Saturday 14 February 2015

Virtual Reality for less than $50

I recently came across a link to the dodocase. If you haven't heard about this device, visit their website

http://www.dodocase.com/products/google-cardboard-vr-goggle-toolkit

After watching the preview and reading about what these clever cheap cardboard boxes could do I made a purchase for one. I will post again when I have had an opportunity to test them out!  

Split with Gap

Unless you do a lot of work with precast panelling, the 'split with gap' tool doesn't really get much use in the office. It is a worth while tool not to forget about though.

I was recently in the middle of documenting a building with internal masonry walls. We decided to run downpipes in the walls, thereforing requiring the masonry wall to stop and start at each downpipe location. Cue the spit with gap tool. Clicking once on the wall creates an automatic gap in the wall to the desired distance entered in the options bar. In our case 200mm for a 150 dp. Revit allows a maximum gap space of 308mm. While the regular split tool with 'delete inner segment' ticked could do the same thing, its more tedious dealing with a small specified distance as accurately. 

Managing Revit Callouts with Crop Region Breaks

In Revit we can create callouts in most view types. In Architecture, when we create these callouts they may be larger than required. We have the ability to apply crop view breaks by clicking the break symbol on the crop region boundary, breaking the view in two. This keeps the detail smaller and shows only the critical areas. 

However, this creates problems for us when documenting as we wish to see the whole view while detailing and only crop for the sheet. It would be nice if there was a temporary expand on views with breaks. This would save us having to reset the view each time. 

There is an easier way though. The use of dependent views work extremely well in these instances. The main view has the crop break applied and put on a sheet as desired. Crop boundaries are not affected by dependent views, meaning we can have two different crop regions setup. So the dependent view enables us to detail in the whole view while keeping the view (with the crop region break) on the sheet intact.