How not to learn Revit...

This is how far I have got, in between having a day off and putting unwanted stuff on the local internet market.

Two conclusions:
1. Putting in walls and windows in Revit: easy.
2. Constructing floor structures and roof structures:a bit harder!
When it came to putting in the floor structure, things seemed to go a lot slower for some reason-most likely because I was doing things for the first time, and did not realise there was a multiple copy. (There is, you just have to look for the checkbox).

I downloaded a roof truss from somewhere but things came to a bit of a halt when I had to alter the existing family. This was when I realised that I had not quite understood families and creating them. So I spent most of the day trying to make a sloped rafter, even getting as far as making a bird's mouth at the lower end, which caused quite a few problems.

Maybe I have missed something, but I would have thought that a plain old rafter would have come with the package. It probably is, but is called something like "Structural Effects".
I can see that the English are on to the fact that the Americans speak American. For instance a "notch" in English is "coping" in American.

It has been a frustrating experience, but just reinforces what someone has said previously:"You can learn by yourself, but you will take less time if you have training".

After the last try, I found my rafter coming through as an elevation in a plan view, so I tossed the toys out of the cot and went and mowed the lawn. (Yes, I do know what I did wrong!)

Maybe I'm like a lot of those crusty old Autocad users: Don't show me anything new: my mind is made up. It just seems working in Autocad is wonderfully precise and extremely flexible: you can quickly draw anything you want. It's just that it is not parametric.

I seem to be stuck in the family editor, doing things the "correct" way (by my way of thinking!)
only to be greeted with error dialog boxes saying things like "reference dimensions are no longer parallel " and so on. Going to Youtube is no good as the tutorials there do not cover a sloping item such as a rafter.

As an Autocad user, you find yourself keying in things like "M" for move, when you should be pressing a button. Visibility states are another minefield for an Autocad user: there ain't no layers!

When you finally find out a way to hide something, it's gone forever because the way to get it back is not the same button or next to it!

Autocad to Revit...Notes of an Autocad user

A successful install of Revit Architecture 2010. Whaddaya mean there's no tutorials???

Well, says R, they are a separate download. Oh...Ok. All sorts of downloads going to the wrong directories and much shuffling later...

I have ground my way through the tutorials, missing things like room spaces etc.

Being an impatient type, I thought it would be good to redo a previously done house drawn in 2D Autocad to see how it compared. (Yes, I know I should not have done it in 2D--it just reinforces for me that 2D is a crazy way of drawing.) This particular drawing I remember well because in the early stages the client wanted a print. Being a "work in progress" there were things wrong.

He got very cranky, so this has taught me the lesson that you do not give anyone a "rough" drawing. I'm not a particularly fussy person, but I'm sure that there is sweat and blood on that drawing...even if it is a PDF!

The above shows progress so far- about 3 hours. The house is a bit deceptive as it has 2 levels on the ground floor.

Putting in things like walls, doors and windows is fairly easy, once you get used to the idea that if the standard version is not what you want, you just duplicate it, and rename it as something else, then alter that one.

Another head scrambler is the fact that all you ever need is already drawn for you: your job is just to fit it and modify it to what you want.

I'm half way between huge admiration for this product and frustration with how things are done.

Another neat way to learn is to go to Youtube and type in say "Revit Stairs". There are some very good presentations there.

Another thing that really surprised me was the connection to Autodesk Seek-

http://seek.autodesk.com/

This seems to be a huge depository of components such as baths, sinks etc.

(Note in the standard install they cleverly hide bathroom fittings under "Drainage"-go figure!)

Equally surprising was the lack of sliding windows- sure you can go places where you have to register/pay for such things, but even they have only 2 panels, not 3.

Or am I missing something? (Probably!)

On a video roll

I've gone mad with the uploading of videos to Youtube. The latest is for
handrails to be found at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIJ4ZNz3rhk

I hope that I'm getting better at doing these- a friend suggested I work on a smaller
screen size and have the autocad background set to white, which seems to produce
a much better result.

Now, back to that Revit tutorial....

Xmas Madness continues

It's all too much: Xmas food, holidays, being able to decide what to do each day.

So the mad part is I have downloaded a trial copy of Revit to see what it is about.

Just to be totally inconsistent, I downloaded Java netbeans integrated development environment as well.

It just allows you to "easily" make java programs. That is, if you can figure out what the heck is going on!

Even worse, I have downloaded a screen video capture program called CamStudio and after much searching for a microphone produced a video. The trick (I have not mastered it yet) is to have the settings so that the file size is low. It is just a short 3 minute demo of my pipe lisp.

It can be found at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZsVUjbRWO4

Maybe it's time for a break..

The picture shows a pair of double doors. Just opening a set of these, it would never occur to you that there are two different styles (the uprights on the left and right), and what a pain they have caused. They must overlap in the middle, and this has been a bit of a trial.

Anyway, this window stuff is now finished, and unless my friend R wants a set of horizontally sliding doors, or windows that slide up and down, this is now a project done.

That is, unless I get excited about doing a costing part.

The next project is to do a bit on Java. How this can be connected to Autocad I'm not sure and what the next project should be I'm not sure. Maybe it is just the time of year.

I had a flash of the blinding obvious regarding drawing of houses. It seems that almost every part of a house model is controlled by the floor plan. If you could have a program that generates a set of foundation plans automatically from a floor plan?

Same with the roof. Which just leaves the walls and windows. The exterior walls would be controlled by the floor perimeter, so they are covered. The exterior walls are then able to be enumerated and so windows as a separate item could be assigned to a particular wall.

That leaves just the interior walls. Maybe these are controlled by the "room usage"?

Which comes back to Java: I know this is an object oriented language and I have done a bit of research on it and it seems very good.

It now occurs to me that someone else has thought of all of the above, and is possibly feverishly putting the finishing touches on a program which, unfortunately, will put a lot of architects out of work.

Just finished bashing my head against the keyboard

Who would have thought doing a lisp for the above item would take hours and damn hours?
I have an all too convenient cold at the moment (this stops me from running/riding a bike/walking etc)-so I have had time to finish this one. I'm not terribly proud of the way I have written this one-no planning, just hack away until it was finished. Bring on object oriented programming for lisp (maybe that is what visual lisp is?).

The next steps might be to make it a bit more user friendly (it is all command line stuff).
I have given it to my friend who typically might take 3/4 hr to draw a window in 2D.
I'm hoping he can do one in 5 minutes using this one.

Another next step might be to do one for doors, then a quotation/costing/cutting list add-on, but this would be a real time-burner.

My Next Project

Hmphhh! Seems nobody wanted my handrail routine. Oh well, as I said I'm going to get fun out of it.

Now for the next pile of frustration: A lisp set that does wooden joinery,ie windows (or called millwork in the USA). A friend of mine recently bought an English program that costs up joinery, so maybe I'll add to my drawing part to create a saleable item. I think I'm done now with giving some things away for free.

Progress has been slow-it is now at the stage shown in the pic.

I'm realising in my travels that there are some drawings done by architects of joinery, but most of these only have a passing nod at doing things to scale. It seems nowhere is there an "engineering" type of scale drawing exactly how joinery is constructed.