Anchors Aweigh

In my first year working at an architectural practice all I did on the conveyor belt of construction documentation was toilet layouts, ceilings and basement parking. "Young man" (as the old man used to refer to me as) otherwise it was the run of the mill Jnr, Mik, Skivie, or just plain "The Ceiling guy". At least I wasn't just a number?????

Why oh why, did I not have a simple tool like that of Dimensions + EQ back in the day. String a row of toilet cubicles and hit equal.... BANG!!! Done. But no,...... offset 900mm, then offset 90mm, then copy, then endpoint and endpoint................. then changes and start all over.

I wonder how few of you know that, in the equal string of dimensions, exists a small but marvelous little tool namely the "Anchor". By toggeling the anchors position (a simple click 'n drag of the mouse) one can achieve various results of the EQ dims. The Anchor symbol designates which element will remain anchored while the rest are altered.












































Thanks... glad I could help!

What a perfect View?

It's far to often that I come across Revit users not using the view capabilites and duplicate views with various options correctly. It is so easy to create many instances of the same view and have different visibility settings for each.
A simple example of this is......
In any given project (it's actually set up in my templates) I will have at least 10 various 3D views and slices. With the size projects we do, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to spin an entire model around to see something on the other side.
So there starts my 1st 4 views.
1. Orient to North west-South east and so on.
2. Then we set up views by disciplines (found in the View Properties). Architectural; Structural and so on. So when we need to work on structural or mechanical elements, no need to switch stuff on or off, simple go to the dedicated view discipline.




































3. Then we will create slices through all critical areas, which reflect directly on the sections we are working up.






































All these duplicate 3D views apply to our plans and sections as well. So for plans we would have a, Ground floor Overall Documentation, then GF Architectural Model, GF structural, GF Mechanical and so on....





















So get to see the perfect views and start using them to benefit your design, co-ordination and speed with which you move around the project.

Oh, by the way, this building is of Porshe's new showroom in SA Johannesburg. It will be the largest (10 000sqm) privately owned Dealership, Showroom, Workshop, Bodyshop, Racing Tuning shop and Training Centre worldwide!

Built first in Revit!

Get your act together?

After what seems like decades (I have actually posted something here) of waiting for Cadplan to get there act together, Marek Brandstater and his team have finaly launched Digital Building Solutions.
Their product line is geared to provide the BIM users with much anticipated software solutions.

Two products (out of the five) have been launched so far.

The first - Shortcut Highway

"Shortcut Highway is a powerful productivity tool that allows you to edit and manage AutoDesk Revit's Keyboard Shortcuts. Without Shortcut Highway the only way to edit shortcuts is with a standard text editor such as Notepad."

The Second - Content Highway

"Content Highway is an ambitious and exciting project to manage and share Revit families and Autocad drawings - from your desktop, to the web and back again."


Content highway is packed with so many cool features,
Load and manage multiple libraries on your PC and across the network.
Thumbnails and a resizing tool
Sort families by any number of fields, including Supplier, Uniformat, Masterformat, Path, Filename, Cost, etc.
Live search features.
The coolest one for me is the ability to scan existing or old projects for families through "Project Manager" and export the families to your libraries.


Be sure to check out and download.