If you are using SketchUp, then it’s time for you to soon browse over to Google’s website and download the latest version (v.8 M2). Although this release is not a new version but rather a maintenance release (hence the “M2″), there are a few new features and a bunch of bugfixes. So what’s new and [...]

When I went to the 2011 Google Geo User Summit United States in Mountain View, CA this July, I had the chance to present two projects that I have worked on in the recent past here at the University of Massachusetts. “Building a 3D World” The first presentation was on our campus modeling project in [...]

Yesterday, Autodesk announced the new features for their 2012 roster of architectural software. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to watch the webcast, but there is ample chatter in the blogosphere this morning. To keep you up-to-date, here is a good reading list for Revit 2012: Autodesk Revit – David Light’s exhaustive overview of the Architectural enhancements [...]

Apparently Autodesk has been busy lately amalgamating its acquisitions into something useful. As announced a few days ago on their blog, Project Vasari is their newest tool/toy for creating early-design massing and energy studies of parametric building models. Here’s a video that gives an overview: From what I can see so far, Autodesk reduced the [...]

Expanding on yesterday’s post, I wanted to try out how I could take a building shell model that I originally created in SketchUp, take it into Revit 2010 and run a solar analysis on it using Autodesk’s new Solar Radiation Technology Preview for Revit Architecture and Revit MEP (download it from Autodesk Labs). And guess [...]

When you are working with any CAD software, then you’ll quickly appreciate the benefits of pre-made reusable objects. Be they called blocks, components or families – as is the case in Autodesk Revit, they are immensely useful. For your Revit modeling pleasure, here are a few manufacturer websites that are now offering “configurators” and provide [...]

Oh, yes… you can buy some, too. Autodesk and Turbosquid have partnered to start a market for Revit content (i.e. families). This joins websites with free content like RevitCity and Autodesk’s own Seek service. There is also a contest for “early-vendors”. From their press-release: To encourage users to publish Revit families for sale, TurboSquid is [...]

Ahh… there it is: Casework with family name Countertop Sink Assembly Line Based. Autodesk just updated its large and well presented component library called “Seek” at seek.autodek.com. You can either go there directly and download Revit and DWG CAD files or a PDF 3-part spec or you can access it from within Revit 2009 using [...]

Since we now have the capability to use Google’s 3D Warehouse as an online collaboration tool, it just makes sense to use this functionality for building programming, too.

Now Autodesk has two green thumbs! In a press release published earlier today, Autodesk has announced that it has acquired ECOTECT. Let’s see how they weave Revit, Green Building Studio and Ecotect together. FYI, here is a description of ECOTECT from the Square 1 website: Ecotect is a comprehensive environmental design tool that covers a [...]