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 [...]

It is spring again and the Revit web is as much abuzz with postings about the new Revit version (2011) as there are fresh buds on our tree in the garden. Based on what I have seen so far on Revit3D.com and elsewhere, I am very much looking forward to the new version. To whet [...]

And the good ideas keep on coming! As just announced by Autodesk Labs in their post Project Twitch Range Expanded: can YOU connect?, Autodesk extended the range of their application tryout platform “Twitch” beyond the originally stated 1000 mile radius. Now user connection capability is just limited by a network latency cutoff. And as I [...]

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 [...]

Turns out Autodesk’s purchase of Ecotect does not limit their offerings to one additional piece of software. It even sprouts some very useful off-shoots. A first glimpse at new energy-integrated planning tools offers the recently released Solar Radiation Technology Preview for Revit Architecture and Revit MEP. This software, which has been published on the Autodesk [...]

Two interesting news items: CASE architects have developed an interesting whitepaper for Autodesk that illustrates nicely the conceptual design process in Revit 2010. In this paper, a highrise development is taken from the conceptual stage through some Ecotect solar analysis all the way to facade panelization using the new Revit tools. You can download the [...]

Here’s a method that I found recently on the buildz blog: Although it is not clear from the rendering dialog, it is easily possible to do a soft-shadowed ambient-occlusion rendering in Revit’s implementation of MentalRay. This is done by setting the time of the rendering to sometime during the night. After the rendering, just open [...]

The Daily CatchUp The first news about SketchUp is news itself. To be more to the point, the folks at SketchUcation.com have just launched an interesting news portal. It is called The Daily CatchUp and it was created to bring frequently updated news to us SU users. So far, posts seem to follow the major topics [...]

Now that the Autodesk 2010 versions are finally available, it is time to get familiar with them. I am particularly looking forward to the new Revit functionality (3D modeling and paneling tools), but there’s far more than that in the Autodesk software roster. Maybe the main change to grapple with is the ribbon menu UI. [...]