The Building Coder

UR1 and Line Origin versus Start and End Point

My official vacation time has begun. I still have rather a backlog of important, pending, almost completed projects, unanswered blog comments, and unavoidable meetings, so I will be online now and then in spite of that. I also want to keep us all updated on important little titbits such as the UR1: Revit 2013 Update Release 1 The Revit 2013 Update Release 1 is now available for download and installation from the web and within the product through Communication Center.... Read more →

Elbow Fitting Selection and Dimensioning

Vacation time is approaching fast for me and lots of things need finishing off beforehand. Meanwhile, one thing that had a number of developers champing at their bits for a while now finally came to fruition: Autodesk Exchange The Autodesk Exchange store is now open for application submissions. Stephen Preston already published several articles exaplaining the full details: Summary information Information for Revit developers Publishing an app Here is another topic that recently kept me busy, with some helpful input... Read more →

View of NewGroup Duplicated Elements

I already mentioned that you can work around the lack of programmatic creation possibilities for some element types by grouping existing ones, creating new instances of that group, and then ungrouping it again. One question that came up in that context is what view the new group appears in: Question: I am using code like this to duplicate one or more elements: void CreateGroup( Document doc, ICollection ids, XYZ offset ) { Group group = doc.Create.NewGroup( ids ); LocationPoint location... Read more →

Creating an Opening

Here is a question that we have looked at in the distant past, brought up again and reinforced by Jon Mirtschin of Geometry Gym, working on BIM and model exchange with Rhino, Grasshopper et al: Question: Sorry to bother you, but trying to get a quick answer to this problem. If you happen to have 5 minutes to help, it will be greatly appreciated. I've attached a sample Revit project. It simply creates a polyline curve array and slab outline,... Read more →

Multi-Version Add-in

This is blog post number 800, in case you are interested. I'll celebrate that fact by going out for a run in the woods after posting. As we all saw when migrating add-ins from Revit 2012 to Revit 2013, the new version requires an add-in to be compiled using the .NET framework version 4.0. In spite of this, a Revit 2012 add-in can still be loaded into Revit 2013. I created a sample to prove this. Not only can a... Read more →

Running Language Code and More Exporters

A cleanly designed add-in consists of a completely language independent core application with additional localised resources. Localised resources for different languages can be identified by language tags, e.g. the hexadecimal LCID or language code identifier used by the Revit Product GUID. Here is a more complete overview of several different language tag systems. Question: Is it possible to determine the language of Revit via the API at run-time? For example, when you click F1 for help when hovering over a... Read more →

RevitRubyShell Implementation and Installer

I had a very impressive train ride on Friday evening on my way up to meet my friends to climb the Spitzhorn mountain, happening to take the panoramic express up from Montreux to Gstaad, completely by chance. I was just expecting a normal train ride, but it turned out to be extremely beautiful, the most comfortable way I have yet experienced to get an almost overwhelming impression of Swiss mountain beauty without having to do any hiking, just looking out... Read more →

Meetings, Football, and RevitRubyShell

The whole EMEA DevTech team is meeting in Neuchâtel prior to the coming weekend's annual Autodesk football tournament taking place here. I won't be able to play myself, unfortunately, for the first time in many years, since I had a prior appointment with friends to go climb the Spitzhorn mountain. We also held a virtual meeting with Stephen Preston from the US, who is now our world-wide DevTech manager. Here we are in virtual union, from left to right, Gary... Read more →

OBJ Model Exporter with Transparency Support

Tuesday evening the moon was full, the rain finally eased up a bit, the sky became completely clear, and I spent a couple of hours outside on a hill with a beautiful view, a group of friends, and a nice hot fire. On Wednesday I finally got to play hockey again with my Autodesk colleagues after a long period of missing out on that. I hope all US Americans enjoyed a nice Independence Day. The next days are filled with... Read more →

OBJ Model Exporter with Multiple Solid Support

Yesterday, I thought that I had completed my basic working OBJ exporter implementation including colour support. Rudolf Honke of Mensch und Maschine acadGraph GmbH rapidly pointed out two important flaws, though. Before discussing the ensuing OBJ exporter update, here is another little colour related item of Rudolf's: Colour Conversion Regarding colours, I have another hint. When assigning a colour to a TextNoteType 'tnt', the required value is an integer. It can be calculated as follows using a Windows colour input... Read more →

OBJ Model Exporter with Colours

I discussed the first take of my OBJ exporter last week, still lacking colour support. Adding colours turned out to be more complex than I had expected, and the result as it currently stands includes a couple of kludges, I'm afraid. Still, for a quick hack it does a decent job of getting a rough idea across. For instance, here is the result of exporting the basic sample project rac_basic_sample_project.rvt included in the Revit product distribution: The resulting OBJ file... Read more →