Inside the System

Required Reading

For the second day in a row I have an exciting announcement.  We have just released our Revit Platform 2009 Technical Note as a Subscription benefit for all customers with entitlements to a Revit 2009 product.  What is this technical note you say?

Well, it is a comprehensive paper that discusses best practices for optimal performance and productivity within the Revit 2009 family of products.  It is required reading for all Revit users interested to know this information straight from the Product Teams themselves.

It is the result of a comprehensive effort among the Designers, Developers, Quality Assurance, Consulting, Customer Success Engineers, and Product Managers, and we are excited to get this information straight to users.

Some major topics that are discussed:

• Project Structuring
• Worksharing
• Linked Files
• Hardware Optimization
• Large Model Performance

As somebody who interacts with Revit users on a regular basis, I know these are all topics of much interest to firms implementing Revit.  I would especially recommend that MEP users read the MEP-specific section, as it contains information and strategies to optimize the performance of your MEP models, which is something I encounter frequently in the market.

It is our hope that this information is very useful to you all, and we welcome your comments or concerns that are started from the document.  There will be Discussion Forum threads to spur this discussion, and I'll add those links later today.

And like yesterday, here is a video showing how to access the White Paper.

Dowloading Revit Platform Technical Note

Note: Be sure to Right-Click->Zoom->Full Screen inside of the embedded video player to see it in all its 1024x768 beauty.  You you can download the full video by clicking on the linked title.

Enjoy!

Extensions Released for Revit MEP

I wanted to let all of you in the Revit MEP community know that we have just released a new Subscription benefit for Revit MEP, Revit Extensions.  These are a series of Plugin applications that work with Revit MEP to provide enhanced functionality.

Those of you familiar with Revit Structure know about the Revit Extensions developed by Robobat.  As some of those Extensions have functionality that applies to all Revit users, we wanted to make those available to all of you.  Check out the links below to know more about the Extensions.

• Text Generator
• Elements Positioning
• Freeze Drawings
• Compare Models

All Subscription customers of Revit Products can download these Extensions for use with the Revit 2009 Family of products.  As is customary for Inside the System, I have made a video on getting to the downloads in the Subscription Center.

Downloading Revit Extensions

There you go, I encourage everybody to take a look at these handy plug-ins.

IES Releases VE-Ware

I wanted to let everybody know that Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES), our Business Partner in delivering Heating and Cooling Load Analysis inside of Revit MEP, has released VE-Ware, a FREE analysis tool to all users of Revit 2008 and 2009 products.

What is VE-Ware you say?  Well their website has a much better explanation than I can provide, but I'll give it a try.

Most of you already know about IES' flagship application for Building Performance Analysis, the Virtual Environment (<VE>).  For those of you who don't, it is a model-based analysis platform that leverages one model to carry our different types of Building Performance Analysis.

The <VE> is a fully featured, very capable analysis environment.  With that capability comes a significant amount of information that must be authored in a model to carry out analysis, and users must learn how to enter that information.  The folks at IES recognized that there was an opportunity to streamline the <VE> analysis workflow for early-stage design, and they delivered what they called Toolkits.  Toolkits are tools that leverage a Revit BIM to carry out different types of Building Performance Analysis.  They released last year a plug-in for Revit that facilitates the model transfer and analysis.

Well, VE-Ware is a FREE (you read that right) tool that allows users to become familiar with the Toolkit workflow, while delivering valuable analsys related to the Energy Usage and Carbon Emissions related to the operation of a building designed in the Revit environment.  Cool stuff, I know.

I highly recommend that those of you interested in Sustainable Design and its integration with BIM tools, go the to IES website and download VE-Ware.  While you're at it, check out the White Paper on model preparation in Revit.  That should help to provide you all with a good baseline on the concepts involved.  I know it's from last year, we're updating it for this year at the moment.

MEP Analysis Extension Released on Autodesk Labs

I am excited to announce that we have today released the MEP Analysis Extension on Autodesk Labs.  Scott Shepard has a post on this on his It is Alive in the Lab blog.

Go check it out and kick the tires.

Live from Boston

Today I'm back in the office for the first time since I left for Turkey on June 28th, it seems like forever.  Aside from the mountain of e-mails that have massed for attack on my inbox in my absence, I was able to shut off the otherwise non-stop Autodesk machine and vacation for a while, which really was a great thing for me.

Enough about me though...I know some of you enjoyed my quick updates, but others are mainly interested in information on Revit, Sustainability, and the other technical subjects I usually cover on Inside the System.

Which brings me to the radio silence on the blog over the past few weeks before I went on vacation.  I had alluded to discussing that, and today that's my main objective.

I am guilty of setting the bar too high, simple as that.  With the large effort I have put into posts lately on new features, I found myself with less and less time to spend on such efforts.  I was, however, still spending a great deal of time on the forums helping you all out, but Inside the System was not getting the love it deserved.  Rather than just post smaller items or link to good discussion forums, I was holding out for that mystical period where I had 1.5 hours to put together a video and post on subjects.  That's not a good way to manage readership and information dissemination.

So, here's how I'm going to do things moving forward.

• In some cases I will post about content created by others, both in forums and on other blogs.  These smaller posts will still point you all to great technical information you've come to expect from the blog.
• When I have the time I'm going to post original content on technical subjects in Revit, like always, this just might not come every week, as my schedule has been getting pretty hectic these days.
• Still take suggestions from all of you regarding future posts and technical content.

As always, your thoughts are always appreciated.

Live from Prague

You know you've been on vacation for a while when you forget what day it is. Well happy Independence Day to all of the US readers of Inside the System. If that's you, then I hope you don't read this until Monday after the holiday, having better things to do today. My vacation with my wife has taken me to Prague for the next few days, for sightseeing and the annual Autodesk football tournament (soccer for the stateside readers). One of the great things about working at Autodesk is the international culture and diverse opportunities, and this is no exception. Okay, back to sightseeing for me. I'll drop another update before I return and then it's back to MEP blogging for me.

Live from Istanbul

Today I'm trying my first blog post from my beloved Crackberry, we'll see how this turns out. On a completely unrelated note to my last post on Sustainable Design tools, I"m writing today in the middle of my vacation in Istanbul, Turkey. Why Istanbul? Well my wife and I wanted to make a trip to Europe, she has a friend from grad school (she's a BC Double Eagle), and Istanbul is a great city with tons of history. So we've been having a great time thus far checking out the sightsn including; the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi Palace, Aya Sofia, and a huge underground cistern (picture included). The most unique experience by far has been the Turkish Bath. since it was "one of those things you just had to do." The turkish bath is a tradition extends back to the Ottoman Period, and thew one we went to was over 300 years old. A hulking Turkish man delivered a brutal massage that went to my core. As he manhandled be on a heated marble slab that Sultans had used, I really questioned why this was a "must do." Nonetheless an interesting experience. That's it for now, I'll check in later.