VR Yourself with Autodesk Cloud Rendering

VR (Virtual Reality) is definitely the focus of the year more than 3D printing. Especially with DIY kit or the affordable Google Cardboard that you can immerse yourself into this technology, I finally got my hands on trying it myself in the recently days. I first learn about the new added feature from Revit Kid where Autodesk cloud rendering now offers the "Stereo Panorama" render service of your design and one can view them with one of the cardboard VR goggles.

Good news for me is I happened to have some previous projects that are still stored in the cloud. All I have to do is to log in to the site and select the project to be rendered. From the project, choose the down icon --> Render as --> Stereo Panorama. Click the "Start Rendering" icon and you are good to go. **This service is now offer for FREE until March 31.**

When it is finished, you can click to see the finished rendering but it doesn't do much for you. You have to select the image to open the preview. At the bottom of the image, there is a check box where it says "Preview on your phone" and it will generate a web link. Email the link to yourself and open it via the browser on your phone.

Since my phone (Samsung Galaxy S3) runs on Android OS, according to Autodesk, it said it only supports in Chrome browser. (iPhone will have to launch it with Safari) For some reasons, it doesn't even work on Chrome on my phone. I found this link where you have to enable the WebGL in order for it to work; However, it still didn't work for me. I finally was able to get it to work with Firefox browser for Android and it works beautifully.

Luckily my colleague had one of the cardboard goggles hanging around when he attended AU and got one for free last year so I just borrow it from him to test it.

I have to say the quality of the render is very impressive. Although controlling the view takes some practicing to navigate, I found it very easy to use. I have played with Samsung Gear VR version of the Oculus rift before and this affordable version is pretty awesome. 

Besides, Autodesk provided this link where there are a few samples of the finished "Stereo Panorama" images that are ready for viewing.

I could see this could be a good media for the designer to showcase their work to the clients.

I also test it on my randomized Curtain Panel with this feature and you can copy and paste this link to view it on your own.

Below are some of the projects that I tested with.

Go ahead and try it yourself now. Did I mention this service will be FREE until March 31st?

Randomize Color and Material in Revit - Dynamo Style!

I made a post almost a year ago about how to use a third party app to randomize color and material for curtain panel in Revit. I have been wanting to do more study on how to this in Dynamo. Dynamo has gained so much attention recently and there are always new builds coming out every other week or so. I saw a post from Zach Kron some time ago and haven't got time to look into that until recently. He even made a YouTube video to show his process. First of all, huge thanks to Zach and now I am able to make my own twist and use that on my Randomized Curtain Panel family and have some fun with it.

Below are some images that show by moving the Integer Slider back and forth to change the color of the curtain panels.

Check out this video to see how the slider works in action:

You can find the sample file in this link also.

Enjoy and more to come later!

AC Quirkiness Part 4 - Create Similar Command

There is a comment made recently about my previous post on another odd behavior about adaptive component. I thought I would share it on this post.

"Create Similar" is one of my favorite commands in Revit. It is also one command that I use almost every day. I could create a lot of things quickly by selecting an existing elements around the space and keep building it.

Create similar is accessible both in project environment as well as family environment. In a project, you could literally select anything 2D or 3D, then go to your option under "Modify" tab and click the icon "Create Similar"

Or you can access it via "right click" and choose from the pop-up.

How about in Family? You can pretty much do the same; however, it only applies to traditional family.

Select the geometry, go to the option, click "create similar".

Or just "right click" after you have selected the geometry. 

**The only thing I found in family that does not allow you to use "create similar" are model line and symbolic line. For some reasons, they just don't work with create similar.**

When it comes to adaptive component (or conceptual mass), once again, Revit just disable this nice feature from this type of family. If you "right click" by selecting the geometry, you actually get the same option from the pop-up window but it is grayed out. I suppose there is no time saving using "create similar" in adaptive component!?

AC Quirkiness Part 3 - Adaptive Component Visibility Setting

For those of you who have experience creating families, one can always overwrite the visibility of any geometry in the family (to set it to any detail level from Coarse, Medium or Fine; and whether to have the geometry to display in different view like Plan/RCP, Front/Back and Left/Right)

When it comes to Adaptive Component, such settings remained the same in the AC family. However, this dialog box shows it in a subtle way and you just have to know how to get to it. 

In the Adaptive Component (AC) environment, when you select the solid form, the only option that shows up are displayed in the image below. You just don't see anything that says "Visibility Settings"

If you check the Properties of the solid, it doesn't give you much of an option either. 

Look closer:

Clicking the Visibility/Graphic Overrides (VG), and this will take you directly to the Visibility Settings. 

**This is actually the same way on how traditional family works.**

You can also do the same by selecting the geometry, "right click" and choose "Visibility".

Tim Waldock from RevitCat has briefly mentioned this inconsistent setting about adaptive component.

Well, nested family, on the other hand, works differently in AC environment. You actually get this nice option just like the traditional family by selecting the nested family. The icon will present itself.

I would hope Autodesk can resolve this inconsistent setting in the family environment in the future release. As I suspect Adaptive Component is gaining more use in the project now, I can imagine more people are going to run into this issue with this behavior.

Mind Those Reference Planes!

It has been a few months since my last post about some quirkiness on adaptive components. I have this project using adaptive component to populate the building facade which posed some challenge not only with divide path direction; I stumped upon another unusual behavior with adaptive component and thought to write about this as part 2 on my blog.

For this building facade, we are using adaptive component to set up the window wall system module for number of reasons. One particular reason is that this facade has a sloping wall plane. As you might know, traditional curtain wall system doesn't work on non-vertical wall surface at all. One can try to use curtain system but it just doesn't work. Therefore, adaptive component with conceptual massing seems to be the answer for this question.

From the above image, each unit is composed by an adaptive component, there are a few different types of configuration in the facade. As we have modeled the whole facade, I notice something strange happening. Whenever I am trying to use dimension or align tool, these random "axis" started to show up. There are just so many of these axis no matter how many times you hit "tab" key to try to cycle through to something orthogonal to snap to.

I had no clue at first and thought Revit was going crazy on me. Then, I started examining the adaptive panel family and the answer was there.

Adaptive component (AC), just like any traditional family has two default reference planes, called Center (Front/Back) and Center (Left/Right). And by default, they are considered as "Strong reference" once the family is loaded to a project. However, reference planes in AC family do not serve any real purpose since "adaptive points" are taking their place on driving the geometry behavior. Unfortunately, those little reference planes are still pretty "snappy" in the project; and obviously, those reference planes become selectable more often than you expect and they appear at different angles depend on how they interact with the adaptive points as well as the massing.

Well, all you need to do is open the family (in my case, I have a handful of different type of families), select the Center (Front/Back) reference plane, and set it to "Not a Reference". Select the other one "Center (Left/Right)" ref plane and do the same, then you are good to go. Load it back to project and they are not snappy anymore!