Category Archives: Revit

Revit Posts

Building Design Suite Install update

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As all of us are receiving the nice USB drive with our BDS we are going to jump into creating deployments or possibly just install it.    Paul Aubin posted about his issued installing the software and Mark McDonough reminded us all about a blog post from Autodesk about the issues that were in the 2012 deployments as well.  The nice part about the UP and Ready blog post is that they showed how to create deployments from the suite to include only the AutoCAD based products or only the Revit Based products.  This is a good thing in my opinion in the fact that alot of my clients keep saying they don’t want to install the the AutoCAD based products on most of the machines just the Revit side of things.  So if this is a concern for you check out the post and divide your deployments.

Building Design Suite 2013 Bug?

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I had posted about the installation about the BDS 2013, but today I noticed a few issues after using some of the programs.  First off, it must install Navisworks before Revit because the Exporters are not there in Revit 2013.  You have to go back to Add Remove inside of Windows and tell it to update the exporters.  Once that is done Navisworks Switchback and the export to Navisworks 2013 then appears under the Addins External Tools.

The reason I noticed this is the fact that I was trying to get Rebar to display in Navisworks, unfortunately it does not go out to Navisworks with just opening a Revit model.  If you export out the Revit Model as a .NWC then the rebar will go out.  However if you export out as a .NWC file then you have to keep exporting out to .NWC as Navisworks is no longer looking to the Revit file for updates rather the .NWC file.

Of course like usual I could be doing something wrong so I will wait for updates from Autodesk Support to confirm or deny these issues.  I bet a reader of this blog will comment before Autodesk we will see.

Revit 2013 Options Bar

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For years Autodesk Revit has had issues with the options bar growing and shrinking.  Now a new undocumented feature of 2013.  When you select anything in the project browser the options bar disappears completely.  Of course this is at random and I haven’t been able to find a rhyme or reason for it.  It will be doing it for a while and then all of the sudden just stop, come back a bit later.  I had this issue in the alpha and beta but Autodesk was unable to reproduce the issue.  Continue reading →

Building Design Suite 2013

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Paul Aubin wrote a nice post about his trials and tributes while installing Autodesk BDS 2013.  I thought I would follow his thoughts and post about my adventures.

First off I didn’t have the issues that Paul had while downloading, I set mine to download went to bed and it was on the Install screen when I woke up in the morning.  I cancelled out of this to go check about the folder naming Paul had described in his post and I didn’t have this issue.  My folder structure was this “BDS_ULT_2013_English_Win_x86x64”.  So no issue with the long version.  Although I do agree that it has both 62 and 32 bit versions here so the folder is large to say the least.  The downloaded and extracted .zip file ended up being  66GB on my hard drive.

By default for me when I started the install only Revit, AutoCAD and Navisworks Manage were checked for install.  I thought this was a bit unusual since they are pushing the Suites  you would think some of the other programs would be checked so users would have an icon on the desktop and try out something new. I also found it odd that AutoCAD Architecture and MEP installed 3 icons for each, Imperial, Metric and English Global.  I know I told it to install all of those options but do I seriously need an icon for each.

I did notice that all of the products from the Media side of Autodesk all had updates (service Packs) available for them, including: SketchBook Designer, Showcase, 3DS Max Design.  I do like this about the installations of late.  I remember back in 2009 when the disks that were delivered were out of date because they had released a service pack for Revit during the shipping.

Infrastructure Modeler shouldn’t even have any configurations because all you can do is change a path, which is in the options later.  I did install this program although I don’t foresee being able to try it out for a while.

I started the deployment and it took me 20 minutes just to go through the configurations  and download the service packs for the media software.  I then took 2 hours to run the installation, not bad considering everything it was installing.  I didn’t have any issues with anything failing so for me it went all smooth. 

All I can say is sorry Paul my experience wasn’t as bad as yours.

Dimension Home

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I am almost embarrassed to say that I didn’t know this feature existed and I just found it.  Naturally when I find a nice little feature like this I go back to previous releases to see how long I have been not utilizing it.  Thankfully I found out it was new to Revit 2012, so I didn’t feel as bad.  If you have taken the text from a dimension and moved it off to the side, either to get a leader or just to move it, and then wanted it to go back to it’s default location there is a new way to do this in Revit 2012 (yes in 2013 too).  Simply Right Click on the text that has been moved and select Reset Dimension Text Position.

 

Whenever I find an undocumented feature like this it always makes me wonder what other ones am I missing.  If you know of any please pass on the knowledge.