16 January 2010

AUGIWorld: Jan/Feb 2010

The latest issue is out...

http://www.augi.com/publications/default.asp?page=63

07 January 2010

Organize Frequently Used Families

Okay, so you use Revit of some flavor. No doubt you use families. No doubt you load them over and over and over. If you use a family with a catalog, you load that family repeatedly as you load additional types. Here's a tip to perhaps make your life a little easier.

1) In your My Documents folder, create a folder called whatever, "RST2010 Family Favs" perhaps.

2) From within Revit, open any File access dialog (like Open) and browse to My Documents. Click and drag the "RST2010 Family Favs" folder onto the Places area of the File access dialog.

3) When you close this dialog, Revit will ask if you want to save the changes to the Places list - do so.

Now go about your work. Next time you go to access a family you use a lot,

a) Right-click on it and choose Copy.

b) Then move to the Places list and click on that "fav" folder. In the "fav" folder, right-click and choose Paste Shortcut.

Now you can just click the shortcut link and Revit will follow it and load the family file. If applicable it will open up the catalog as well.

Now the beauty of this is that the file organization for Revit families is quite complicated, files are all over the place - even those related to one another. You could take this a step further and make folders for specific project types (perhaps a Precast building folder) and put shortcut links to frequently used families that all related to that building type. By being a shortcut, you maintain your standard family organization and as Autodesk updates the family files, the links you created stay valid (as long as the name and location is the same).

Comments?

05 January 2010

AUGIWorld 2010 March/April Issue

Hello there!

Efforts are underway for the second issue of AUGIWorld for 2010! Here’s the request for you to pitch in and help out! As you may have noticed AW has gotten a bit more chunky as now we are a digital only publication. This is great news as now more authors can contribute and the articles can be longer!

The next deadline is January 18, 2010. This is a Monday so you have that weekend prior to write. ;)

If you can contribute to this issue please contact me as soon as possible so we can define the subject you are covering.

Take care and have a wonderful new year!
David