IDEA studio

There's a great opportunity here if you are a student. IDEA Studio is calling for proposals for Student in residence at Autodesk. Act fast ....you only have until the 15th to get it in.

http://labs.blogs.com/its_alive_in_the_lab/2013/02/call-for-proposals-for-the-idea-studio-by-february-15.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Revit Hatch patterns revisited

A long time ago I talked about the in's and out's of hatch patterns in Revit and how they are made from scratch. I'm not sure why the universally used functionality hasn't been addressed in any shape or form by the Factory but thanks to some talent out there in the world, there are easier ways to address patterns. I recently came across Hatch22, a fairly easy-to-use Revit Add-in that addresses the missing functionality. It's Pay as you Please and worth a look if you find yourself in need of non-standard patterns. I found the instructions fairly concise and thorough except for a few things: The View type (Dratfting/Detail/Model) in which you draw your pattern was vaguely referenced, and the wording describing how drawing Scale relates to the pattern and it's output was unclear. The plugin dialog looks like so:

You essentially draw your pattern and pattern boundary in a Revit drafting view, and use the four line styles Hatch22 loads into the file to help the lines do what you want them to do.

The Add-in and a new pattern for a Perforated Ceiling tile

I found that it did not recognize circles, spitting out a blank boundary file and that it had some issue with some of the hexagon linework, to where it had to be "corrected". All in all it's a good tool and Gregory Mertens deserves some patronage for his work.
Cheers

Watch "AU 2012 Keynote crowd" on YouTube

Like some of you, I am at AU. For those of you who have never experienced it, here is a quick video of the attendees at the Keynote speech at Mandalay Bay hotel. The full video may be posted online at au.Autodesk.com soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRZci9sJhyM&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Craig

Passionate about BIM

Dash over to Stephen Hamil's blog and see what it takes to be passionate about BIM...

Passionate about BIM: When writing summary information for conferences or introducing other speakers the words "passionate about BIM" often spring to mind. But ...

Are you passionate about BIM?

Revit viewport arranger

This looks darn handy. It's a Revit 2013 add-on utility that arranges your viewports in Revit. You may already now some of the keyboard shortcuts like WT for window tile, ZA for zoom all, and Ctrl-Tab for switching between open windows, but this utility gives you even more handy flexibility in arranging windows. It's called Palladio X and it's free, thanks to the folks at Mensch und Maschine Software SE. I like the classic architectural reference in the name.
Check it out here on the Autodesk App Exchange.

Left: Revit managed viewports     -     Right: Palladio X managed viewports

Nicely stacked viewports...

Now if you are working on a large project, keeping this many windows open may decrease your performance and may not be a good idea. It would be a good idea to close the ones not in use. That being said, there are lots of working scenarios where this utility would be very handy. If you try it out, leave a comment. Thanks to Markb for posting this to Revitforum.org
Cheers