extra blog

Small post for my followers:


I also write blogs on this address: danielgijsbers.blogspot.com



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http://danielgijsbers.blogspot.com/2012/08/disclaimer.html

Revit Families for the bridgemodeler: Piers

When you use the bridgemodeler in Revit you will most likely think that the design of the piers (and all the other stuff) could deal with a little update.

Select a pier and notice the contextual ribbon with the button edit family.

Go to the family categories and parameters and notice that this is a generic model.  

You can substitute piers in your project for other generic model families but, you will loose the instance parameter values. That means you will no longer have the height information and so. (unless you have saved that somewhere)

You can edit an existing pier that came with the extension. Be sure to save it under a new name. If you save it in the same folder, as the other piers that came with the extension, you will be able to select your pier from the drop down list in the extension window.

What is important to know is that the intersection of the reference planes: center (front/back) and center (left/right) and the Ref.level is the point lies on the alignment from Civil 3D. (alignment might not be the correct name here, ofcourse I mean the 3D line that is a result of the horizontal alignment and the vertical Profile)

next time more on parameters used in the bridgemodeler.

In the meantime take a look here, that's where you find al the bridgemodel families on a windows 7 machine. C:\Users\Public\Autodesk\REX\2011.0\Revit\Bridges\Families

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Revit Families for the bridgemodeler

At the AU2010 in Las Vegas I attended a nice hands on lab from Steven Costa, Bridging the Gap Between AutoCAD® Civil 3D® and Autodesk® Revit® Structure.


There were quiet some questions about family customization. I will soon post some examples and how it's done. So please subscribe if you are interested. I will update this blog sometimes in the coming 2 weeks.



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Navisworks Avatars

Recently Autodesk released the subscription advantage pack. One of the things that was added were new avatars. Anyone who knows a bit of Navisworks knew that the old avatars are quite boring. The new ones are an improvement but it could be better.


So I looked into making it a bit bolder. It is relatively easy to get your own avatar in Navisworks. After installing the subscription advantage pack you can use the new avatars as you would before.

Office female 

How to get your own avatar in Navisworks?

1. Get a model of what you want to use from your favorite 3D software into Navisworks. 
2. Save this file as an nwd
3. Close Navisworks
4. open the explorer and go to the Navisworks installation folder. Default path is: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Navisworks Manage 2011\avatars
5. Create a sub folder with the name of your avatar. Mine is called Lara.
6. put the nwd you just saved into this folder.
7. Start Navisworks and you can use this avatar

Online I found a free download of Lara Croft...

This was a model with materials. I had some trouble getting those materials into Navisworks. So I opened the file into 3D max and created a dwf from it. I choose for dwf because I got the materials the way I wanted them. (there are many more ways to accomplish this but this worked for me.)

This is how I got Lara into Navisworks first time.

I choosed to use Lara because of the contributions she has made to the gaming industry and video card development She inspired videocard builders to push the technology forward and make it possible to start using high count polygon models.

As you can see Lara is carring quiet a lot of weaponry. You might not want that  when you are showing this to your clients. Luckily this model was build quiet nicely and things are separate objects. So I set all those things to hidden.

You can also override the color or change the material of her dress quiet easily. It's possible to hide the dress as well...

But I guess I should have found my self a paid model of Lara. (the arrows point to missing tissue) 

When you get a model of a person into Navisworks to be used as an avatar you have to do a little manipulating with it.

Most models of person have their feet on the xy plane and their spline is parallel to the positive z axis. Several times this turned out not to work in Navisworks. I ended up rotating the model before it propperly appeared in Navisworks.

I rotated Lara in such a way that she would look you in the face as a hostess would normally do. I think it's good manners. (there were no other motives... :)

In order to get the rotation right you have to go into the following settings.

1. Select the entire model
2. Right click the model in the selection tree
3. go to file units and transform
4. Play around with the rotation settings to get it right
5. Be sure to use the rotation fields under the degrees as well as they influence the axis of rotation. Use 1 as starting values for the axis and 90 for the angle. That gives you the best idea what the effects are.

What I haven't quiet figured out is how I can get the materials to show on the model when used as an avatar. I tried publishing and have the materials embedded but that didn't seem to want to work. So feel free to add comment and tips.

Did anyone else notice yet that in heavy scene's the skirt of the office female, that came with the subscription advantage pack, disappears when moving around? 

Disclaimer information
http://danielgijsbers.blogspot.com/2012/08/disclaimer.html

Navisworks is fun

When I am working with Revit and Civil I frequently use Navisworks to view the data from both. The civil object viewer isn't to great on my machine and Revit is not always to great with viewing civil data.


I recently ran into something that said you can set your own avatar in Navisworks.I looked into it a bit and it wasn't that difficult. Lately I have been very busy with bridges in Revit and Civil. Most of the time I view them in Navisworks.


Ofcourse you want to fly under your bridge in style. Being a Star trek fan I had to pick something from the show. So I found a sketchup model of a Bird of Prey. 


See how it flies!






Disclaimer information
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Dimensioning

This is part 4


(part one is somewhere at the bottom)

I spend a lot of time trying to get something to work in Civil yesterday. I tried to get the bridge to show up in a section view. It worked a couple of times but not the way I wanted. Projecting solids on a section view has some mysteries left for me to solve. In the end I got a bit frustrated with the tool. It suddenly dawned upon me that the bridge is made of solids so the regular sectionplane tool in from Autocad can be used....

How about I manually put the section it creates under the sectionview from civil.

Rather empty sectionview of a pier. 

Sectionview with an Autocad section underneath.There is trouble in paradise. But that might have to do with my knowledge of civil.

But this might be fixable if I set the frequency to a smaller distance or it has to do with my tinkering in revit with the super elevation

At the moment it is of by:

Distance = 0.0061,  Angle in XY Plane = 299g,  Angle from XY Plane = 0g

Delta X = -0.0001,  Delta Y = -0.0061,   Delta Z = 0.0000

I''ll leave it for the moment. I am going to check on that snappoint I assumed earlier. Because I have this nagging feeling I made a wrong assumption.are some more things wrong. I took both files to navisworks and I saw the following. The piers are correctly lined out but the height is off. The odd thing is that it is a round number. That makes me curious.


Next image you see Revit and Civil next to each other. Notice that the shape of the piers are of.

It's not good that the measurements are off but the fact that the piers are in the exact same position makes me happy for the moment. What doesn't make me happy is the fact I spend a lot of time trying to get the parameters to match to find out now there is still an error. 

here you see the bridgemodel open in both applications they have both read the same rxd file and it's not good yet. More later my laptop is tired and I need a beer. That's it for today.

even more bridges

This is part 3

Since I had some problems running some of the extensions I decided to have a clean go.

Starting from civil

I pushed the bridge to a new Revit file. In Revit I started the extensions again. made some very small changes in the superelevation.

 I added a pier. I also substituted a couple of piers for a selfmade family.

 Which gave me this

I ran the documentation extension hoping to get it to work while I hadn't made many changes yet. That does seem to help. Notice the amount of levels it creates. This is customizable but I left it to it's default suggestions. I had some trouble with the custom families so I switched them back for the moment to the default piers.

Notice all the grids and views it creates

I decided to first push the data back to civil again before I would make any further changes. The extension ended up deleting the bridge in civil. Re-running the bridge extension in Civil gave me a different bridge. But there is a way to synchronise this with rxd files. I assume it stands for something like Revit eXtension Data, but I could be wrong here.

After getting the two bridges back in sync I am interested to see dimensioning  in both programs. As we all know Revit is very good a dimensioning things you are not interested in. (sorry Autodesk but this bug should have been fixed a long time ago!!!) 

On the other hand we have civil dimensioning / labeling and good old Autocad dimensioning tools.

(about Autocad, I sometimes here people say that there is no place for autocad in a BIM workflow. I always comment that BIM isn't a software program but a way of working and communicating with eachother.)

First I need to get some good sections so I need sample lines. At this moment you have put the sample lines manually. I t would have been nice if the brigdemodeler would have put in sample lines at the locations of the piers. To get the sample lines in place I snapped to the middle of the piers.

Since I had to place the sample lines manually it's worth checking to see if the position of the stations matches with the places of the piers. I snapped properly except for one abutment. That'll do for now.

Next blog will be about dimensioning

This was part 3