BIM and others

I know the word "Alfresco" doesn't have any meaning for people from outside Italy but, let me explain something. When you say "alfresco" ("al fresco") in Italy means either you keep something cold in the fridge, or you put someone in jail.  Today I don't want to do both of those things, I just want to talk about one of the most powerful and well known Open Source Document Management, ALFRESCO. In a BIM company one of the biggest challenge is to keep updated and fully compliant the BIM family library. Every day someone is coming to my desk asking for this pump, that valve or those supports and is really hard keep track of all the families and all the requests. Sometimes I receive a request about a family already available in the server, only because is difficult to find and search in the tons of folders. There're couple of commercial systems able to perform this task, one of this is UNIFI ( http://unifilabs.com/ ) and if you looking...

Yes, finally I'm creating a package for MEP engineers to be able to collect information from different systems. Is still a starting point but I'll try to improve this set of nodes with all my day by day experience. For now only 2 nodes are available, both of them collect information about different elements and export directly to an excel file. I'll add more elements (fittings, pipe, accessories, equipment,etc.) and also system information to these nodes. Stay tuned

I'm trying to solve this task since 3 weeks. Finally I got it! Some python code, some sort and searching algorithm and now I can easily select a cable tray route, insert couple of parameters and run the automatic drawing. Everything is based on the logic of connectors. I'm using some algorithm to find connectors connected along the path and remove all  orphan connectors. This and others functionalities are part of one of the classrom that I've submitted to AU2016 so, cross the fingers with me :) In the meantime take a look to the video https://knowledge.autodesk.com/community/screencast/3fe4f5da-de3c-459f-aba5-89d5c0c5ade0

Today I want to share a very simple and useful tip to add more columns to you quantification template. I'm sure that you faced my same issue when you try to use some customization during the quantification export and you want to direct map properties from the model directly to a item field.  First of all this is a very simple quantification template. The construction team is able to select from the selection set a category (i.e. Ducts) and automatically take off the selected models element.  Most of the field are taken directly from the model and you have to fields for description tha tyou can easily map with custom information. But, unfortunately we have only two fields and you know that your team is asking always for more than two, maybe three, but of course more than two :) So now the solution...navigate to this folder (depends on you version it may be different), and open this file for editing. Rember to create a backup copy of the file just in case some...

I couldn't wait to post the second part of the article. This time I recorded a small screencast to show the process of using this small script. http://autode.sk/1VDHN9J Enjoy...

I'm back with some new workflow for MEP addicted. I tried couple of plugin for placing supports but all of them are either expensive or useless, so I decided to create a small definition to place families based on point, parameters and levels matching my requirements. First of all what we have: piping, duct, cable tray or trunking (duct in my case). In this first example II'm using a family of U-Bolt created to change dimensions according to the diameter of the pipe and the insultaion thickness. This articles is not dedicated to the creation of families but basically the family as a parameter for the DN and with this parameter I read the outside diameter of the pipe from a lookup table, then apply the insulation thickness and everiything is matching with pipe axis. Then a simple project just to test the definition, different diameter, different elevation, different angles, some of them with insulation. Now is time for Dynamo The definition starts selecting all the...

Following my previous article I have some updates or maybe a newest version of the definition. Now you can use an XML report exported from Navisworks to visualize clash results into Revit. You need to install LunchBox package for Dynamo before. DYN download