Revit File Naming Tips & Tricks

July 7, 2017 by Leave a comment

In the development of Families, the choice of Object Styles, Graphics, and Identity Data usually receive careful attention, but the file name may be neglected. The inevitable result is eye/brain strain that may lead to slower read times, which slows production time,which leads to lower profits. Now we have your attention. After reading this post you will hopefully realize the need to implement well-defined, easy-to-read Family naming conventions to keep your projects running smoothly.

Keep it simple and spell it out

File names should be kept as short as possible as long as they convey their content. Avoid using dates, numbers and special codes. Instead, use simple abbreviation to decrease the numbers of letters in the words. The Door Families in the image below uses commonly understood architectural abbreviations used for naming the materials for door frames. “HM” is the abbreviation for Hollow Metal. A list of some common architectural abbreviations may be found here.

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Break it up to stack it up

Notice how the names in the sample above have the ability to stack up according to Revit Category then by the type of door (swing, sliding, overhead or rotating) with the number of panels and finally the material followed by the type of the frame. This type of hierarchy is easy to memorize as it is simple and literally spelled out to the user.

Note: It is acceptable – and may be useful – but not necessary to include the Family Category in the name, unless it is in one of the following Browser Categories: 

All Annotation (Tag, Title Block, etc.) fall under the same folder in the Project Browser.

Curtain Panels as they may be “converted” to Doors or Windows in the Family Editor.

Profiles as their Profile Usage may be “converted” in the Family Editor.

The next example uses Specialty Equipment abbreviation prefixes as it encompasses the largest selection of building products on any given project and often contains the largest number of Families located in the Project Browser. The first part of the name is based on AIA sheet order which may be found here. Next is the type of equipment, followed by the manufacturer and model number. By using simple organizational logic the eye is quickly directed to very specific names.

Note: The system used below uses CamelCase to spell out the name of the manufacturer. Feel free to use this on any of the conventions you may create as it is a real space saver.

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It is OK to use spaces

Unless you are using an operating system that does not support spaces, there is no reason you can’t use them! Reasons to not use spaces would be if you were pipelining Families or adding a Family to a URL for direct download as opposed to adding it to a zipped file. The bottom line is that Windows and Revit support spaces for Family names and that using spaces is easier on the eyes.

Final Checklist

  1. Keep names as short as possible so long as they convey their content.
  2. Use natural language instead of special codes like the MasterFormat.
  3. Use headline style, also known as title casing.
  4. Do not use Categories for naming unless it is absolutely necessary.
  5. Be creative when setting up your system based on stackability and users needs.
  6. Use hyphens (-) and or CamelCasing to create groups for formatting

 

The mission of Family and Detail Warehouse is to maintain the world’s best, non-manufacturer specific library of standard Revit Families and Details… so you don’t have to.

 

Filed under General Tips & Tricks, Products, Revit, Tips, Tricks & Tutorials

Family and Detail Warehouse (F+DW)

June 5, 2017 by Leave a comment

When we launched Detail Warehouse in late 2015 our goal was to provide an extensive collection of native-built Revit details perfect for starting or bolstering your own internal library. The library boasts over 27,500 door, foundation, roof and window details across 50 sub-categories. Also included in the collection are nearly 1000 ready-to-use Revit Components which have been very popular.

The popularity of the components prompted us to continue to add additional Revit Families throughout 2016 including wood screws and sleeve anchors, concrete anchors and a comprehensive collection of AISC Steel Shapes improving over the OOTB (out of the box) content that ships with Revit.

We’re expanding the overall mission of Detail Warehouse to be the preeminent stock library of native-built non-manufacturer-specific Revit families, components and details. As such we’re changing the name to Family and Detail Warehouse (F+DW). When we think of how many times the same families are modeled over and over and over around the world it becomes clear that a great stock library that’s growing and improving would be a great service to the industry. With a Family and Detail Warehouse subscription you get access to just that, a collection of the most popular native-built families and details, ready-to-use or edit to supplement your needs.

Casework

The first major category we’ve tackled is Casework. Included in your F+DW subscription are dozens of casework families driven by thousands of Types providing you with the most extensive commercial collection of casework available. The casework library alone will save your team hundreds of hours should you opt to produce them yourself. We’ve done the heavy lifting for you! We’re not stopping there. An extensive collection of Doors is in production. We’d love to hear what you think would be helpful.

AVAIL

As you may already know the F+DW library is managed and delivered through our sister company platform AVAIL. AVAIL is an enterprise content & workflow management platform designed to help AECO firms organize, manage and deliver content within their organization. You can learn more about AVAIL at getavail.com.

F+DW subscribers can now take advantage of new advanced workflow features in AVAIL. With an AVAIL license you can now control distribution of F+DW “Channels” of content across your organization, control download access, and allow users to request Families by “Flagging” them which notifies admins of the request. The F+DW library of content comes pre-tagged within AVAIL making it easy to find the content you need quickly.

We hope you’ll find the expanded mission of the Family and Detail Warehouse and the AVAIL content & workflow management platform a welcomed addition to the industry and your firms ongoing content strategy.

Filed under Announcements, Products, Revit

Publish your own 3D+ RPCs!

March 15, 2017 by 2 Comments

Quite a while in the making, we’ve launched a new RPC Creator service that supports the creation of what we refer to as 3D+ RPCs. A 3D+ RPC means the RPC contains both texture and underlying geometry data. You’ve been experiencing 3D+ RPCs in the form of the RPC Automobiles we’ve been publishing for many years. More recently we began partnering with companies like AXYZ Design to publish their incredible people models as 3D+ RPCs. This new RPC Creator service is still in beta and can be found at labs.archvision.com.

Now you can convert your own geometric models into RPCs ready to place in your favorite modeling/visualization app such as Revit!

In order to make your own 3D+ RPCs using the new service you need to supply 3 essential pieces of information 1) geometry in the .obj format, 2) a master texture as a .jpg or .png, and 3) a 124 x 98 pixel preview image. That’s all you need. Upload each to the service and you’re handed back an RPC file in less than a minute.

Why?

In the early days of ArchVision we were in the visualization services business. One of the lessons I learned was that if you’re going for realism, the best visualizations were the ones with an inordinate amount of “detail”. For interior visualizations it was a very “inward” challenge in providing all the “stuff” other than the building itself that were needed to make the scene come alive and look “real”. For exterior scenes it was the opposite; you’d model the hell out of your building but when it came to visualizing it creating the “rest of the world” around it became a headache. Enter RPCs. RPC People were a great addition to those interiors. RPC Trees were great for creating a boundary for that exterior world (or hiding mediocre architecture 🙂 ) and RPC Automobiles helped fill those parking lots.

RPCs have some unique characteristics that have made them a popular way to add entourage and other “stuff” to your designs and improving your visualizations.

1) Convenient – with an RPC you never get a “missing texture” warning. All of the data required to render are included in the .rpc file.

2) Fast – RPCs can be optimized to carry just the right amount of geometry and texture data to make your visualizations standout without bogging down your model. In some implementation such as 3dsMax, textures contained within RPCs dynamically scale themselves when loaded which optimizes the memory footprint required to load those RPCs (ie. you can efficiently stuff more into your scene)

3) Temporal – Context matters but has always been difficult in content creation. With the new 3D+ RPC Creator service you can designate separate geometry (referred to as the “Icon”) which is placed in the model and “swapped” out at render time with the full Mesh contained in the RPC. Internally we refer to these as the “Preview Mesh” and the “Render Mesh”. This dynamic swapping of data helps optimize what you see and when you see it and challenges the “one model suits all needs” mindset of content creation. This can be especially important in workflows like Revit > Visualization where the underlying model is important for one purpose (eg. documentation) but not well suited for another (eg. visualization)

4) Versatile – RPCs are supported by the world’s leading modeling and visualization platforms: Revit, 3dsMax, Autocad, Civil3D, SketchUp, FormZ, Modo, Rhino, Photoshop and more. Publish your content as an RPC and it’s ready-to-use on any of those platforms.

We look forward to hearing your feedback and seeing your results. You can even share your RPCs with the rest of the community in Stash!

Randall

Filed under Announcements, Innovations + Observations, Products

Meet Jan Kokol of IMAGO Design

January 23, 2017 by Leave a comment

user-spotlight_jan2017_jan_kokolJan Kokol, Ph.D., is leading his design and visualization company IMAGO Design and working as a design consultant for major design firms. In this collection of renderings from Kokol, the 3D images were modeled in Rhinoceros, then ArchVision RPCs were placed and rendered in 3ds Max with V-Ray. Post production was handled in Photoshop.

Though the software is powerful, Kokol says his biggest asset is sheer passion for his projects and continuing to learn new skills.

“I would say that it is important to love what you do,” said the Slovenia-born, Austria-based designer. “Always be very critical with your own work and do not hesitate to put in an extra amount of work in your project, if you believe it is going to look better.”

ovg_foyer1

Designed by Jan Kokol, here is a lobby space for OVG Real Estate on the M1 Berlin project.

Kokol encourages others to invest in learning and improving in technical knowledge, particularly in the 3D community where “there is so much technical knowledge shared.”

IMAGO Design is a computer graphics and design production studio specializing in architectural design, product development, visualizations, web design, illustrations and interactive environments. These are ideal settings for ArchVision RPC entourage to shine, and Kokol has done just that.

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Designed by Jan Kokol, here is the café view for OVG Real Estate on the M1 Berlin project.

RPCs translate well in virtual reality scenes like the ones that Kokol created below. The VR movies were done with V-Ray and 3ds Max, too, and then rendered as 360 degree spherical images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9et220L568

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C570Y8V-TE&t=13s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CQvyedvwQs&t=5s

Kokol studied Architecture at the Technical University Graz, the Faculdade de Arquitectura Lisboa, the Chiba-Dai University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, GSD. Prior to starting his own company, Kokol was working for diverse international architecture firms such as Günther Domenig, Miralles Tagliabue, Opersis/Zaha Hadid and UNStudio.

Kokol can be reached at imagodesign.at or office@imagodesign.at.

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Want to see your firm featured? Share your project with us. Contact us at marketing@archvision.com.

Filed under User Spotlight

2016 in Review – 2017 Preview

December 19, 2016 by Leave a comment

I try to spend some time at the end of each year reflecting on what we’ve accomplished but more importantly thinking about what we should be working on moving forward. 2016 was an eventful year for ArchVision. We celebrated our 25th year in business in August. No small feat as those of you that run your own businesses can attest. It was probably equal doses of foresight, naivety, stubbornness and love of the industry that carried us this far.

If you followed ArchVision over the years you probably witnessed us going through numerous transition periods with our products. 2015 and ’16 were years where you may not have perceived a lot of activity with our existing products but behind the scenes it was just the opposite. We introduced a new product in September called AVAIL, a new approach to enterprise content management that is sweeping across the AEC industry. Released commercially in late August, AVAIL has been in development for more than 3 years and has it’s origins in the ArchVision Dashboard product. In late 2015 we introduced a new content product called Detail Warehouse that is destined to change the way the AEC industry thinks about BIM content. Throughout the past year we augmented the RPC subscription content collection with hundreds of new RPC Automobiles and we have been laying some groundwork to dramatically increase the volume, quality and variety of RPC formatted content, ready to drag & drop into your next project.

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I’m not sure if AVAIL is a result of that foresight or naivety I mentioned but we seem to have struck a chord. Thanks to everyone who helped during the beta period as we couldn’t have done it without you. AVAIL is solving what we now refer to as that 40 year old Windows file folder problem we’ve all become numb to. If you haven’t seen AVAIL in action check out the AVAIL YouTube channel. There are a couple of overview videos for managing visualization assets or specifically how AVAIL can be used to manage Revit content. You can try AVAIL for yourself (I suggest watching the video(s) first so you have an idea of what it is designed to do) by visiting getavail.com and downloading a fully functioning install. The only limit is how many Channels you can create and how much content you can index. It’s designed to let you get your feet wet with your own content. AVAIL comes alive once you see and start organizing your own assets.

detail_warehouse_horiz_cropped

Detail Warehouse is the world’s largest commercial repository of native-built Revit drafting views encompassing 50 sub-categories of door, roof, window and foundation details. Designed to be a starting point for building your own internal detail library, what you currently see in Detail Warehouse is just the beginning. In 2016 we continued to augment the subscription with additional detail components such as Wood Screws and Sleeve Anchors as well as new AISC Steel Shapes. 2017 promises to bring new categories of not only details but oft-used families and components. We’re also working to more tightly integrate the delivery and management of Detail Warehouse with AVAIL so watch for updates early in 2017.

rpc_grey

Last but certainly not least is the RPC platform. We introduced a new partnership with AXYZ Design for photorealistic people content delivered as 3D+ RPCs. If you haven’t previewed and sampled these collections you owe it to yourself to take a look as they’re a spectacular way to liven up your renderings. In the past couple of months we were also pleased to announce the addition of 3 new rendering and visualization applications to the RPC family. It has been the year-of-Revit as Enscape, Revizto and V-Ray for Revit all have released RPC support in their latest releases.

While we’re continuing to augment and deliver the world’s most comprehensive collection of architectural entourage we’ve also been busy laying the groundwork for some exciting new ways you’ll be able to leverage the RPC platform. The current RPC Creator tool in Dashboard lets you convert any 2D TIFF or PNG image into an RPC, ready to use in your preferred modeling and and visualization applications. Get ready, we’re about to open up the ability to create your own 3D+ RPCs! We’re working to broaden your ability to create your own RPCs from existing models. Without getting into too much detail you’ll be able to convert most any 3d model into an RPC.

As an example consider the airplane in the image below. It started as a SketchUp model on 3D Warehouse, textures were “baked” in 3dsMax, exported along with the geometry and converted to RPC. The resulting RPC was then placed in Revit and rendered using Enscape. All within minutes! We’ll be launching the new RPC Creator capability as a web service accessible at labs.archvision.com soon so watch your inbox for details.

airplane

Thanks to everyone for your continued support. We couldn’t work on such fun projects without you! Looking forward to helping each of you in 2017.

Randall

Filed under Innovations + Observations Tagged with , , , , , , ,

File Systems, Revit & Folder Hell

January 20, 2016 by 2 Comments

No to File Folders

It seems everyone is looking for a way to manage their Revit content. It’s just the latest reminder that File Folders suck.  I doubt I’m the first person to so emphatically call it out 🙂 Stated more eloquently, the Windows File System doesn’t do a very good job of helping to organize content or make it easy to find.

 

According to Wikipedia…

In computing, a file system (or filesystem) is used to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, information placed in a storage area would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of information stops and the next begins. By separating the data into individual pieces, and giving each piece a name, the information is easily separated and identified. Taking its name from the way paper-based information systems are named, each group of data is called a “file“. The structure and logic rules used to manage the groups of information and their names is called a “file system”.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the past few months.  As many of you know, ArchVision has been working on a content management solution we call AVAIL.  It takes me a while for things to gel and be able to clearly articulate things but it finally dawned on me that what we’ve been trying to conquer are the inherent limitations of file systems.  Anybody working on a “content management” solution is taking some approach to overcoming the limitations of those file systems.  Despite a lot of energy expelled to solve this problem, we’ve remained in Folder Hell for the better part of 40 plus years!

Many providers of content management solutions take on both storage and retrieval. Their solutions require you to stuff your content into a new database, move it around your network into some new abstracted file folder system or as of late, ask you to store it “in the cloud”.  The team at ArchVision is taking a different approach.

I’ll claim that the Windows File System is a dandy storage solution, it just sucks when you have to find something!  And you weren’t crazy when you put files where you put them.  It just seems that way when you come back months later looking for them. You wouldn’t have put them where you put them if it didn’t make sense at the time. Have solice.  You haven’t lost your mind, the context changed.  In a previous blog post “Local vs Cloud – A Limited Argument” I suggested that separating the tasks of storage from retrieval was one way of beginning to isolate the real problem.  With AVAIL we’ve done just that.  AVAIL “virtualizes” the files on your network freeing you to retrieve files without regard to how or where they are stored.  Once those files have been “freed” you then become freed to think about organizing and accessing them in new ways.

I mentioned in another post (Context Matters) that after interviewing dozens of customers we kept hearing a common practice of digging back into old project files to get content.  The content you’re looking for is more likely to be referenced and permanently wired in your brain in the context of that project than it is with some abstract “standards” library system.  That’s the challenge with retrieving content.  There’s always some spark or memory that is prominent in your mind when you begin thinking about or looking for a file.  When you’re forced to map what you’re thinking into that standards library it’s enough to make your head hurt.  Context does matter and a good content management solution should recognize that.

AVAIL lets you present content in any number of different contexts.  The files stay in one place on your network but can be presented in any number of ways designed to match the context be it some well known standard, a project name or number, or some other logical grouping(s) that make sense to you and your team.

I’m not sure there’s ever going to be a perfect solution.  It is complicated.  AVAIL is a big swing at the problem. Register for updates here – AVAIL.

DW_AVAIL_Panoply

 

Filed under Uncategorized

Local vs Cloud – A Limited Argument

November 10, 2015 by 1 Comment

Local_vs_CloudI’ll claim that when you’re talking about content management “local vs cloud” is a limited argument. In a broad sense it’s analogous to saying “now that we have cars you don’t need to walk”. If you’re in the business of selling cars (or cloud services) that argument might make sense. For most of course, reality dictates that you need to manage content across “all” environments. Sometimes the cloud makes sense but, for the foreseeable future, you will also have content on your local network. Even the most popular cloud storage solutions like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, you name it, cache a copy of the content locally.

Valid arguments for storing content in the cloud include 1) a need for external teams to have access to content, 2) consolidating content in one location, 3) making content accessible via the Internet, 4) “outsourcing” IT/storage.

For most people local versus cloud is largely a storage decision. If you have teams needing to access that content in the field there is indeed some good arguments for cloud storage but if most of the content is accessed at the desktop the cloud doesn’t solve many of the real content management problems those users encounter daily.

Another way to think about the challenge is to think in terms of Storage and Retrieval. I’ll make another claim… with regards to content management, storage isn’t the real problem, it’s largely a retrieval problem and going to the cloud does nothing to solve it. The graphic above was used in a class we presented at RTC Europe in Budapest a couple of weeks ago. It illustrates the challenge not only of your own content being stored locally and in the cloud but of trying to manage cloud-based content from 3rd parties that is being downloaded and stored in the your local environment.

At ArchVision we’re working on some unique solutions to the retrieval problem. We have a new content management platform named AVAIL that is attacking content retrieval in new ways and tackling the reality of managing content in a “blended” environment. I’ve blogged about how important we think context is to accessing content and how AVAIL is addressing some of those problems. If you’d like to keep track of our progress you can continue to follow this blog but you may also want to sign up for AVAIL notifications at avail.archvision.com. If you are planning to be at AU in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks be sure to stop by our booth #1213 for a sneak peek.

Filed under Innovations + Observations, Products, Revit Tagged with ,

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