What's New for Building Design with BIM

What's New for Building Design with BIM <- Link to the webinar!



For anyone that missed the webinar yesterday. The folks at Autodesk have released yesterday's webinar with all the new features coming to Autodesk Formit and Revit 2016 R2. These features enhance the fabrication parts workflow and several other key aspects of the software. The official release date for the subscription release is October 6th, 2015! A lot of these features and enhancements were announced at Revit Training Conference in D.C. in July as well.

Dynamo Customizer Beta

The possibilities of this are absolutely exciting. This evening DynamoBIM announced a beta to their Dynamo Customizer extension to Dynamo. From the bit of research I've done on it, I have gathered that you can now host your Dynamo scripts in a web browser and have others interact with these scripts... All through their browsers. This type of functionality excites me in a few ways of thinking about the possibilities of illustrating programmatic diagrams, having clients potentially interacting throughout the design process to communicate their own ideas based off of your initial guidance through a script, and data integration to be streamlined back to the Dynamo model fed from external data that was hosted in the cloud. Now whether or not this functionality is available yet I can see the potential or future possibilities are going to be extraordinary! After I get the beta installed, and ran, I will share my results!!! For now check out the new beta here:

http://dynamobim.com/dynamo-customizer-beta-now-available/

Assembly Creation With DynamoBIM

Attached is the newly created Assembly Creation module. This tool, thanks to Julian Benoit with Steam Nodes, works flawlessly now.

Assembly Creation with DynamoBIM

Bulk Family, Group and View Saver

Luke Johnson. You are the man!!!



We use Unifi in our office as well, but to have the ability to bulk export family libraries is just incredible! We've been creating a series of groups, and were saving them one at a time (Until Unifi of course)! _._



For anyone who has always looked for that bulk exporting tool, without the catch, here is where you will find it!!! Although if you want analytics and some other cool perks of being able to manage your content libraries... Unifi is definitely still the only way to go!!!



Read Luke Johnson's blog for his explanation!





What Revit Wants: Free Ways to Export your Families from Revit and S...: There was an API addin available a while back , but in recent years I have used: the Case Batch Export Family RFA's tool http://whatr...

The Power of The Dynamo Community

In case anyone wanted a good, clean cut, example of the power of the Dynamo community. Go take a look at the post I posted two months back asking for "Creating Assembly Views, Sheets, and Schedules", and the response through Julien's hard work of creating additional nodes for his Steam Nodes Dynamo package (Available on the package manager).

In fact, I challenged the package to automate the naming of the assemblies a bit differently! It wasn't quite ready, but after communication and explanation of the functionality (that I need to carry out my day to day workflows for Revit assembly automation), Julien announced it is "coming soon"! I just wanted to share this example because this shows the power of the Dynamo Community, and for non-coders, like myself, this is absolutely powerful! Thank you Julien! I intend to update this post as the package becomes updated, and showcasing the process through Autodesk Screencast!

SteamNodes!

You can view the discussion here:

http://dynamobim.com/forums/topic/creating-assembly-views-sheets-and-schedules/#post-29733

Selecting model elements for the Assembly

Modification of Assembly Parameters

The Ability to Rename the Assembly has been requested!

The Module - Larger Image on the Community discussion board at DynamoBIM.com

Thank you to Julien for SOLVING this request!!!

Some additional functionality, that I would like to see released, would be the ungroup elements node!

Combining Google Maps, Photogrammetry and Pointcloud Data into Revit 2016

Arne Folkestad Bjelland's Tutorial

Here is a video that I stumbled upon, by Arne Folkestad Bjelland, while trying to figure out how to get 3D building information from google earth into Revit. In the past there have been far more complicated ways to do this, and to save the confusion we're just going to forget about those old ways, and stick with this! Below is a recording of my take on the process!





On Arne's blog he explains the simple process as so:

"I guess I have a hang up on photogrammetry lately. But I enjoy the way you can move data quickly in an effortless operation.

Google Maps is getting better and better, and to be honest I am really amazed how you can view an entire city in great detail. We use Google Maps in our office to investigate exciting sites and surroundings, and I have thought that it would have been valuable to import this information into Revit.

And guess what, by using photogrammetry I made it happen:)

In short:

• open google maps in full screen and find your building site
• rotate the view around your site meanwhile you press «print screen» as often as you wish
• with dropbox installed, the «print screens» should be perfectly downloaded automatically
• you should crop your photos to get rid of unwanted text/labels. You can do this by making an «action» in Photoshop and then choose «File» – «Scripts» – «Image Processor» to crop every photos in a folder
• then you make a mesh in Memento with your cropped photos and export it in RCP
• import it into Revit and enjoy

PS! For fun, I also tried to do photogrammetry with Google Streetview. It was not successful but I will try again later. I do have some ideas:)"

Thank you Arne Folkestad Bjelland this is brilliant!

I also had never used Momento before, but here is a link for you all to check it out. It's another great Autodesk product that's currently in beta!

https://memento.autodesk.com/about

Some additional features coming soon and news about Memento!
http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/reality-computing/autodesk-memento-is-evolving-fast-check-out-what-s-new/ba-p/5808205

Here's a link to his blog, and his absolutely brilliant approach.

https://digitalstoryofanarchitect.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/combining-google-maps-photogrammetry-and-pointcloud-into-revit/


UPDATE!

I have ran two image processes thus far, and it is confirmed that you can use Google Earth Pro, or any images for that matter! Have fun exploring!


Note 09/14/2015:

Amr Kamal, BSc., EIT, PMP

Sent me this wonderful tip, in case anyone else was wondering how to take the screenshots in a more convenient way!

Hi Brian,
Thank you for the video that you posted, i have a small suggestion, 
If you use Google earth you have the option to record a tour and then if you make a movie of that tour in Google earth and export that movie into images you will have hundreds of high quality images from google earth without pressing any print screen.

Regards,

Amr

18 images before processing, and processed with Google Earth Browser Edition

100 images before processing, and processed with Google Earth Pro

Final Image Composed of Downtown Core

The Revit Import

Revit Point Cloud Section - Downtown Bozeman, Montana

Process Evolution!

I've been published in AUGI World September 2015's Issue!

Process Evolution! I've been published in AUGI World! Go read the article! I'm super proud of this! Thank you to everyone that has been supporting me, and helping make this evolution a reality! Pages 30-33!!!

Go check out the article today!

http://issuu.com/augi/docs/aw201509hr