Toreador, en garde!

Ok, so maybe no Toreadors are involved, but we had an interesting support case the other day.  A client with a newly installed copy of Revit 2014 (from the Building Design Suite Premium) was crashing directly to his desktop simply by opening an RFA file, or trying to save an RVT file. Picture John Madden hitting his hands together and saying “BOOM”. No error reports to send to Autodesk, just a one way ticket out of Revit. His journals files did not contain anything either.

Well, as I had the product successfully installed and working on my computer, as usually is the case, there was something different about the two systems, but what? After we tried all possible solutions short of reformatting his hard disc (I was tempted), we contacted Autodesk tech support. And once again they came through with flying colors.

Lance Coffey, the Autodesk tech, wrote me: “I have seen “Constant Guard” (a security program Comcast provides to its customers), cause this issue (Revit crashes when any File dialog is accessed).  If they use Comcast for their ISP, check if they are using this program, and if so have them try disabling or uninstalling it.”

Well, you guessed it, they did have this installed and once it was uninstalled, Revit 2014 worked perfectly. So remember you should always be on guard, but maybe not on Constant Guard. Toreador, en garde….

This is crazy, but call me, maybe?

Back in the “day” I used to refer clients with subscription and other issues to the Autodesk Business Center, or ABC for short. Clients needed to change their Subscription Manager or had forgotten their password. ABC was usually the fastest way to rectify this.

That is until Autodesk discontinued their 800 number for customers. I was unaware of this until a client told me that when they called the number, the message said “No longer in service”. Sadness!

Now what? So I spoke with the reseller’s ABC contact and was told there was STILL a way. When they walked me through how to do this online, it was a rather circuitous route. So let me be your friendly tour guide.

AutoCAD ZOOMWHEEL variable

So if you have ever had to switch between Inventor and AutoCAD, you know that zooming is the exact opposite with the scroll wheel.
In Inventor scrolling AWAY from you zooms OUT while towards you zooms IN.
Of course this is completely logical, yet AutoCAD is the exact opposite.
However, there is a new system variable named ZOOMWHEEL.
Set to Zero (0) AutoCAD behaves as normal.
Set to One (1) and it behaves like Inventor.
Try it. You make like it!

Let Paul try it!

So some of you may have heard of Paul Aubin. He is an author, consultant, frequent speaker at AU, and a pretty nice guy as well! He writes a great blog, and he sadly suffered through a Building Design Suite install from HELLLL!!!!! Read all about it on his blog at http://paulaubin.com/blog/installing-the-building-design-suite/

I just want to pass along some advice having to do with file folder names and lengths, as this seemed to cause Paul several hours if not days of wasted time.  Paul downloaded and unzipped the Ultimate Suite which created a folded called Autodesk_Building_Design_Suite_Ultimate_2013_English_Win_32-64bit. Apparently after all of the other subfolders get created under this, some of them actually are TOO LONG for the Windows OS to use, and the entire install process fails.

The truly fun part Paul had was when he Canceled the install. Not only does it stop the install process at that point, it also UNINSTALLS EVERYTHING that had successfully installed. Seriously? Yah, that is what he wrote. Bang. Head. Here.

Ok, so hopefully Paul’s sacrifice is your gain. Here is his advice:

• Download the archives.
• Run the installer and accept the default location (you can change drives if you like)
• When the actual installer appears, cancel it.
• Browse to the location of the installed folder and rename it to something shorter (like BDS).
• Double-click the Setup.exe file in the now shortened folder.
• Sit back and wait for it to finish.

Ok? Thanks Paul! We owe you one. Next time you’re in Philly, the drinks are on my boss, er make that me.

Disclaimer: I have not attempted the Suite install myself, but seriously, doing what Paul suggested is like chicken soup. It couldn’t hurt, right, and it might actually help!

‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky!

I have been using Revit for a few years now on my Macbook Pro in a virtual environment (Parallels 6) with no issues. (Showcase – well that is a DIFFERENT blog item!). I recently installed the Revit 2013 products and started kicking the tires, so to speak.

Stairs are super fun. That 30 minutes I spend teaching stairs has now expanded to more like 90 minutes. There are a huge number of amazingly wonderful new tools. Then it was time to play with the new Background Graphic Display Options feature. The one thing I like to brag about with my Macbook is that “it just works”, er, except when it doesn’t, which is what happened here.

So, from the Properties palette I set up a “fluffy cloud” image background. We have been missing fluffy clouds ever since Accurender vanished from the products. I found a great image and set it up from here:

And then…..I held my breath and waited for the screen to refresh…and….NOTHING! Just a white background. So, I changed to Sky and yep, same results. Strangely, Gradient did work. So, I checked with my fellow techs here who all have much less cool Lenovos, and WHAT??? It worked on their laptops. It even works on our Dell training stations. So, my sleek, sexy, extra cool Macbook was NOT going to do this? Bummer!

The issue is with virtual machines and graphic card emulation. While the Macbook has this hot little Nvidia card, the virtual machine creates some rinky dink vga driver and no you can’t change that. After exhausting the web, it was time to turn to the experts at Autodesk.  So to keep the 60’s music analogies going here, the Mighty Quinn in tech support there found this bit of info:

“Hardware acceleration is not available in the Parallels 7 environment, and Revit will revert to a DirectX 9 based software graphics mode, which will not render materials, sky, artificial lights, and other features when the Realistic visual style is in effect.

Workaround 1: When you first start Revit and see the Graphics Options – Cannot Use Hardware Acceleration dialog, select the Save Hardware Acceleration Setting option, and then close and restart Revit. Upon restart, DirectX 11 software mode will be used and features will display correctly in Realistic visual style.

Workaround 2: Manually add the following to the [Graphics] section of the Revit.ini file before startup: UseGraphicsHardware=0”

Workaround 1 did not present itself to me, but workaround 2 was pretty easy to achieve:

[Graphics]
TempDimFontSizeInPoints=12
InvertBackground=0
Antialiasing=0
SemiTransparent=1
UseGraphicsHardware=0

I added the last line above to the 2013 Revit.ini file, restarted RAC 2013, and….

As they say these days: “SWEET!!”

Now if this purple haze will just lift……

Revit: Automatically create Catalog files for Families

How come when I want to place a 2D section of a Steel Beam or Column in my project I get the following catalog to choose from:

However, when I want to put a put a Brick or CMU section into my project Revit inserts EVERY brick shape known to mankind and now I have to sort through them in the Type drop down list in the Properties palette:

The reason is there is a Catalog Text file (.txt) with the same name as the Family file (.rfa).

The structure of the file looks as follows:

The first line sets the parameters for the types, followed by a list with these parameters filled in.

These are what appear in the Catalog dialog box when you go to add one of these detail components. But hey, I am SUPER lazy. There is NO way I’m doing this for those brick sections, so I guess I’m stuck, right?

NO!!! Let’s review the lazy person’s way to create this catalog file. I’ll begin by opening the Bricks-Section.rfa file. Now, from the Application pulldown menu (the big “R”), choose Export, then at the bottom of the fly-out menu, Family Types.  In the Export As dialog box, keep the default name Bricks-Section.txt for this file, then pick the Save button.

Opening this file, it will look like the following:

Yah, there was no way I was typing all of THAT stuff out. Ok, let’s test it. With both the RFA and the TXT file for Bricks-Section now in the same folder, I’ll open the Bricks-Section.rfa file using the Annotate tab, Detail panel, Detail Component tool.  Picking the Load Family tool from the Place Detail Component tab, Mode panel, instead of all of the types automatically loading into my project, I now get the Specify Types dialog box, and a list of the types to choose from:

Wow. That was easy. Hey, I think I get to go home early. Don’t tell my boss how quickly I did that!

Revit Architecture Viewer 2012

So, you have just had a request from the Project Manager, or worse, the “Boss”, that they want to open a copy of Revit and look around in the model and maybe print some sheets.  Now, several thoughts pop into your head:

1. Oh my God, these guys are going to screw up the model and delay the project!
2. If they open a copy of Revit, then I lose a usable license for production work

Have I got a solution for you! It is called Revit Architecture Viewer 2012 and is found in the Start menu:

Revit Architecture Viewer 2012 (RAV 2012) installs when you install Revit Architecture (RAC).  It modifies the startup code with a “viewer switch” : “C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Revit Architecture 2012\Program\Revit.exe” /viewer.

RAC starts with the normal splash screen, but when the Recent Files page is displayed, you are presented with the following dialog box:

While elements may be edited in the file, none of the changes may be saved. In addition, RAC 2012 does not pull a network license, thus preserving them for staff that needs editing capabilities.

Memories of the past decade

Monday September 12^th.

10 years ago I had just started a new job after having been a Consultant with my own business for the previous decade plus. I was in the process of settling in when I heard about the plane crashing into the World Trade Center and like you thought it must have been a small twin engine job or something like that.

My job was to move 60 people from a randomly customized AutoCAD 14 to a consistent use of Architectural Desktop 3.3. We then moved to the 2005 and 2007 versions, along with Revit 8.1. From there I landed with Microsol Resources, one of the most amazing resellers I have ever worked with, and trust me, I’ve worked with them all as a consultant. I have watched both AutoCAD Architecture and Revit Architecture mature, while watching the advance of products like Navisworks, Showcase, 3DS Max Design, and so much more. Use of the internet to extend processing power and connectivity continues at a steady pace as well.

In the years ahead, I can only imagine where virtualization will lead us. Clearly we will eventually move to more interactive devices such as tablets, and eventually to working virtually in the model itself. So just imagine where we are today in relationship to 2001, and imagine where we shall be in 2021. Hang on. The fun part of the ride is going to continue….