Inside the System

Free Revit MEP for Students and Faculty

I spent a number of summers during college as an Intern for an MEP Consulting Engineering firm and a Design/Build Contractor.  This was really my first exposure to the world of CAD and applied Mechanical Design, and proved to be very valuable as I moved into the industry after school.

When I returned to school, there was no good way for me to get my hands on the software I had been using during those summers, as I didn't want to pay for licenses for the software at the time, and my school didn't provide and site licenses for my personal machine.  I basically slowly forgot much of what I had learned until the next summer, where it all came flooding back to me...not exactly an ideal scenario to prepare me for usage of the tools after graduation.

Those days are over now, with the Autodesk Student Engineering and Design Community, which exists to provide free software to college students and faculty, as well as provide an online community for exchange of information.  My colleague in our educational team was kind enough to supply me with the official marketing blurb on the community, so I'll add it below.

Join the Autodesk Student Engineering and Design Community - a networking site for post secondary students and faculty, where you can download Revit MEP and other Autodesk 3D products for FREE*.

Faculty can take advantage of the Faculty Lounge area to access learning resources, curriculum materials, and hold faculty-only forums.

Advance your skills outside of the classroom with a free Student Edition of Revit MEP, easy-to-use online tutorials and resources, industry articles, product tips, job listings, Q&A forums, and more!

Register to join the Autodesk Student Engineering and Design Community today!

· Start exploring Revit MEP today by taking advantage of interactive learning modules

* FREE products subject to the terms and conditions of the end user license agreement that accompanies download of the software.

A Little Beachside Reading

I tried my best to disconnect from my working life while on my Honeymoon.  Honest.  No, seriously I'm telling the truth.  In many ways I was quite successful, I completely disconnected from e-mail, no meetings, no conference calls, it really was great.  I even found time to get comfy on a hammock on the beach and read a book.

I didn't however, completely disconnect with everything related to my job.  That's because there's intersection between the things that consume my working life and the things that I fill my outside life with.  The main intersection involves the Global Ecosystem, and mankind's undeniable impact on it.  This is a topic that I personally care deeply about, and something that is of strong corporate importance for Autodesk.

In my role as Product Manager, I'm lucky to have the tremendous opportunity to help shape the software that you in the Building Design industry use to design buildings.  More and more, the software that you are using is replacing decades-old "check figures" to drive the design decisions for the Built Environment.  This integration of technology is allowing for dramatic improvements in in the availability of objective design information, when it is needed for design decisions. With better information and technology, we can make better decisions.

Those decisions, in turn, make a huge impact on the Built Environment's energy and material usages.  I'm sure you all know all of this, so I'll step down from my soap box...for now.  In short, I feel it is my obligation to my grandchildren, and their grandchildren, to try and reverse the damage that we inflict on Earth's Ecosystem every day, and Autodesk feels the same way.  So with that in mind, I set out to do a little "light" reading while I was in Costa Rica.

When I was a Senior in college at Cornell, my brother told me that I needed to read a book called Natural Capitalism.  I'm admittedly not a huge reader of books, although I have an insatiable appetite for Internet articles.  Nonetheless I read the book; and it completely changed my view on the world.

I know that sounds dramatic, and I'm usually not a really dramatic person.  Nonetheless, it really was a big change for me.  Never before had I be so clearly presented with objective information regarding mankind's impact on Earth's Ecosystem, it's consequences, and the options to avoid those consequences.  As a senior in College though, I didn't see a whole lot that I could do, other than trying to minimize my impact, which I try to do every day.

I've been so caught up with 60-70 hour weeks, endless e-mail, conference calls, and wedding planning lately, that I really felt disconnected from the larger world, so I decided to re-read Natural Capitalism, to help re-focus and re-energize me with a larger purpose at work and at home.

Wow.  That's all I can say.  Wow.  I really didn't expect everything to be just as powerful the second time, but it was.  I could go at length about the immensely important points made in the book, but it's much better for you out there to read the book.  My ability to articulate these points with quantifiable evidence pales in comparison to Natural Capitalism's authors.

So that's my call to action, if you haven't read Natural Capitalism, read it.  If you have and it was a long time ago, read it it again.  The entire text of the book is available for FREE online, or you can buy the paperback version.  If you need motivation to make changes in your personal life or your professional life as a design professional, this is it.  If you already know the importance, but want to better understand everything, read the book.

Okay, now I will get off the Soap Box.  There will be a test in 2 months.  Just kidding.

Beaches, Rainforests, and Ziplines

As I mentioned in my recent posts, I got married on New Year's Eve, and I went to Cost Rica for my honeymoon for 2 weeks.  After all of the stress of Wedding planning, on top of the regular craziness of drinking from the Autodesk fire hose, my new wife and I were looking forward to getting away from everything.

Well, we were successful.  Costa Rica certainly is a beautiful place, the people are incredibly nice, and there is lots to do.  It was so compelling that I actually managed to not think about work for most of the trip, a feat of epic proportions for me.

For those of you who are interested, I've added some highlights below.

Seratura Suspension Bridge Canopy Tour - Monteverde

Great views above and below the Rainforest canopy.  A bit rainy but really cool.

Tabacon Hot Springs - Arenal Volcanic Region

Volcanic-heated rivers moving through a series of different waterfalls and pools.  Need I say more?

SkyTram Zip Line - Arenal Volcanic Region

Video of me being sent on my way.

Our crazy guide borrowed our digital camera for a trip across the zip line.

Isla Tortuga - Nicoyan Peninsula

A boat ride out, Snorkeling on a Coral Reef, and a beach barbecue for lunch.   Tough to beat that.

Yoga in Beautiful Settings

Tabacon Hot Springs - Arenal Volcanic Region

Ylang Ylang Resort - Montezuma

Horizons Yoga Center - Mal Pais

Pina Colada Drinking - Everwhere

With all of those fun activities, I'm re-energized to bring you all some great MEP-related info over the coming weeks and months.

Whoops

Update: Thanks Mitch from Stantec for pointing out that I posted the internal link to the model.  My mind's still on the beach drinking Pina Coladas.  I have updated all links to correctly point to the model.

I just returned from my lovely relaxing Honeymoon in Costa Rica, which I'm going to write a bit about once I get settled in, but in quickly checking submitted comments I realized that I omitted a critical detail in my last post, Worth 1,000,000 Words....the link to download the model.

That's right folks, in my haste to get that post thrown together before I checked out, I did every step, including uploading the model to our download servers, except for actually placing a link for you all.  My sincere apologies.

For those of you still recovering from the confusion, despair, and sheer MEP-related trauma of not finding a link to the model initially, I can only hope that you can all find in in you to some day put back together the pieces of your now shattered hearts and continue with your ritualistic reading of Inside the System.

As a token of my gratitude for coming back, I thought I'd throw you all a crazy video I found a little while back.  I don't know about you all, but I love a good random video on YouTube from time to time, and this one if one of the best I've seen.  Watch it below, and be sure to watch all the way through.  Best darn hammer jugglin' I've ever seen.

Oh, and although I have updated my previous post with the download link, you can download the Urban House MEP model here.  I hope to use it in the future for more discussions about Revit MEP.  Feel free to submit comments with questions you want answered.

Worth 1,000,000 Words

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words....I guess that means that a model must be worth 1,000,000 when we're talking about Revit.

A while back, after I became the Product Manager for Revit MEP, I set out to build a MEP Model to facilitate a number of end goals:

• Becoming more skilled on the Revit Platform, because I am relatively new to Revit in general.
• Becoming more skilled with Revit MEP as a tool, because I need have a strong understanding of the application.
• Identify areas for improvement.  I wanted to see what opportunities I uncovered as part of the modeling and design process.
• Develop a model to showcase some of the features of Revit MEP.

Well, after countless hours of work, I figured I'd release the model out into the "wild" for you all to investigate.  This will be my holiday gift to everyone.

Download it here -> Urban House MEP

Nothing's perfect in the model, but it does contain pretty much all major building services, outside of lighting, as I haven't added that yet. 

A couple of things to check out:

• Use of View Templates and View Filters - I spent a huge amount of time setting up all of these, but once I did it's very easy to create a new view and achieve the desired appearance.  Using the Transfer Project Settings functionality I can move these to other projects, or better yet I could have done this work in my Project Template before I even started the Project.
• Schedules - I added a few different schedules that use our Embedded Schedule and Conditional Formatting functionality.  I haven't populated enough Parameters to produce Production Level schedules, but you might find some of the grouping and calculations I've used interesting.
• Analytical Model - I've set up the model for Heating & Cooling Load Calculations, including defining the Energy Analysis Parameters.
• Use of Modeling Views - In order to maintain the correct appearance on Sheet views, I created Modeling views, which allowed me to use the Wireframe Model Graphics Style, while still maintaining the Sheet views, which used Hidden Lines and contained all of my Tags.
• Sheets - I made some basics sheets for a few disciplines.  Nothing special here, except for maybe the Title Block....
• Sloped Piping - I'm no Public Services Engineer, so I'm sure my design violates everything holy to that trade, but nonetheless there's some sloped piping in there for my drain systems.  I had to get intimately acquainted with the Trim, Connect Into, and Align tools to successfully model those systems.  I've got a partially completed post on those tools for modeling.  Expect that in the future.

Have No Fear...

I hope everybody had a good Holiday season and New Year.  As I mentioned in All Quiet on the Blog Front, my holiday season has been consumed mostly with family and preparing for my Wedding, which successfully happened on New Years Eve.  It was really a perfect night, and everybody really had a great time. As you might expect, the stress level has subsided now for me now that everything has been completed.

I'm now getting packed to head south to Costa Rica for my honeymoon.  This should be a really fun, relaxing time, and I look forward to not thinking about Revit MEP all day.  I'll be back on the 22nd, and expect to hear from me during that week with MEP-related goodness like before the holiday season.

I have a post all set up to go live during my absence, so go ahead and get your RSS readers subscribed to my feed so you'll know when it goes live.  I wouldn't want you to come back to the site only to be let down with the tragedy of no updates.

I'll talk with you all of you in a few weeks.