The Building Coder

Forge and Autodesk University Call for Proposals

In the beginning of the week, I listed my things to do next, including the most important and exciting one, attending and presenting at the Forge DevCon developer conference in San Francisco June 15-16. My to-do list also includes the Forge accelerators being held in Barcelona May 16-20 and in San Francisco June 19-24. Now the calls for proposals have opened for both Autodesk University and the Forge accelerator in San Francisco... Read more →

FireRatingCloud Context and Architecture

A picture says more than a thousand words. I find a compelling and clear picture takes a lot of work, though. I created the image below to explain the context and architecture of the FireRatingCloud and other samples connecting BIM and the cloud like RoomEditorApp, followed by some musings on using Revit as a server – FireRatingCloud context and architecture – You cannot use Revit as a server... Read more →

Real-Time BIM Update via a Windows Forms Client

Today, I address the first item in yesterday's to do list – Document and improve FireRatingClient, the stand-alone Windows client – we will need this to demonstrate the real-time BIM update from arbitrary sources – Context – FireRatingClient – Adding the modified Field – Updating the modified Field on Edit – FireRatingClient Live BIM Update Demo Recording – Download – To Do... Read more →

Real-Time BIM Update with FireRatingCloud 2017

Yesterday, I migrated RoomEditorApp to Revit 2017 and mentioned the BIM and cloud related projects I am working on. Next, let's focus on the FireRatingCloud sample. The main goal there is to implement fully automatic real-time BIM update from the cloud. Now, 24 hours after writing the previous sentence, I can tell you that I succeeded. Well, add another six hours to edit this post... Here is the updated FireRatingCloud custom ribbon tab with its new set of commands... Read more →

Room Editor – First Revit 2017 Addin Migration

A wonderful Monday morning to you. We are enjoying perfect April weather, rapidly oscillating back and forth between warm sprintime sunshine, sleet and hail. Meanwhile, I am continuously striving hard yet failing miserably to reduce my pure Revit API focussed case answering and Revit API activity – Things To Do – Forge DevCon developer conference – RoomEditorApp for Revit 2017 – Roomedit CouchDB installation on Windows – FireRatingCloud enhancements completed and upcoming – First Revit 2017 deprecated API clean-up – Where BIM hasn't gone... Read more →

Reference Stable Representation Magic Voodoo

Let's end the week with a truly magnificent contribution and research result provided by Scott Wilson in the Revit API discussion forum. Scott responded to Pat Hague's recent thread on converting local family instance coordinate of a selected edge to project coordinates, saying, Yeah the Stable Reference Strings can be used to get at areas of the Geometry API that aren't fully exposed – I love playing around with them. Sometimes I stumble upon something cool such as this solution for a situation in which the geometry returns no reference for a family instance... Read more →

What's New in the Revit 2017 API

Here is the online version of the 'What's New' section of the Revit 2017 API help file RevitAPI.chm included in the Revit SDK, which is also provided in the separate document Revit Platform API Changes and Additions.docx. This is very important information, both for exploring thee new features and for later reference. If you encounter any issues at all migrating your add-in between different versions, this is one of the first ports of call... Read more →

RvtSamples for Revit 2017

Setting up RvtSamples for Revit 2017 – Copy Html Markup in Visual Studio 2015 – Running Revit 2017 in the Visual Studio 2015 debugger – 'Security – Unsigned Add-In' message – RvtSamples DLL and TXT should be together – Specifying the Revit SDK samples root path – Correcting errors in individual SDK sample entries – PlacementOptions description line is missing – The five FabricationPartLayout external commands – RvtSamples loads and RvtSamples.txt is cleaned up... Read more →

Revit 2017, RevitLookup and SDK Samples

Revit 2017 was released yesterday. Here is the official Autodesk statement stating that Revit 2017 advances BIM for the future of designing buildings. I downloaded and installed my version from the Autodesk Revit family free trial web site. Let's look at what I did to install and first add-in compilation experiences – Uninstalling prior versions and cleaning the registry – Dummy API assembly folder for compiling samples – Resolving hiccups compiling Revit 2017 SDK samples – RevitLookup for Revit 2017... Read more →

The pyRevit IronPython Script Library

Two weeks ago, Maltezc raised a question on the availability of a version of RevitLookup for Python. I am not aware of any Python version of RevitLookup, but you can certainly call into RevitLookup from RevitPythonShell. Maltezc pointed out the pyRevit IronPython script library. Ehsan Iran-Nejad, pyRevit creator and maintainer, now wrote a blog post describing this powerful and popular collection... Read more →

More on Wall Opening Areas per Room

Håvard added some clarifications and background information on his sample code to determine wall opening areas per room: I have some questions on Håvard's initial approaches. Using a Boolean subtraction between transient solids from the actual wall and the family symbol sounds like the right track, but I don’t understand the need for the family instance, because the wall already provides the net geometry... Read more →

Determining Wall Opening Areas per Room

We continue the rather exhaustive exploration of calculating net and gross wall areas per room, and two other announcements, pointers to interesting sources of information – Why Autodesk has a Labs – Dal BIM in poi – Italian BIM – Determining wall opening areas per room – Håvard's SpatialElementGeometryCalculator enhancement – External command mainline – Test run... Read more →

Named Guid Storage for Project Identification

I want to continue working on the TrackChangesCloud project asap. So far, it only consists of the Revit add-in to determine and list the changes made to the BIM. The interesting part will be to store the results in a cloud database for analysis and reporting. A prerequisite for that is a reliable way to identify Revit project documents. I already explored that topic when starting to implement the FireRatingCloud sample... Read more →

Determining Wall Cut Area for a Specific Room

We looked at calculating gross and net wall areas last year, with a later enhancement to use IFCExportUtils to determine the door and window area, resulting in the two respective projects and GitHub repositories, SpatialElementGeometryCalculator and ExporterIfcUtilsWinArea. Several developers have been busy expanding on those to determine surface areas of subfaces, for instance for openings in walls spanning multiple rooms... Read more →

Forge DevCon, Spring, Impermanence, BIM Cloud

Spring is getting into swing, and new life is budding. I hope the same holds true for all your development efforts and visions of the future. Not everything is budding into new life, though... part of existence is passing away, as well. One of my dearest school classmates and closest friends of my youth, Prof. Dr. Lorenz Poellinger, unexpectedly passed on. The two of us travelled together for several of months, climbing and hitchhiking... Read more →

Location of Hooks in a Rebar Shape Family

Here is a slightly tricky structural rebar Revit API issue raised in the Revit API discussion forum thread on getting the location of hooks in a rebar shape family: When editing a Rebar Shape family I would like to find out what lines in the family the hooks are attached to. In other words I would like the id of the line the start hook is attached to and the coordinate of this hook... Read more →

.NET Runtime Security Blocks External Command

Here is a Revit API add-in installation issue that came up in various forms in the past and now again in the context of Windows 10 configuration: I have a plugin that has been working fine for all pre-Windows 10 platforms. Under Win10, the DLL loads into Revit.exe correctly. The add-in manifest contents are displayed correctly in the Revit UI. When I issue the command, however, nothing happens... Read more →

How to Distinguish Redundant Rooms

A couple of interesting Revit API issues were resolved during my recent absence. Let's start with this question raised by Miroslav Schonauer and resolved by Diane Christoforo: Using the terminology as shown in Schedules, I need to report all 'Not Placed', 'Redundant' and 'Not Enclosed' rooms... Read more →

Swami Ma Anand Mazaak Buddhoo

My Vipassana meditation retreatis nearing its end... I have had a wonderful time with peace, quiet, introspection... I am very glad to already now announce one radical decision I have taken: I am being ordinated as a monk! The blog format will be modified to include some spiritual messages, silent passages for meditation, and chimes. The new name will be announced next week... Read more →