already has a room. So here is a little trick - enable the visibility for the room reference lines and color fill.

Happy Valentines - Revit Heart Wall

Happy Valentines Day everyone, I thought it would be a good idea to use the ocassion to remind of the Edit Sketch function within the wall object. While very basic, it's been handy many times.

To begin you need to have a wall selected in elevation. Once the wall is selected you will see in the options bar an option to Edit Sketch.

When you click on it, you will go into an overlay mode which is know as sketch more. This overlay mode allow you to change the elevation qualities of the selected wall, this is achieved by either modifying the existing four lines (top, bottom, left or right) or in this car by creating new ones using the Lines command from the Sketch mode tool bar on the left.

Once you are happy with the new elevation shape of your wall, you can click Finish Sketch, or Quit Sketch if you're not (howeve please know the if you Quick Sketch, you can not undo !)

Now you should see that the original wall has taken a new shape, derived from the lines you drew. If any point you wish to change the shape of the all, or even the remove the siluete overide, you can select the wall and look at the option bar where you will find two options. Edit Profile - lets you make changes, or Remove Sketch - revert the profile back to its original state, ortogonal.

Enjoy the day !

Tapered Slab Edges

Hello again ! What I want to share how to take a regular slab in Revit Architecture and taper any or all of its edges. In order to do this we need we will use "The Floor Slab Edge" tool found under "Host Sweep" in the Modeling tool drawer and click on the edges on the floor slab we want to alter. However before we begin we need to configure the "Edge" and this is the tricky part.

First let's build a profile which will give us the shape of the taper. Lets go to and on the dialog box, let's select the appropriate templeter which is Porfile.rtf and click open.

What we have now in front is a drawing area in which we are going to draw our 2D profile. Since this profile will be swept around the edges of the floor slab, we need to draw a section of the taper we want to occur.

Use the Line tool to draw the shape and you can use refereance planes if you wanted to make the profile parametric. By the way come to one of our cusomized training to learn how to build parametric components.

Now just save the profile and load it into your current project or into the project were the floor slab you wish you modify exist or will be created. Now we can go into and redefine the existing slab edge to use the profile we just created.

Once the element properties dialog appear, we need to either rename the current Slab Edge definiton or create a new one by using the Element properties dialog and into Type porperties.

At this point as you can see in the above screen shot, all you need to do is load the profile we made, click OK to exit all the dialogs and beging to click on the edges of your Floor object.

e-mail me or call me here at the office if you have any questions.

Bug Alert - Unspecified error when saving groups.

Happy new year everyone !
I would like to share something with you that was recently brought to my attention by Autodesk Support. There seems to be a bug within Revit which during the month of January 2008 will not allow you to save groups, instead during this process you will receive an error: “Unspecified error”.


However, once we move into February and through the rest of 2008 this issue will no longer affect us.



The way to work around it however, is to change the month (date) within Windows to a month other than January 2008. Your choice could be a month in the past or in the future; however keep in mind that if you have any outlook reminders these will be affected and they flash on your screen - so be careful!!! Once you are finished saving your groups you can reset your date settings.