Revit Spark

A while back I found that you could download a copy of a thing called SPARK.
This is a possible release of a different type of Revit.

The download is from: http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/spark/

You can check Robin Capper's blog opinion at http://rcd.typepad.com/rcd/,
look for 13th September 2011.

It is free to download and will last till 7th July 2012.

I would call it Revit LT, ie "Low Technology"? or LITE?
(As Tim would say, you are able to draft lots on LT because it is "Lite")

Someone has suggested I write up my experiences with it.
I have had experience with Autocad Architecture, so thought it might be
interesting to give it a try.

At the outset, I have to say that leaping straight in is not the ideal
way to approach learning a new program. I found lot's of frustrations that
would not have happened if I had learned in a classroom situation.
I have given Revit a go before about a year ago, so the user interface was
familiar and I had a small project a friend had started using 2D Autocad.

The project is to take a standard house and put a basement rumpus room
in it. The drawings are not perfect(!?...are they ever?) and are in a very
preliminary stage.

The things I found most wanting were: (unless I'm missing something!)

1. No ability to be in 3D of the level you are editing. Sure, you can
make a 3D view and fiddle around for ages with that, but that is a
separate view. This compares very badly with Autocad Architecture, which
allows you to do an instant 3D view of the level you are editing,
and whats more, get a perspective view in an instant.

2. The supply of windows and doors seemed a little poor. I guess I could
create my own families, but that feels like a bit of a mission. For instance,
I wanted bifolds, 4 off, on the front part. Not there.... So mangled a curtain
wall to fill it in.

As with Autocad, it is a lot of knowing where to find things....

Just a Simple Door

A friend of mine has a joinery shop. It seems sometimes he gets a job where an architectural style of door is needed. He mentioned how it was a bit of calculator bashing to work out the plank widths and how many planks etc. Previously, I had investigated doing Autocad scripts generated from an excel visual basic macro, so I thought, what good waste of my time this might be!

It was quite surprising to me that it was quite tricky to work out, and compromises had to be made-for instance the gap had to be specified, not calculated, then all the tricky stuff with decimal points and integers etc.

The resulting script draws it in 3D.

Autocad and piping

Just had a look on Youtube at a demo of Autodesk's Plant 3D which I guess is an add-on to Autocad. It looks easy to use and produces things like isometric drawings with bills of materials.
From the short demo, I came away quite impressed. You can see one of the videos here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gokkAr0Lc2I

It makes my home grown approach to piping look a little crude and backward. If you want a look at how I do this, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZsVUjbRWO4

Having said this, I could imagine how hard it would be to persuade decision makers at my work that this would be a good way to go, probably because my work about 20% piping. Well, I can dream can't I?

Even if I were certain that this was the way to go, there would be a nagging doubt that maybe other products such as Revit MEP might be the clever way.....

So, back to Youtube and what do you know? Here is a demo of Revit MEP,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sf_b_Wes2s

To me, it looked like a lot of button pressing for not much result. So here is a puzzle: Autodesk make and sell both products.....why?

I don't want to be seen as a Revit basher here, because as I understand it, a lot of quite clued up people think that Revit is the way to go for drawings of buildings, so maybe I'm missing something.

Acad.pat

A co-worker who uses Autocad LT to do his electrical drawings recently said he could not open one of my drawings, because I had saved it as R2010. I had recently been upgraded from Autocad R2008 to R2010, so I said:

"I believe you may be able to upgrade to the R2010 version".

Which he did, which in hindsight was not the best plan, as after installing he wanted to use the hatch command, and got a dialog saying:

"Cannot find acadlt.pat"

Which is fine: All you have to do is go Options, File Locations, and add where it is to your support path. Unfortunately, on the network, we are mere users and are not allowed access to our c: drive.

The IT man was duly called, and progress is on going...involving reimaging and so on.

Which made me think, why can you not get a copy off the internet, download it, stick it somewhere where you are allowed to go and add that location to your support listing?

Strangely enough, I was not able to find a copy of acad.pat anywhere!

Of course there were heaps of people giving out add-ons to the file, but not the file itself.

So here I am, Saturday morning of the 23rd of April, rummaging around my hard drive for the mysterious file. (Mad? Yes!). You can open it up in Notepad and check it out.

Here is part of it:

;;
;; Copyright (C) 1991-2011 by Autodesk, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
;; Version 2.0
;; AutoCAD Hatch Patterns
;;
;;
;; Note: in order to ease migration of this file when upgrading
;; to a future version of AutoCAD, it is recommended that you add
;; your customizations to the User Defined Hatch Patterns section at the
;; end of this file.
;;


;; Note: Dummy pattern description used for 'Solid fill'.
*SOLID, Solid fill
45, 0,0, 0,.125
*ANGLE, Angle steel
0, 0,0, 0,.275, .2,-.075
90, 0,0, 0,.275, .2,-.075
*ANSI31, ANSI Iron, Brick, Stone masonry
45, 0,0, 0,.125

It does go on for quite a bit more, as I have Autocad Architecture, then towards then end it has this bit:

;; User Defined Hatch Patterns
;; Add any hatch patterns that you define to this section of
;; the file to ensure that they migrate properly when
;; upgrading to a future AutoCAD version. If duplicate hatch
;; patterns are found in this file, items in the User Defined
;; Hatch Patterns section take precedence over patterns that
;; appear earlier in the file.
;;

I find it puzzling as to why the file is called acadlt.pat for LT, but maybe they are given less hatches out of the box.

STOP PRESS! According to Robin, a good plan is to run Autocad first time WITH ADMINISTRATOR RIGHTS! Should I tell the IT man?......

Autocad 2012 - 3dconfig

Well, here we go again, with another release of Autocad.

A quick verdict:

1. It seems nice to use, quick and responsive.

2. No new killer features, except that the section command seems to be doing what it should have done in R2007. Namely the colour of the cut lines seems to be OK now.
To me that is almost worth the upgrade.

3. The nicest thing I like is the display. I have an old quadro fx1500 video card and after updating the video driver, I used 3dconfig to enable hardware acceleration. At first I had rotten results, but after setting it to only have Gooch hardware shader, I found it performed a lot better.
The point is here that you need to update your video driver with a new version, and set it's usage to be not too overtaxing.

4. It has a lot of other stuff that I probably would not use, but I have to concede that my usage is not everyones! Things like 3d parametric arrays and so on.

5. Rendering seems a lot better.

6. As usual, a small upgrade, but all these small things add up over the years to make things a little easier. For instance hatching.

7. A little easy to miss is a new system for views-there is a new bit of text in the top left corner to select views, and visual styles. This comes under the heading of old dogs and new tricks.....woof.

It seems there is more and more stuff with each release. It shows up in the file size of the download (I don't bother with discs any more). It was a 1.4GB download.
Back in 2002, it seemed to fit on a cd.

I had a bit of fun installing: It seemed Nortons noticed a good time to do a background scan, which froze things up a bit. Never mind, do a "restore point". That failed as well, and I was just considering dealing to the whole hard drive, when I tried again and it seemed OK. This time, I hovered around and pounced on Nortons as soon as it came up and killed it off.

The picture of the house I did in Autocad Architecture 2011 as a concept for a friend, which shows what gooch shading looks like.

If you want a quick roundup of all the features, nicely presented, go see:
http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/acadblog/autocad-2012-new-features/

Last Post for a While

A New Year's Resolution...haul back on the blogging and do something more useful.

Probably something to do with not a lot of feedback.

This post is about a porch roof I designed. My wife requested a cover over our front door so you don't have to get wet when it rains...it rains lots in Auckland. My original idea was a repeat of the roof nearby,ie tiles, rafters etc.

Then I saw one a friend had done: Just a sheet of glass held up by steel brackets.

Just to be competitive I designed a similar one, but this one used stainless steel. Originally, I chose 40 x 5 flat bars as the material, but the look was not all that "architectural", so I redesigned it to use a profile cut shape as the support part.

Why getting into Architectural Drafting might not be a good idea....

You may not agree with this, but give Autodesk's new Homestyler a try out.

I have tried out previous attempts by Autodesk to do this sort of thing, but this is way out in front as far as usability and so on.

It's primary function seems to be for interior layouts and it is is very good at these. Outdoor layouts are catered for as well, but it appears a pretty flat world out there.

I could see my friends computer-phobic wife getting onto this and producing a kitchen or two.

In the pic, I just slammed in some furniture and hit the render button, and it produced a fairly good render.

There are some things it does not seem to do:

1. Allow you to make your own content.

2. The window content is a little sparse as yet, but might grow.

What this shows is the shape of things to come: The tools of designers will become so effortless to use, that anyone can produce drawings. The new job of architect might then become what it should be: a dreamer, artist etc.

I'm still waiting for something similar to come along for mechanical drafting.....

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=14943677