Revit Learning Club Content Clinic to be Held at BSA

Revit Learning Club Content Clinic

Update: The clinic at BSA has been cancelled due to not enough people registering.

Learn and practice in-depth aspects of content creation in Revit. Parametric solids, Family Types, references, constraints, Type Catalogs, Materials, and embedded Families will be covered.

Optionally, bring a laptop with the latest version of Revit installed and a mouse if you would like to practice the subjects covered.

The instructor, Eric Boehlke (truevis.com), has made myriad Revit Families professionally in his consulting business. See this album to view some of them.


Sunday, May 20, 2012, 10:30am to 2:30pm. Price: $60/$45 BSA members. At BSA Space, 290 Congress Street, Boston, Massachusetts.

Parking meters are free on Sundays in Boston.

The course is limited to the first 20 applicants and advance registration is required. Enroll by noon on May 18. Online registration

It's on the Boston Society of Architects calendar at http://www.architects.org//calendar

How to Get a Color From Your Screen into a Revit Material

Someone has shared a very nice color picker utility called Colorette, which was written in AutoHotKey. The app description is at http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic69559.html and the EXE itself is http://www.autohotkey.net/~sumon/apps/colorette/Colorette.exe .

For an example of how to use Colorette with Revit, save the EXE to your Desktop and run it. Find a web page with the color you want to find, like http://www.jameshardie.com/homeowner/colorplus-palette.shtml , hover your mouse over the color on the screen and press Space on your keyboard. A color dialog will appear with the RGB values.

In Revit, find a similar material to what you want and copy it or edit an existing material. In the appearance settings, edit the Color of the material.

Type in the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) values that Colorette has found. 

Check "Use Render Appearance for Shading" in the Graphics tab. 

When you look at your material, it will have the color that you had selected.

Make Siding to Match the Manufacturer's  Published Colors

If you want to change a "wood" siding material to that of your picked color, duplicate the "Siding - Clapboard" material (which is in the Residential template) with your new name.

Change the material's image to "Thermal_Moisture.Roofing_Siding Panels.Wood.Horizontal.White.png".

Move the "Image Fade" down to around 15.

Get your color with Colorette.

Edit the color's RGB values. The color will mix in with the siding image to make the new material appearance.

 A rendering of the result:

DWG Software

Just want to view a DWG quickly? I have found nothing better than Free DWG Viewer from Brava.


If you need editing and measuring, etc. DraftSight is free CAD software from Dassault. It requires registration, but it's rather heavy-duty and the price is pretty good.

Autodesk has some Free DWG viewing software. Last time I tried their TrueView app, I found it to be just too big to be convenient for a quick viewer because it seems to be full AutoCAD with all of the editing tools turned off. It would surely be the most accurate, though, because it's from the mother ship. Design Review is also said to work to view DWGs but this is what you see if TrueView is not installed:

Great Freeware for Revit Work

Here is some software that I like to install on any computer I am using:

copy-unc-path adds an item to the right-click menu of any file in Explorer that copies the text path to the clipboard. This is very useful in Revit when you have to enter a filename (DWG import, etc.) and saves lots of clicking up and down folders.

CCleaner has a startup configurator and is nice for cleaning the recycle bin, the registry, and uninstalling programs among other functions.

Clipboard Help+Spell is a text-based clipboard utility that keeps an accessible list of all of the things that you copy to the Windows clipboard. (Not to be confused with Revit's clipboard which is separate and has no history). It also has spell check and change case functions.

On-line Alarm Clock reminds you when to wake up or leave. I also use it to remind me when to move my car in Boston when it's at a meter. Just don't leave it unattended because it has a very annoying alarm sound.

Time Card Calculator & Timesheet Manager a great on-line calculator for converting work start and stop times to decimal hours.

Total Commander a super powerful alternative to Windows Explorer. Has a built-in FTP client, too. Search *.00??.r?? to find your Revit backups. (Not free per se but has just one nag screen.)

Air Duct Calculator -- who needs a cardboard ductulator?

ninite.com lets one install many different apps all at once. Great for setting up a new computer quickly. FastStone Image Viewer is a great app there for viewing and light editing of your images. Chrome, VLC, Winamp, CutePDF are all splendid apps.

Greenshot -- utility for screen captures. Grabbing a rectangular area of one's screen and putting the image in an email is an effective way of communication. (I did recommend Gadwin PrintScreen , but their newer versions don't work as well as their older versions.)

CleanMem is good for if you are running out of RAM when working with large RVTs. It seems to help performance. It can make the difference between painfully slow performance and being able to work if your RAM is limited.

AutoHotkey is a free utility for Windows. With it, you can automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. Repetitive Revit tasks may also be automated.

Revit 101 for Thursday, October 27, 2011

This Thursday, 6pm, at Microsoft Waltham, we'll cover:

• The basics of Revit Families
• Reference planes
• Constraints
• Parameters
• Kinds of solids
• Sketches
• Flexing the model
• Voids
• Making perspective views
• Navigating perspective views
• Rendering

Download http://www.truevis.com/Files/Mixed_Use_from_class_10-12.zip if you'd like to use my model from the previous week. 

Drop-ins remain welcome ($25) if you are at all familiar with Revit's interface. This will be the last class.

Hiatus

We have been meeting every Monday since the spring of 2010 with an original Revit lesson. I am thinking of taking a hiatus. Let's see in a month or so if there is enough demand to start up again.

Please email me if you'd be in for more Revit Learning Club starting in October or November.

For Monday, September 12, 2011 - The Family Editor

Let's look at Revit's Family editor. What do all of those tools do? What are some of the issues that one needs to know to make content in Revit?

Some subjects to cover:

• Different kinds of Family Templates
• Subcategories
• The Reference Plane tool 
• The Reference Line tool 
• The Void tool
• The Extrusion, Blend, Revolve, Sweep, Swept Blend tools
• Profiles
• The Load into Project tool 
• Parameters
• Flexing the model
• The Control tool 
• The Model Text tool 
• Etc.

For further study, see The Families Guide -- "A guide that contains conceptual explanations, hands-on tutorials, and reference information to help you understand how to work with Revit Architecture families." http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=13376394

This will also be the last meeting of our 8-week session. Revit Learning Club may go on hiatus after September 12th.