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VDC News
Revit & steel fabrication models...
Written by John
Thursday, 04 February 2010 10:01
As part of my never-ending challenge of producing better 3D backgrounds for MEP coordination I've been trying to export a quadrant based Steel fabrication model.
Here's why:
1) Our Revit Structure model doesn't have all the small connections, angles and slab edge reinforcement modeled. Our steel fabrication model does.
I got it working, but blew up a couple times in the process... and kept me in the office until 8PM last night (despite the fact I was working on my new Revit monster with 36 GB of RAM and 6 simultaneous sessions of Revit when importing my IFCs)
1) Revit 2009 + IFC import. Geometry isn't cleanly imported. Geometry gets unjoined (or can't be created at all!) ultimately, I get columns that disconnect from beams like so:
Random small pieces of geometry aren't created. Others are created with problems identified in the images below:
In orange: Original DWG from steel fabricator
In Grey: CIS/2 STP of same model from steel fabricator. Imported into Revit, exported as an NWC.
As you can see, the CIS2 RVT is missing the edge of slab & precast embeds.
This is far more troubling -- the slope and attachment points of angle bracing has changed. I'm actually dealing with some sloped roof drains in this bay, so the CIS2 imported model is useless for this reason alone.
same issue, different location. All of my small diagonal bracing & kickers are off w/ the CIS/2 RVT model.
The final straw is the large connections for our W14x211 brace frames.
Bottom line? Way too much detail is lost in CIS/2 --> RVT and IFC --> RVT.
The only geometrically accurate option (even though I lose edge of slab reinforcing bar):
Blank Revit project, import all the DWGs, and deal with the artifacts and "space junk" that happen when Revit attempts to cut a DWG, when I export it along with all of the designers models (which are all native Revit files, and cut rather cleanly... except for Revit MEP, which is another story).
Although some people may not know, the Phoenix BIMForum was put on by the Emerging Leaders subforum, a group I co-chair within the BIMForum along with Sarah Vekasy.Sarah’s help and leadership was instrumental, along with other members of the conference leadership team – Carl Roberts from Ballard Spahr LLP and Chris Fischer from Schuff Steel.David Epps from Holder gets an honorary mention, but Holder keeps David too busy!
Anyhow, it was a great event, from a fantastic Gensler presentation by Shawn Gehle and Ken Sanders on LA Live and the Shanghai Tower, to a blow-your-hair-back presentation from Jeff McGrew with Because We Can/10 Miles Wide… the entire event was a blast.
One item of note was on Wednesday (1/13) before the BIMForum, we hosted tours of some sophisticated trade contractors from around the Metro-Phoenix area.I organized this, so I’m a little hesitant to pass judgment on it, but if you float on over to Laura Handler’s blog, you’ll find some discussion there on it.
As much as I love my Dell Precision M6400 Covet (which is to say, I love it dearly!) I've been looking for a smaller machine that can function as an ultra-portable compadre to my Portable Workstation, Dell's classification for the M6400.
Here's the kicker: my ideal netbook type machine is well, not a netbook, since netbooks by their very nature are only designed for email and web browsing. I'm looking for something small and cheap like a netbook, but powerful enough to run a serious Navisworks session & also do some basic work in Revit.
So, it needs to:
Have a decent Video Card (no integrated intel GPUs)
Have a reasonable CPU (the Atom is... meh, Navisworks + 100+ MB NWD = CPU DOA)
4+ GB of RAM (yes, I'm crazy, yes 4GB of RAM isn't a netbook)
Capable of a 64-bit operating system (yeah, I belong in a padded cell)
Well, until I saw the press release for the MSI Wind U230 , I thought I was crazy too.
Key figures:
AMD Neo X2 MV40 CPU at 1.6GHz
Windows 7 Home Premium
AMD Radeon HD3200
Up to 4GB of RAM
12.1-inch LCD at 1366×768
160GB/250GB/320GB hard drive options
1.3-megapixel webcam
Card reader, Ethernet, b/g/n Wi-Fi, optional Bluetooth
VGA and HDMI output
Three- or six-cell battery options
Weighs 2.86 pounds with three-cell battery
Up to four hours battery life (with three-cell battery)
Needless to say, I've found my next purchase... now I'm just considering the merits of upgrading to a SSD (because I know I'll have an absolutely massive page file if I tempt fate and run Revit on this little guy)
...I'll keep you all posted as I find out more information about this über Netbook.
Recently I had our general superintendant drop in and ask for all the floor plans color coded by floor.
Piece of cake. I cranked them out, included a schedule with it and he was happy... for about an hour.
Later he came back and asked "well, can I see all the floors as seperate 3D plans?"
Okay, so this time it was a little more work, but I cranked them out... but this time I had to tag the floors using text boxes, since Revit won't let you "tag all" in the 3D view (gah!)
Well, it took about 8 hours (gimme a break, I've got a 16-story 700,000 SF building I'm working with here), and my super was happy...
For a three whole days.
The latest? He'd like 3D gridlines. For a guy who's been in the industry for 35 years, he certainly does like this "BIM stuff" ...and I'm paying dearly.
Well, I just finished printing it to PDF. Hopefully he likes it, and maybe you guys will too!
...but the parameters I'm using for those tokens, now I've got a little secret sauce of my own in there that really helps when setting up a new project and exporting to ACAD. :-)
Every once in a while some small setting thing will pop up -- either I'll get confused about which floor I'm on, I'll be looking at an older version of the composite model and forget.
...when that happens I give my ticker a little impromptu stress test.
One such occurrence happened recently kudos to Navisworks handling of the NWCs created from Revit via the API module (I call it NWC OUT, since thats what it was called in ACAD back in the day).
Anyhow the problem is specifically related to a new feature in 2010: The ability to use (and in my case abuse) shared coordinates.
The problem goes something like so:
As you can see, the green export, prepared via a lengthy (like, 24 hours of processing on a 3.0 GHz box w/ 8GB of RAM) Revit to DWG ripping process. The solid is the fast NWC out from Revit (Tools --> External Tools) option.
As you can see, both files, appended with no additional steps for some reason are off in both the X & Y direction. Since my trade contractors were well on their way modeling for the purpose of MEP coordination (and doing epic battles with the laws of physics), I felt my stomach drop to somewhere around my shoes.
I quickly discovered that I couldn't move the revit-created NWC file (the solid one). It was locked and simply wouldn't move
After looking through the various options, I discovered the fix: switch the NWC export tool from it's default setting of using shared coordinates to using project internal... Apparently the navisworks team assumed that most Revit teams don't bother to make sure they all start of the same base model in the same location. I guess my motley band of characters is an exception to that rule.
An important note: if you're using shared coordinates, your NWC will be locked -- you can't bump it around at all... a huge pain. And if a designer has true north set different from project north, well that'll be a headache too. Not fun.
So, to fix that setting, follow along:
1) Open your project in revit. Click Tools --> external options --> Navisworks 2010
Okay, so I created a blog post that was awesome on an epic scale… but my session timed out and I lost the write up.That reminds me of Revit – when dimensions disappear on me or I take the wrong approach to modeling an object, I just tell myself “well, when I do it again, I’ll be that much faster and whatever I’m doing will be that much better”
…at least that’s what I tell myself!
Over the weekend I was working with the team and one of the redlines I was picking up was relocating parking bollard and creating a chain link fence in an underground parking area to protect some MEP gear.
The bollards were easy – just a quick MM and AA (my keyboard shortcut for move and align, respectively) and I was in business.
…but the chain link fence was a different story.
I’ve done chain link fences two ways before, and I wasn’t happy with either of them:
1)Generic, parametric surface hosted chain link fence family.
a.This sucker is somewhat problematic since it’s simply a series of independent objects that can be quite a headache to keep aligned, turn corners and generally behave correctly, especially over changes in elevation.
2)A basic wall with a chain link material.
a.This is nice, since it’s quick and easy… but for clearly documenting in both elevation & plan, it’s somewhat lacking.
Enter the railing family based chain link fence.
With a bit of initial setup, you’ll quickly have a chain link fence family that can follow sloped surfaces, cleanly connect chain link panels and even resize with minimal drama.
Step 1) Chain Link Pattern File.
Here’s a (somewhat) little-known dirty secret: AutoCAD pattern files (.pat) work like a champ in Revit… if you do two thinks.
1)Insert a single line of code into the pattern file (rename it from .PAT to .TXT, open in notepad, add in ;%TYPE=MODEL on the second line, so that the PAT code goes from this:
(note: if you’d prefer the pattern type to be drafting instead of modeling, use ;%TYPE=DRAFTING instead.
Step 2) Create your Chain Link Baluster Panel
For the sake of starting with something halfway decent, I started with Baluster Panel - Glass.rfa (which is found in your default Revit content library (C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\RAC 2009\Imperial Library\Balusters) for us Vista users.
(Side note: Vista rocks – I’m convinced all the crap Dell and others install on top of Vista is the main reason people hate it so much)
Once you have the glass panel open, change the material type to chain link, import the chain link pattern file (set the scale to 3.0 for optimal results) and save as a new panel/file and close.
You can find the materials dialog via: Settings --> Materials
Step 3)
Load the panel you just created into a blank project, create a floor, then go about creating a railing.
For the baluster placement, alternate the panel family we just loaded with the existing 1” (or larger if you want) circular baluster.
Ultimately, you should have something that looks like this:
One of the hardest parts of the entire VDC adventure is clearly documenting what just happened... but in a company of 2,000 people, without clear documentation, repeating the effort is nearly impossible without the "lessons learned" along the way.
Although it varies from company to company, I've found that teaming with the western region Sr. Precon Manager has been a fantastic opportunity to continually brainstorm and document the process.
The photograph below (captured using my sprint/nextel blackberry 8350i) is from a quick 60-45 brainstorm/brain dump into the nature of VDC on a large phased design project (like the one I'm on) with the WRO Sr. Precon Manager.
The truly frightening thing: this all makes sense to me.
So, about 18 months ago I was talking with someone from autodesk and I said "who cares about Mental Ray rendering in Navisworks? That's not what the tool is used for"
Although that's still the truth (I'm not really sure what's the construction usage here), I was pleasantly suprised by how the rendering turned out.
The story behind it:
Someone rather senior on my project's the design team gave me a jingle and asked "John, do you have a way to create a video that shows all of the 3D elements we have in the design?"
I thought about it and said "sure, give me until the end of the week -- I'll shoot you an AVI about two minutes long"
...well, around 10 AM on Friday, I finally found a second to think about a rendered animation in Navisworks or Revit.
After quickly weighing the pros and cons:
Revit Pros: Mental Ray Rendering Engine
Revit Cons: Loading the composite model takes 7.99 GB of an available 8GB
Navisworks Pros: Wicked light weight
Navisworks Cons: Wicked light weight rendering engine (or so I thought)
Well, I outlined the basic idea, then I had the project's (somewhat overgrown) VCI (virtual construction intern) Scott Gurley take care of the heavy lifting.
for a navisworks rendering that took 2 hours to put together (and 66 hours for all the frames to render!) it's not half bad!
If people are interested in the steps on how we put it together, I might be cajoled into posting up the step-by-step narrative...
Scott takes payment in form of Dr. Pepper, Mountain Dew for me.
I got this in an email from one of our potential tower crane providers. I made a wise-crack comment about tower cranes horizontally shifting on certain floors... just when you think "it can't be done" someone goes and does it.
This is a guy who dragged me along to AGC meetings before preschool (I had my own jacket & matching slacks). He also refused to buy us kids a nintendo, but instead got a 286 from PCs Unlimited and wrote the proper DOS commands to exit windows and launch Jet Fighter 2 on a post-it note and left it for me to figure out after school. He's also the same guy who let us kids use powertools (under supervision of course!) before we were even done with 2nd grade.
My dad... the visionary. Well, duh. :)
None the less, it's been a fantastic ride watching those Tocci Building Corporation people shake things up... I'm looking forward to even more excitement in 2009.
I suppose I should be suprised that John Tocci Sr. was selected as one of