The REVITlution

Ugg.. Need.. to... update... blog

2006-05-23T21:39:00.000-04:00

title sez it all

New Year… New Job!

2006-01-12T13:28:00.000-05:00

With the advent of the New Year, I am starting a new chapter in my career. After 7 great years at JRPArch, I am leaving to take a position with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP’s New York Office, as a Senior Digital Design Coordinator. It will be a fantastic opportunity to work on some of the most amazing architectural commissions in the world. As well as, a chance to help push Autodesk Revit (and BIM in general) to the bleeding edge.

I am a little nervous about the adjustments necessary to work in a such a large firm, but looking forward to the resources that such an environment affords. It will be exciting to work at a firm with such a pioneering technology pedigree. If you have a few minutes you can catch a glimpse of what Digital Design at SOM is all about by reading Paul Seletskys’s Digital Design in the Age of Building Simulation, an AECBytes Viewpoint article. Paul is the Director of Digital Design at the New York office, and recruited me for my new position.

Friday will be my last day at JRPArch. I will miss all of my co-workers, including my brother-in-law, Taylor and my sister-in-law, Lauren, and, of course, my boss (and father-in-law), Jack Parry. Jack has been an outstanding mentor to me throughout my career, and I can honestly say that I would not be where I am today without his guidance, support and friendship. To his credit, he took the news of my departure, very well. Though disappointed in my decision to leave the firm, he respected my wishes and was very proud of me at the same time.

My contact information will be updated as soon as I have it.

Wish me Luck,

Z

Revit Wiki Goes Live!

2005-10-17T23:15:00.000-04:00

Beau Turner, of will render 4 food fame, with the help of Steve Stafford has setup a new revit wiki to join the existing ADT wiki at Triple D design. The revit history section is a great read! Be sure to sign up and contribute!

REVIT WIKI

RSS Feed Added

2005-06-27T11:27:00.000-04:00

FYI I Just added and RSS feed, with feedburner.

New News is Good News

2005-06-23T22:16:00.000-04:00

Continuing his 1-2-3 Revit article series at Cadalyst, Rick Rundell's latest installment deals with Revit structure and how it fits into the BIM concept. Great read, I highly recommend it.

While you are there, check out the latest AEC tech news installment from Arnie Williams. It is yet another article about the freedom tower and revit. I wonder if James V and the gang at SOM ever get tired of all the publicity? naahhh ;)

Bim away!

Revit Structure 1.0 Released Today!

2005-06-07T21:09:00.000-04:00

The long awaited revit based structural design tool, Autodesk Revit Structure 1.0, is set to ship today. It seems that information on crossgrade promotions and pricing details have not yet been released. I will pass that info on as I receive it. Always on the ball, Augi has already added an entirely new forum category dedicated to the new product. Autodesk was also quick to add new discussion group, autodesk.revitstructure, has been added to discussion.autodesk.com.

Wes Macaulay, of Pacific Alliance Technologies, has started an informative thread with FAQ’s for ARS.

More news to follow...... this time I promise ;)

Revit Building 8 is HERE!

2005-04-26T10:59:00.000-04:00

Autodesk Revit Building 8 is now officially here!!! The download version is now available!

Revit 8 and The Freedom Tower Get Press

2005-04-22T10:29:00.000-04:00

Building Design & Construction Magazine has a great article featuring Revit and the Freedom Tower this month! Thanks to Mike Jarosz of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for posting the link on AUGI

Computer-Aided Green Design

2005-04-20T11:29:00.000-04:00

Jim Gleeson has authored a great article on the use of Revit in the context of "Green Architecture"

http://www.architectureweek.com/2005/0413/tools_1-1.html

Viz 2006 is now shipping!

2005-04-19T14:08:00.000-04:00

Looks like Viz 2006 is now shipping to subscription customers!

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050419/sftu087.html?.v=7

Revit OpEd Hires new "reporter"

2005-04-11T16:55:00.000-04:00

Good for a chuckle or two.....

OpEd

Light it up!

2005-04-09T11:40:00.000-04:00

Have you ever rendered a night scene with revit and wished the lights would "glow", or rendered an interior scene and wished to "soften" the light in the space? Unfortunately it is not really possible to get volumetric effects like this with Revit's implementation of accurender. But all is not lost, you can easily fake this effect in the photo manipulation software of your choice!

Here is revit rendering I did a few years ago, it looks OK, but it would be great if we could give it some “life”.

Adding a glow to the lights and lit windows helps a lot.

Better right? It lends some warmth to the image. Now lets see how to do it. Please note that I am using Photoshop 6 for this tutorial but this should work in almost any version of Photoshop, paint shop pro, or possibly Photoshop elements. As long as your software supports transfer modes this should work.

Step 1: Create the glow layer.
Start with you raw rendered image, duplicate the “background” layer and name it “Glow”.

Step 2: Adjust the levels of the glow layer.
With the glow layer selected, go up to the pull down menus and select Image Adjust Levels or simply press “crtl + L” Now comes the subjective part, adjust the sliders until your image pretty much only shows the secular highlights, by that I mean only the brightest parts (ie the lights)

Here is what my level settings were:

And here is what the image looks like:

Not very nice right, but just wait.

Step 3: Blur to taste.
Next apply a gaussian blur to the glow layer. Do this by selecting Filter Blur Guassian Blur… from the pull down menu. Adjust the radius to you liking, personally I typically use a blur radius of 4 pixels.

Ok here is what the image looks like now, still not much. We’ll fix that in the last step.

Step 4: Set the glow layers transfer mode to Screen.
I won’t into detail about image transfer modes here, but you should learn what the do, as they are very powerful. In our case simply set the transfer mode from Normal to Screen for the glow layer by using the pull down menu on the layer tab.
Optionally, you can adjust the opacity of the glow layer to make the effect more subtle, or even edit color balance slightly to change the color of the glow.

Thats about it! Here is my final image.

1-2-3 Revit

2005-04-08T00:09:00.000-04:00

If you haven’t seen them, Rick Rundle of Autodesk has a great series of revit articles on catalyst.com. Topics range from an explanation of parametric modeling to successful revit implementation. Take a look when you have a chance: 1-2-3 Revit

Nvidia releases update to MAXtreme Driver

2005-04-07T17:44:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Nvidia released an update to MAXtreme Driver that is compatible with Viz2005. I just installed Version 7.00.03 today and it seems to work well with viz. Please note that you must have an Nvidia Qaudro based workstaion card for this driver to work.

Cool Class

2005-04-06T16:03:00.000-04:00

Architectural Design, Visualization and Presentation - Cal State University

Found this link on CGArchitect today. It looks like an interesting class for anyone wanting to improve thier architectural visualization and presentation skills. Best of all they are using Revit and 3dsMax.

Here are the details:

Class: Architurectural Design, Visualization and Presentation with CAD & 3ds max 7
Date: Monday – Friday May 16 - 20Time: 9:30 - 5:30. Subject to change based on the needs of the teacher and students.
Cost: $1495.00. Check, cash, and credit cards are accepted.
Certificate: YES
Location: Advanced Media Production at Cal State Long Beach. Parking included.
Lab Time: YES. 10 hours included and times must be approved by AMP staff.
Teacher: Roger Cusson, Former Discreet Learning Product Manager, Discreet Training Specialist, Caddie Award winner
Registration: Call Pia Maffei directly at 800-929-8155 or 951-587-8245.

Description: This instructor lead class is a mix of instructor led theoretical content reinforced by practical hands on exercises. Should time permit students will develop their own architectural models and presentations. This style gives the students the confidence to complete their own presentations once they leave the classroom. You learn the following:
· The 3ds max User Interface, and the Architectural CAD software of choice, in this course we will use AutoCAD and Revit.
· Developing Architectural Models in CAD
· Importing and / or linking of CAD Models into 3ds max, through DWG and or 3ds formats
· Creating Materials for Architectural Scenes
· Advanced lighting such as radiosity and Still Image Rendering suitable for Print and Web
· Creating animation in Architectural Presentations, walk throughs, fly arounds and moving elements

Autodesk Media & Entertainment Ships Combustion 4

2005-04-06T14:53:00.000-04:00

Autodesk Media & Entertainment (formally Discreet) is now shipping Auotdesk Combustion 4, an update to my favorite 3d compositing, motion graphics and vector paint tool! I plan on posting tips and tricks for using Combustion in architectural visualization, so stay tuned!

Welcome the the REVITlution!

2005-04-06T14:20:00.000-04:00

Hi, and welcome to my blog! I've always wanted to start one of these for Revit, so here it is!