Importing Excel Sheet Index to Revit Placeholder Sheets with Dynamo & Python

From the andrewking(me) website:

Convert an Excel Sheet Index into Revit Placeholder Sheets using Dynamo and Python.

The Challenge

Architects typically include a combined sheet index for all disciplines at the beginning of a drawing set. While Revit can easily create a list of sheets included in a model (and can also grab sheets from linked models), not all offices use Revit and not every transmission arrives with a model.

Rather than typing incoming sheet information line-by-line into a Revit schedule, Dynamo and Python can help convert Excel data into Revit Placeholder Sheets. Manual entry that could have taken hours (on a large project with hundreds of incoming drawing sheets) can now be completed in seconds.

Exporting Revit Revision Cloud Data to Excel with Dynamo & Python

From the andrewking(me) website:

Extract revision cloud data from Revit using Dynamo and Python.

OOTB Revit Revision Schedule Limitations

Revit can schedule the following revision parameters in a title block family. However, instance parameters (Mark and Comments), sheet numbers, and sheet names are not supported out-of-the-box.

• Revision Sequence
• Revision Number
• Revision Date
• Revision Description
• Issued to
• Issued by

Free Webinars April 7 & 21: FormIt Fridays

From the FormIt 360 website:

FormIt Friday Webinars

Join us once a month for an hour long webinar on all things FormIt 360

April 7, 2017

Welcome to another episode in our FormIt Friday webinar series! It is not just about a single monolithic product these days. For all of us in AEC, we know the name of the game is getting a bunch of apps to work together - much like the conductor of an orchestra. Our special guests for this episode are Bill Allen and John Pierson from EvolveLAB (http://www.evolvebim.com) They will demonstrate how they make beautiful music by passing data between a variety of tools, including FormIt, Dynamo, Revit and even Project Fractal - which is not even released yet!

Register Now

Burohappold Smart Space Analyser – “The Future of Real-Time Master Planning”, Built on Flux.io

From the SmartSpaceAnalyser website:

Data-rich, distance analysis at campus or city scale in real time

Smart Space is all about using innovative technology combined with our experienced strategic guidance to optimise spaces, shape buildings and plan cities for efficiency, comfort and safety.

Developed using the Flux SDK, SmartSpaceAnalyser brings intuitive, flexible and highly visual spatial analysis to the Site Extractor platform in a quick and easy to use interface.

Simply search, select, analyse, iterate, extract… done.

BIM&CO – A Free and Open Cloud-Based Content Platform

From the BIM&CO website:

All BIM objects and construction product data for your digital models.

Architects, Engineering

Engineering offices, BIM managers, universities...Use data and objects of BIM&CO, publish your own objects, collaborate with the community

BIM&CO allows you to use the objects of the platform and publish your own objects in compliance with the best uses of digital modelling.

Case Study: Stantec's use of BIM 360 Team & Collaboration for Revit

From the Autodesk BIM 360 blog:

Video: Stantec finishes mixed-use project faster with BIM collaboration software

22nd March 2017

By Alison Geering-Kline

Stantec is no stranger to the many challenges that come with working on large-scale multi-discipline architecture projects. The firm specializes in everything large–commercial skyscrapers, hospitals, education centers, colleges, universities, city centers, art museums. To overcome the many coordination and communication challenges of these large projects, BIM collaboration software in the cloud is key.

Free CADtoEarth.Revit Version 4.0.35 Released – Uses Forge Platform and is Integrated with A360

From the Autodesk App Store:

About This Version

Version 4.0.35, 3/30/2017 – Using Forge platform, CADtoEarth is integrated with Autodesk A360 cloud service allowing users to better collaborate on projects

Description

CADtoEarth™ for Autodesk® Revit® is a POC of an application establishing a bi-directional connection between Autodesk Revit and Cesium®. It allows users to create personal accounts on the CADtoEarth web application and provides individual control over the visibility of uploaded data.Using Forge platform, CADtoEarth is integrated with Autodesk A360 cloud service allowing users to better collaborate on projects.

Copy Worksets from Files

From the Autodesk App Store:

This tool is designed to copy worksets from file.

Generally Autodesk® Revit® users have to manually create worksets, This tool will enable you to use any file which contains your old worksets to copy the worksets names from it.

From ArchVision, New RPC Office Clutter and AXYZ Ready-Pose People

From the email announcement:

New Office Clutter Now Available in Stash!

We used the new 3D+ RPC Creator to create stunning new office clutter. You can now download, drag & drop, and render office objects like Apple Macbook Pro, Dell Monitor, HP Laserjet Pro, Microsoft Surface Studio, earphones, books, magazines and more directly from Dashboard into Revit (or any other application that supports RPCs)!

To download the office clutter click here and unzip into your c:\RPC directory (or preferred RPC storage location).

Take Me to Stash!

New AXYZ Collection Released

Check out the four new collections of AXYZ's Ready-Pose People, now available in RPC format and one additional file format of your choosing. These new collections will easily add life to your projects!

A free download sample of AXYZ RPC People is available here.

Buy Now

https://archvision.com/

Renaming Families With Dynamo

From the EvolveLAB website:

March 27, 2017 | Bill Allen

I recently was working on a Revit template, and wanted to rename a lot families within the template.  Now I could go through the manual and tedious process of renaming all the families. The other option would be to write a script that would do it for me (and for future projects).

Free Open Source IFC for Revit Versions 18.1, 17.3, and 16.6 Released – With Better IFC4 Support (Update #2)

From the SourceForge website:

Description

This is the .NET code used by the Revit 2015-2017 family of products to support IFC, and the Revit 2012-2014 families of products to support IFC export. The open source version can override the version that comes standard with shipped Revit. Revit 2013-2017 contain both IFC export and IFC export UI overrides, which contain options not available in the regular UI, such as ifcXML and ifcZIP support. The Revit 2014-2017 versions also work for Revit LT 2014-2017, respectively.

General:

• Minor improvements to the Importer class to make it easier for developers to create a custom Importer.
• We now support the IFC4 Addendum 2 schema.  Specific improvements based on that will be listed below.  For this update, you will have to manually add the IFC4_Add2.exp file (included with this package), to the EDM subfolder of your Revit Program folder.  We will automate this in a future update.

BIM Assure Version 1.2 Released

From the Business Wire website:

Invicara Releases Next Version of BIM Assure to Advance Building Information

Business Wire March 28, 2017

ANN ARBOR, Mich.

Invicara, provider of transformative solutions for building information modeling (BIM), today announced the release of BIM Assure 1.2, with new features focused on making BIM data validation and reporting easier and faster. The latest tools help users edit data quickly and share information with people that don’t have access to BIM.

BIM Assure is a collaborative, cloud solution that unlocks BIM data and helps entire project teams collaborate on data quality. BIM Assure’s intelligent rules help users to quickly identify and resolve issues to improve BIM quality and sync the corrections back to the source model. In addition, the easy-to-use Web app provides a common BIM environment that lets architects, engineers, contractors, and owners (AECO) share models and manage data, creating new opportunities to streamline design and construction workflows and improve project delivery.

Free Clockwork for Dynamo Version 1.0.3 Released

From GitHub:

Clockwork for Dynamo

1.0.3

New nodes:

• Document.Default3DView
• Document.ProjectParameters
• Document.ProjectParametersByCategory
• Element.Category
• FamilyType.FamilyName
• Grid.Plane
• List.Chop+ (re-added to package due to a bug in OOTB node List.Chop)
• List.JoinByKeys
• ModelCurve.Type
• Schedule.KeyScheduleParameterName
• SpotElevation.ByFloorPlanAndPoint
• String.CompileRegularExpression
• String.ReplaceIllegalFilenameCharacters
• String.Replace+
• View.Direction
• View.SetDetailLevel
• ViewSheetSet.Views

Free Webinar March 30: New and Improved MagiCloud Version

From the registration website:

New and Improved MagiCloud Version

Thu, Mar 30, 2017 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM PDT

Overview of MagiCloud, a free browsing library for MEP designers with a wide selection of high-quality BIM products, and its functionality. We will go through the library, how to search, select and download BIM objects.

Register here.

The Week that was in Revit Add-ons for March 20-26, 2017

The week of March 20, 2017 was an exceptionally busy one on Revit Add-ons with 26 articles published.

New

From the Autodesk App Store, we posted about the awkwardly-named yet self-descriptive Synchronize same viewport location to all sheets, as well as AutoExcel, the self-proclaimed "fastest Export / Import from Excel", and (another) Sheets Creator.

Roundup – For the Week of March 20-26, 2017, New and Updated Revit Add-ins on the Autodesk App Store (Update #2)

The week of March 20, 2017 saw the release of a few new Revit add-ins on the Autodesk App Store, including the awkwardly-named yet self-descriptive Synchronize same viewport location to all sheets, as well as AutoExcel, the self-proclaimed "fastest Export / Import from Excel", and (another) Sheets Creator.

Several add-ins were also updated, including the Lumion Plugin, which received a relatively significant update.

New

iSync
The most advanced background synchronization software for Autodesk® Revit®. It work with Revit, so you never have to worry about relinquishing or losing anything important again | Trial
☆☆☆☆☆ (0 reviews)
About This Version: Version 1.1, 3/23/2017 – Support Autodesk® Revit® 2015, 2016, and 2017.

Video: Site Extractor Tutorial

From YouTube:

Site Extractor Tutorial

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Here's a link to the product website: https://flux.io/extractor/

Credit

I liked a @YouTube video https://t.co/TxWqsWw2IW Site Extractor Tutorial

— Carl Storms (@theBIMsider) March 25, 2017

Video: Reuse Grashopper Scripts in Revit Via Flux

From YouTube:

Flux Bi-directional Rhino to Revit brep exchange

Sending Revit reference brep geometry to Rhino, running a Grasshopper script to generate a handrail detail, sending this item back to Revit also as a brep geometry via Dynamo.

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Here's a link to the Flux website: https://flux.io/

Video: ClashMEP - Clash Control Center Upgrades Including New Real-Time Clash Counter

From YouTube:

This video shows recent upgrades to the Clash Control Center. This includes adding a clash counter and UI upgrades.

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Here's a link to the ClashMEP product website: http://buildingsp.com/index.php/products/clashmep

Site Extractor from Flux Labs Gets a New Look

From the Flux website:

POWERED BY FLUX.IO

Site Extractor

Geospatial context for your building design in minutes

GET STARTED

Free RevitWebcam Source Code – Display a Live Webcam Image on an Element Face

From GitHub and The Building Coder blog:

RevitWebcam

C# .NET Revit add-in to display a live webcam image on a selected element face using an external event and AVF, the analysis visualisation framework.

The external event polls the webcam for updated images at regular intervals.

Here is RevitWebcam running in Revit 2017:

Author

Jeremy Tammik, The Building Coder, ADN Open, Autodesk Inc.

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There's more information available on GitHub, and on The Building Coder blog.

Free Webinar April 11 & 12, 2017: BIMcollab and Solibri – Optimize Your Issue Management Workflow

From the registration website:

BIMcollab and Solibri: Optimize your issue management workflow

This webinar is offered several times. Select the date and time that works best for you.

Tue, Apr 11, 2017 1:00 AM - 2:00 AM PDT
Wed, Apr 12, 2017 7:00 AM - 8:00 AM PDT

BIMcollab provides the best way to manage issues found in the Solibri Model Checker and communicate them to modelers working with Revit, ARCHICAD, TEKLA, etc to solve. This webinar will describe the optimal workflow as well as explaining some more advanced ways of working.

Register here.

Product Review – AVAIL Content Management System (Version 3.1)

Concept

AVAIL is the content agnostic content management solution from ArchVision that features deep Revit integration.

Installation

I downloaded AVAIL from https://www.getavail.com/Download. The download began immediately with no need to register. The installer download was 52.9 MB in size.

After agreeing to the license terms and conditions, the installation began. Installation took about five minutes.

The AVAIL "Content Browser" that provides in-app support for Revit is a separate download of 5.6 MB. Installation took just a few minutes.

AVAIL installs as a desktop application, and has its own menu item on the Windows Start menu.

New and Improved MagiCloud Release

From the MagiCloud website:

New and Improved MagiCloud Version is here

22 March 2017 – Turku, Finland – Progman has announced that Europe’s largest BIM library, MagiCloud, has been updated to include the full product information already available in MagiCAD. The cloud-based MagiCloud includes more than one million BIM models and technical details from 230 manufacturers, used primarily by mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) designers. The tool is instrumental in developing a BIM strategy for construction projects.

Some of the latest technical features that will benefit end-users include:

• Improved search function in MagiCloud, helping designers find products more quickly
• Ability to search products from 40 market areas
• Easier downloading of the 3D models, without requiring any installations
• Improved German and Chinese localisations
• Bookmarking, enabling users to gain quick access to their search results via a unique URL, and to share them

Free Webinar April 12, 2017: MagiCAD for Revit MEP – Common / General Revit Productivity Tools

From the registration website:

MagiCAD for Revit MEP: Common / General Revit Productivity Tools

Wed, Apr 12, 2017 1:30 AM - 2:00 AM PDT

Overview of running index, legend tool, cleanup & deliver, find & replace, sheet manager and the tag tool

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Register here.

Video: Creating a Dynamo User Interface (UI) with XAML and C#

From YouTube:

Introduction on how to build a user interface for Dynamo. Get more of your team using your scripts.

This video shows a simple example of how to use the XAML tools and build the code to import into Dynamo for use with the player.

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The original post may be found on the EvolveLAB website.

Dynamo is brought to you by Autodesk. Dynamo for Revit is free.

This add-in is compatible with Revit 2017, 2016, and 2015.

There's more information available on the Dynamo website.

Exporting Schedules to Excel with Dynamo

From the BIM and Others blog:

Dynamo, Revit, Excel, UI...what a wonderful day!

Introduction

Today I'll show you two examples of how to use Dynamo to export existing Revit schedules and how to compose a custom schedule on the fly, to be exported to Excel.

Both of them with a very nice graphical user interface thanks to Data-Shapes (https://data-shapes.net/) package.

Export Schedules

Let's start from the easier. The idea behind this script is to export a list of existing schedules to an Excel file, creating for each schedule a separate tab.
To be able to complete this script you'll need two packages:

• Data-Shapes for the graphical interfaces
• BimorphNodes to extract schedules data

Randomized Panel Facades in Revit with Dynamo

From the EvolveLAB website:

Randomized Panel Facades in Revit with Dynamo

We’ve all seen them and admired their awesomeness. Yes, I am talking about random panelized facades. A quick Google search yields some awesome results.

But the question is, how do I make something like this in Revit? Like really in Revit, not a mass, none of that stuff.

Synchronize Same Viewport Location to All Sheets

From the Autodesk App Store:

This tool is designed to synchronize the viewport location in the same location in all selected sheets.

This will reduce the time used to manually adjust the viewports inside sheets especially in large project.

Instead of moving it manually, location will be adjusted automatically.

Free Webinar March 23, 28, & 30, 2017: AVAIL for Revit

From the announcement:

AVAIL for Revit Webinar

Want to know more about AVAIL for Revit? Join us as we walk through the features of AVAIL and how they can make work in Revit faster and easier!

Choose one of three webinar times:

• Thursday 3/23 1:00pm ET
• Tuesday 3/28  4:00 ET 
• Thursday 3/30 11:00 ET

Hurry! Webinar spaces are limited to 25 per session!

RTV Xporter Pro Update Released – Desktop App Now Supports Collaboration for Revit (C4R)

From RTV Tools eNewsletter:

We have been busy working hard to integrate Collaborate for Revit (C4R) with our RTV Xporter PRO App for Revit. It is our pleasure that we are now able to provide C4R access via the desktop application (only). At this time our Remote Processing (Server) doesn't support C4R but we are working hard to get this functionality added as soon as possible.

The updates are now availible for download from our website and can be found here:

• RTV Xporter Pro 2016 (Build 709) http://www.rtvtools.com/downloads/2016_RTVXporterPro_64B.zip ;and
• RTV Xporter Pro 2017 (Build 740) http://www.rtvtools.com/downloads/2017_RTVXporterPro_64B.zip

 The following is a list of new features, updates and fixes included in the above software updates.

Video: Dynamo and Advance Steel Tutorial

From the BIM and Beam blog:

Dynamo and Advance Steel Tutorial

Tomislav Golubovic March 6, 2017

Learn how to realize the power of Dynamo for your steel frames in this Dynamo Advance Steel tutorial

Last year we released the new Dynamo Extension for Advance Steel that allows you to drive the geometry and behavior of Advance Steel elements from Dynamo. In this Dynamo Advance Steel tutorial I show users how to make a basic portal frame structure within Dynamo and have Advance Steel model the structure from the script. When the script changes, then the model changes. A bonus is that, when you add a connection to any of the joints, they will adapt if you resize the structure from the nodes inside Dynamo. Learn more by watching the tutorial:



If you haven’t yet downloaded the new Dynamo Extension for Advance Steel, read this post to learn how.

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There's more information available on the BIM and Beam blog.

Webinar Video: Visualization – Making Revit NOT Look Like Revit

From the EvolveLAB website:

Want to use Revit for visualization? Bad idea, right? Maybe not. There are a whole host of visualization features that augment the beauty of the Revit rendering and visualization capability. Check out this video as we show you how to make your Revit visualization look amazing.

Free Webinar March 30, 2017: What's New in Advance Steel 2018

From the Autodesk website:

What’s New: Connecting Design and Detailing for Structures

Register for the March 30 Webcast

Join Autodesk and Martin & Martin as they reveal the latest features of Revit and Advance Steel 2018 for structures. During this webcast, you will learn:

• How the latest features in Autodesk Advance Steel 2018 will help enhance your BIM-enabled structural detailing process
• The benefits of a connected workflow between Revit and Advance Steel, and a preview of their improved interoperability
• Understand how those benefits play out in a real-world example with Martin/ Martin
• We promise not to use Power Point! Join this 30-minute session to understand how the new features can benefit your projects and hear best practices from a company implementing the latest technology.

Advance Steel 2018 and Steel Connections for Revit Preview

From Autodesk's BIM and Beam blog:

Autodesk Previews Enhancements for Advance Steel and Steel Connections for Revit at NASCC 2017

Udo Haedicke March 21, 2017

Autodesk Revit and Advance Steel better connect structural design and fabrication

Since acquiring Advance Steel in 2013, Autodesk continues to work towards better support for BIM-centric workflows for structural steel design and detailing. For instance, we have been working to strengthen the interoperability between Autodesk Revit design software and Autodesk Advance Steel software. In advance of tomorrow’s opening day of the NASCC conference, we’re happy to announce that the forthcoming Advance Steel 2018 release next month will now offer seamless consumption of LOD 350* Revit models.

Sheets Creator

From the Autodesk App Store:

Have you ever had the task of manually creating sheets in Autodesk® Revit® and you have been frustrated by the time it takes to create sheet by sheet? Or having made a typing mistake while doing so and you haven't realized that until you have already submitted the drawings? If that is the case then this app is for you!

With Sheets Creator, you will be able to create sheets in seconds by simply selecting an Excel file with the list of Names and Numbers for the sheets. The best thing is that you can't make mistakes while typing!

AutoExcel – "The Fastest Export/Import to/from Excel"

From the Autodesk App Store:

AutoExcel - The fastest Export / Import from Excel

With Auto Excel, you will be able to quickly export and re-import any Autodesk® Revit® project schedule to Microsoft® Excel®. The best batch tool to modify lots of parameters at once.

1. Open any project schedule and click "export"
2. Modify the Excel generated file
3. Go back to the same project schedule and click on "import"