Monday, July 20, 2009

Avatech Utilities for Revit



We finally got our Avatech Utilities for Revit launched a month or so ago. We've added to the list of utilities as well:

  • Room Renumber
  • Change Case
  • Space Update (New)
  • Grid Select (New)
  • Door Mark Update
  • RevitCity Content Browser
  • Earth Connector
  • Room Phase Copy (New)

Unfortunately - we came to a hard decision... because of the amount of effort it takes to produce, support and update these utilities on an ongoing basis - we have to start charging money for them.

Because we didn't really give any warning on this - we wanted to make this as fair as possible for the 2010 release.

As such, we did the following:

  • Avatech Utilities for Revit LITE - this will continue to be free (it's made up of the top four utilities above).
  • Avatech Utilities for Revit - will be offered for $395 USD / seat

To take care of all of the people who had previously downloaded the software- we've put in a one-time program to give previous downloaders 5 standalone seats of the software (this was sent via e-mail to the address which was registered during the download). You should have received the second and final notice of this program today (so if you're thinking "where was that?" you might want to check your junk mail folder or something like that).

Finally, there will be other special offers for customers who purchase their Revit software through Avatech (which I realize is only a fraction of the total audience - sorry!).

While this has been a bit tough for us to work through - I'm looking forward to what this means - we should be able to do a better job growing and releasing more utilities in the future.

-Matt

4 comments:

Cornel said...

Hi Matt,

Although the utilities for Revit are quite interesting, there are a lot of other possible problems that could surface.

We recently came across a problem in my company and I was wondering if it’s possible to programmatically change the fonts (and the width factor) for Revit's Annotations, Tags, Titleblocks, Schedules, Dimensions and Text Tool.

They are all setup to Arial by default, but we have also a big number of model families (.RFT files) created by some third party consultants using some other different fonts and we would like to converge everything and standardize them all (system families, in-place families and model families that are using fonts) and setup them to Swis721 BT.

A brief description of the manual procedure can be found at http://tinyurl.com/n6ghnx but what I’m interested in, is if this process could be automated.


Thanks in advance,

Constantin

Cornel said...

Hello again Matt,

Please excuse me for being so insistent, but I just want to know if I have any chance to get some feedback on the topic concerning the font and width change that I've posted about one week ago.

I don't have any idea about how it works, how long it takes and/or how long is your list of questions to answer, but it would be really great to know if there’s any hope to have an answer.

I thought initially that maybe the question is so stupid that it isn’t even worth an answer, but it seems that is quite relevant, because I saw that Avatech have that nifty utility called Change Case, and I assume that if it’s possible to scan the model and change the text case, it should be possible to change the font and most probably the width too.

I have a reasonable VBA and VB experience and I’m OK in VB.NET, but I can’t find any suggestion or chunk of code, although I've tried also on Autodesk's Revit API forum. I apologise again for insisting on this, but we need it very badly.

Thanks again for your time,

Cornel

Matt Mason said...

Cornel,

It's not a stupid question at all... It's just not a question that I could give significant time to while I was on vacation :).

While I'm still trying to catch up from being gone - I'll say this:

Yes, I believe it is possible to do all the things that you're talking about.

We had a product which could be configured to do some of those things (BIMreview - but it has been purchased by Autodesk).

In terms of your own programming, I would encourage you to get the "RvtMgdDbg" snoop tool - it's a tool published by Autodesk - I think they've made it available over at http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com before.

The Snoop tool will let you explore the families and projects to understand the element/type/parameter structure and how you would need to find and change things to match your standard.

In terms of pushing family changes back into projects - that is also possible (although you will have to figure out what you want to do with the dialog box that asks whether you want to overwrite parameters - which you can suppress via the API).

-Matt

Todd M. Shackelford said...

Matt,

I have another thing to throw at you. In AutoCAD I have added a pulldown menu for standard details. It inserts details dwgs from the server into the current drawing. It would be so great to have a way to drop drafting views of details into a Revit project that took as little effort as the AutoCAD solution.