64-bit Revit 2009 Utilities

The Avatech Revit Utilities for 2009 have been updated and now available for download and use with Revit Architecture, Revit Structure and Revit MEP 64-bit here.

The installer will check if you have a 32 bit or 64 bit machine as well as whether you have 32 or 64 bit Revit and install appropriately. Feedback is always appreciated in the forums section.

Note: If you are looking to share these with your entire staff and want an easy way to install these, here you go.

We are wrapping up work on a new application (BIMreview) and will be sharing more utilities so stay tuned and thanks for your continued use, feedback and development requests.

This post refers to the following utilities:
Change Case
Content Browser
Door Mark Update
Earth Connector
Grid Select
Room Phase Copy
Room Renumber
Space Update

Autodesk Revit 2009 - New Build #1

For all flavors of Revit 2009 a new build is now available for download from the autodesk website.

Revit Utilities Update

As you probably saw there has been a short hiatus from writing, mostly to avoid spilling the beans on the upcoming projects. That said one of those projects has just released an update for compatibility and new features within Revit Architecture, Revit Structure and Revit MEP 2009 available here.

New features include:

	Room Renumber Easily renumber existing rooms into an order defined by selection. Insert rooms into an existing series of rooms with the subsequent room numbers “shifted” to make space for the inserted one. NEW: Handle increments between room numbers. * Version 1.1.3066 Click here to download
	Change Case Instantly match your company’s or client’s standards on naming with either UPPER CASE, Title Case, or lower case. This tool scans your model and automatically fixes “case issues” to whatever standard you specify. NEW: Support for new element/parameter combinations (Text Note Text, View Title on Sheet) * Version 1.0.3032 Click here to download
	Door Mark Update Make door marks refer to the room that the door swings into. Interrogates all doors and rooms to determine the proper mark for each door. Enables you to inspect and override the suggested marks and updates the marks. NEW: Provides user-specified suffixes where a room has more than one door (works with Revit 2009 only). NEW: Swap the door TO/FROM definition to match the door swing. * Version 1.0.3062 Click here to download
	RevitCity.com Content Browser Gives you a Web browser inside of Revit that connects you to the popular RevitCity.com site. All in one step, you can download the content, store it in the proper library, rename it, and load it into the current model. * Version 1.1.3066 Click here to download
	Earth Connector for Revit Enables you to watch your building come together, phase by phase, within Google Earth. Works with all the other Avatech Revit Utilities. Supports Windows Vista. Supports Revit Phases working with Google Earth Timespans. NEW: Provides an alternative mechanism for showing the Revit model origin. NEW: Another way to specify an alternate model origin for use in Google Earth. NEW: Resolved non-English locale issues. * Version 1.1.3054 Click here to download

We are also working on tweaks to a few more features within these (thanks to great user feedback). We are interested if you are hosting content on an intranet (for multiple offices) to work within our content browser above. Drop me an e-mail if you are interested in helping get this going.

Shortly we will be unveiling another Revit application project that we think is different from anything else out there at moment.... :)

Cheers and more writing soon, in the meantime feel free to follow my micro-blog on twitter.
Beau

Revit 2009 New Feature - VSTA

In this release of 2009 for the Revit line of products (Architecture, Structure and MEP) we have a new "light" programming envrionment called VSTA.




VSTA is the acronym for Visual Studio Tools for Applications and is the replacement technology from Microsoft for VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). VSTA is a .NET development environment built into Revit (and other Autodesk applications) and can be used to create both VB.NET and C# based macros. While I called this a "light" programming environment that is not to say this is for beginners as you will need to have some programming skills to take advantage of this feature, maybe Matt can provide an example file that can be useful.






To get started you will need to add this to your installation by using the following steps:


1. Depending on how you installed Revit to begin with (direct download or from the disk) go back to the Installation Screen and choose Install Tools and Utilities (shown below):






2. Make sure to check the Revit VSTA for Architecture 2009 (or Structure/MEP depending on your particular program).






3. Installation will take a few minutes and give you a screen below as it installs the right components:






4. Once it is installed, the first time you start Revit up after that you will get the following notification for a short period of time indicating it is configuring your environment for first time use:








5. Now we are ready to start using, with a project open go to Tools>>Macros








6. Now you will need to make a choice; either run/edit a macro (Macros) or create a new one from scratch (Launch VSTA IDE). When you use the Macros option this is basically a manager for your macros providing two sub-options: Application Level or Document Level.

• Application level macros can be run on all opened Revit projects within the active Revit session (instance).

• Document level macros are stored within your .rvt file and can be loaded within the current active project.

It will be interesting to see how this gets used, if you have a great example let us know.



Happy Revit VSTA'ing...

Autodesk Green Building Studio Aquisition

It looks like the Sustainable design tools from Green Building Studio will soon become part of the autodesk product line of products.

http://pressreleases.autodesk.com/index.php?s=press_releases&item=385%3C%2Ftd%3E

Revit Architecture Sustainable Design Systems

One of the sessions I had hoped to attend at AU but missed was on Sustainable Design Systems. Luckily this session (and many more) are available from the Autodesk University website (a more direct link below):

AB210-2P Sustainable Design Systems Based on Revit® Architecture
Presenter(s): Kenneth Hall
Air Date: 11/28/2007
Air Time: 1:00 PM PST
Length: 1 Hour 29 Minutes 5 Seconds

In addition to this I would also encourage you to read the "Building Performance Analysis Using Revit" (for working with IES) but also applicable to other analysis tools which is available here.