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Thursday, June 16, 2011

JOINT OWNERSHIP

I am going to a cocktail party tonight, thanks to an invitation from a nice young lady called Mina.



She gave a CPD at GAj not long ago on behalf of Construction Specialties, a company who make clever stuff out of aluminium & flexible plastics ... including movement joints.  As usual I asked my question about Revit content.  Do they know what it is ?  Are they interested in making it available ?



So the next weekend I prepared a little session for the Revit Lunch which demonstrated how to make a movement joint family and then broadened out into a discussion of keynoting and specifications.  It's floor based and you can either physically cut through the whole slab or keep it in the finishes zone.  There is a little extrusion that shows on the surface with a material parameter.


The details of the extrusions are detail components which only show up when you cut a section view.  Plus you can set them to only show at fine scale.  This helps with memory handling & regeneration times.  You don't really want to see that level of detail at 1 in 50 for example.  In the end I set the families to have 3 levels of complexity: Coarse Scale, Medium Scale & Fine Scale.

So hello Experts, let's start collaborating !  Like many companies in the field, CS make CAD downloads available, but I am yet to find an expansion joint manufacturer that offers Revit families, which is a shame. 



Don't you realise that a Revit family has all this intelligence built in, like the name of the manufacturer, product code, link to their website, specifications code (CSI or NBS depending on how american or british you wish to be).  Talk about a competitive edge ...  time for someone to go out and grab it.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

Two images here: one compiled a couple of years ago before the project went on site.  Mental Ray renderings directly from Revit. 


The second I put together today from recently taken site photos.  Goes to show how accurate a picture we can give a client these days of the building they are going to get.

  

Acknowledgements to Ammar Berou (now with Atkins) for work done on the Revit model, to Michael Dawson for driving the project through to completion, and to Sandro for the excellent photos.

WIKI LUNCH

So the Revit Lunch Wiki is up and running.  Hoping for some contributions soon,

For the record the straw which led this camel to the water (what ?) was a video that I watched by Ken Young of HOK describing their use of Social Media,

HOK video at KA connect

One day I'll learn how to embed this video properly in my web page.

While I'm here might as well comment that I posted more historical stuff on my Chose to Sing the Blues site.  Relates to my time in Zimbabwe and especially work I did in the education sector, both as a Curriculum Developer and later as an Architect.  A lot of water under that bridge ... and while we're on that subject

here's a bunch of Zimbabweans moulding bricks.  I took this photo about 25 years ago when the future was looking rosy there and my youngest son was not yet born.