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The Buildings That Could "Fly"​ or Digital Construction

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Photo Credit: xdubai.com I have not been blogging for quite some time now and LinkedIn seems to be the right platform to get started again after having a 3-year pause on my personal BIM blog at BIMSpot.blogspot.com.  I would like to discuss the collective mindset that we need to change in order to be able to build better and more efficiently. Nowadays, implementation and utilization of technology in construction grow hourly. However, the way we use to build, or at least the building mindset remains unchanged. Are we not very serious about the accuracy and consistency of the information that we produce in order to build? Are we reluctant to follow the exact (information) drawings and specifications, etc, when we are on site, in the field to execute the work? What happens as a result; we say something on paper, but we build something else on the ground. Now, what if the buildings that we build were meant to fly, just like the aeroplanes that carry millions of people e
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Does this mean we will start hearing about Revit 2016?

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Check out @jasonboehning's Tweet: https://twitter.com/jasonboehning/status/558481424500551680
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Just a quick tip. All of us who deal with quantification in Revit must know that Revit is looking at slabs'/floors' perimeter in two ways, the external perimeter and the total perimeter including the perimeters of cut outs. See the illustrations below and compare the properties:
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Dynamo: possibilities for construction modeling

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Recently one of my connections from Case suggested to get my head around Dynamo. I gotta tell you - IT IS AN UNPACKED POWER FOR BIM. And when I say BIM I don't mean conceptual models for architects controlled and manipulated using Dynamo. I agree that initially it was intended to control stuff in Conceptual massing environment, however lot of people found better use of the possibilities that it gives to automate some tasks and do batch executions of tedious tasks in Revit. Honestly, before coming across Dynamo I was constantly thinking that Autodesk should do something to enable something like that for advanced users and those who usually expect more. Those who are specialists in their field don't necessarily need to be advanced programmers to program and execute custom tasks for PUT SOME LOGIC INTO THE MODELS. Specifically, construction models. The only BIG THING expected when that happens is REVIT's own PERFORMANCE BOOST. I think people in "the factory" ne
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Titleblocks: key plan automatic zone selection & hatching

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As you finish your model and step onto the next stage of producing coordinated workshop drawings from the model you start facing challenges in coordinated annotation and document control issues which can also be tricked & parametrized to allow for more of what I call Building Information Annotation (C) . The issue I want to discuss and share with you is common in Revit documenting environment. So as we all may have noticed we have a Filled Region Tool which help as annotate/hatch with patters almost in every possible view in Revit. Except one: in sheets/titleblocks. Yes you cannot hatch or create a filled region on your titleblock. You can however do it withing the family of a titleblcock. Our team came across this issue when we were trying to mark the corresponding Zones in our Key Plan which we had on a particular project titleblocks. So the first thing we did when we realized that you can't hatch a region (or Create Filled Region) we just marked a zone by manually d
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A Tip on how to adjust the lineweights in pipe color fill legends

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When you get busy coordinating a huge BIM development process sometimes you really forget to pay attention to some handy tools Revit has got and get carried away looking for a complicated  solution of a "problem" that wasn't even a problem at all. However, you didn't expect that there could be a dedicated solution. That's what has happened today in the morning when I suddenly was asked by one of our modellers on how to change the line weight of a pipe color fill legend. So here is the deal. We've modeled a potable water (supply & return) in Revit and our plot scale was somewhat 1:300 or 1:500. Whereas, we have pipes of 25mm DIA, and when we place a pipe color fill legend it creates a color background much wider than the pipes all along. I started breaking my head around, switching line weights on and off didn't help. I tried google-ing to see if somebody came across the same thing but nothing. It seems that only I was really somewhat blind to n
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Family template for manholes used in Stormwater & Sewer utilitiy networks

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Let's start with one of the most required families that we need when modelling a civil or infrastructure network (external MEP). It is assumed that you (readers of this article) are already familiar with the basics of Revit family creation. Manholes . Manholes, basically drive the gravity networks like storm-water and sewer, and if you will spend some time to have that perfect family it can drive all the rest of the utility network and make everything more coordinated and emission-less. Complete Manhole Family with conditional formulas already applied.  A general rule about the manholes is that they are driven by two key Variables . • Invert Level (IL) and  • Cover Level (CL) commonly referred aslo as GL (Ground Level) And as a general rule in Civil Infrastructure models or drawings your reference level is always absolute 0.00.That gives us an idea to build our family main parameters in relations to Ref.Level which is found in all family templates. It means that if y
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