Revit Add-ons
This one goes out to all the firms that
are converting to Revit. When they move to this new platform they
are usually on subscription. There are some additional tools that
one has access to when logging into the Autodesk subscription site.
What commonly happens is that the
principal of the firm will buy the product and not know that he or
she has access to these tools. Sometimes, he or she may know about
subscription, but will not tell the other drafters and project
managers about the add-on tools available. The tools are not
installed out-of-the-box, so I will briefly talk about them here.
To download the tools, you should have a
subscription user name and password handy and log into the site. If
not, you should call Autodesk to get this information.
http://subscription.autodesk.com
Once you log in, click on "product
downloads". This should show you a long list of downloadable
extensions and software programs. Take some time to read through
this list because you will find things like Revit Architecture 2009
64 bit, which I have gotten calls about because it was not available
in the public Autodesk site.
Worksharing Monitor
This is one of my favorite extensions.
This is because it lets you know who is saving to the central file.
For example: you are working on a Revit model and you have the
Worksets feature enabled with several users saving to the central
file simultaneously. When the models get large enough, Revit starts
to take longer to save. On top of that, you have to save to a
network location, which takes even longer than saving locally.
In times like these, the Worksharing
monitor can be of assistance in telling you: who is currently
working on the project file, whether your local file is up to date
with the central file, when your save to central operation will
finish, whether my editing requests are granted or not and other
issues. It serves as a guide when working in a multi-user
environment, giving you messages that you otherwise would not
receive if just working on Revit by itself. It includes a feature
that monitors your virtual memory and physical memory which is
useful when you are working with large models. This monitor works on
the Architecture, MEP and Structure versions of Revit.
Before using this, make sure that you go onto each workstations
Revit application and click SETTINGS>OPTIONS> and type in a unique
workstation name in that box.
This is to be done even before
enabling Worksets or else you will confuse the Worksharing monitor
and all your local files will have the wrong user name assigned to
it. For more information on this, see the help file and the pdf
documents provided when you download the tool.
Batch Plot Utility
Let us take the scenario above where
you have a large, slow project and you want to plot your sheets.
This should take a long time! Well, thats where the batch plot
utility comes in. It opens another copy of Revit in the background
and plots your sheets while you keep working on the model. This way
you wont lose all that valuable productivity by waiting for Revit
to process the plotting. The utility allows you to order the set of
drawings before printing which definitely saves you time with large
sized sheets. There is one drawback; it will not allow you to print
to a virtual printer like DWF or Adobe pdf.
In case the batch plot utility does not
suffice, another way to plot while working is to open another copy
of Revit in the background for printing purposes. In cases where you
have a simple model without many linked parts, it may work fine. In
other situations it may give you other problems. You can run into
some odd errors by manually opening another copy of Revit in the
background. This is especially true if you have a large project
broken up into Worksets and Links. This is not guaranteed to happen,
but I have seen some scenarios where Revit would not allow a user to
save all his work to central because he had two sessions of Revit
open, each with a different link.
Whatever you decide to do, make sure
you have plenty of RAM and that should speed up your printing a bit.
This will also ensure better performance especially when you have
two sessions of Revit open. There is an extremely informative
white paper printed on
Autodesks website which goes over requirements and recommendations
for running Revit.
On a Final Note
If you are a Structural Engineer using
Revit, the extensions available for download are extremely useful
and I recommend that any engineer using Revit Structure at least
download these extensions and look at them. The extensions available
for Revit Structure really add to the value of the program. It
contains wizard-style menus that can help you create reinforced
concrete beam/column structures so that you can schedule those
components and section them, creating a much more detailed model of
the concrete reinforcement that would otherwise be unavailable in
Revit Structure by itself. This is a must-have for anyone wishing to
take advantage of the scheduling and modeling capabilities of BIM in
a Structural environment.
CAD/CAM/CAE
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