BIM and others

As always everything is coming from my childhood…ops no, that's another story. As always everything starts on a white recycled paper just in front of my keyboard; a simple idea becomes immediately a sketch with Revit parameters. I tried many times different kind of plugins for automatic supports placement, but no one of these is able to create a multi-pipes supports (if I'm wrong, please let me know the name of the plugin). The idea for this script in Dynamo, is to create a support for a bounce of pipes going parallel for a while, and create a group that is possible to copy along the path. I'll not focus on the creation of the families that you need for the support but just to explain the main idea, I have 3 different pieces (steel bar, u-bolt and threaded rod) that I'll compose together to create the final support. The first challenge is to align the pipes to the same BOP (bottom of pipe) because they have to stand on the steel bar and locked with the ...

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...