Friday, July 21, 2017

Revit 2018.1 - New Content, Part 1

Autodesk Revit 2018.1 comes with a significant content update which I think a lot of people will be able to use; especially the new structural content. But even the new appliances and window will be beneficial to many.

There is a lot to talk about so I will break this discussion up into 2 or 3 posts. Today I will cover the appliances. The windows will take a little more time to document... they are powerful, but may not be super intuitive to everyone. So I want to spend a little time to unravel what is going on under the hood.

Update: Links to Part 2 (windows) and Part 3 (system furniture).

  • BTW, I had the opportunity to test drive the window content, with some of the Autodesk staff working on this, while I was at Revit: Inside the Factory in Shanghai China last October (2016).
The content is provided...

separately from the 2018.1 update, similar to the precast extension I wrote about yesterday.

Click here to download the new content: http://www.autodesk.com/revit-content-2018_1

The English download file is 825MB and is an EXE file. I recommend you re-path the content (see image below) to a temp folder so you can shift through it and pull out what you want.


Here is a peak at the folder structure... the long list of Countries all contain region specific structural content. Only the US Imperial and US Metric contain the additional content; Systems Furniture, Windows and Appliances.


Here are a two screen shots of the appliance content as viewed from Windows Explorer; first image is the "High End" folder and the second is "Mid-Range" Notice there are a couple Type Catalogs.



When appropriate, the content has MEP connectors as shown below. All the content has labels visible in plan view, which can be toggled off via a Type parameter
Example of Type Properties... notice the material names.


All the materials, for the appliances, have a prefix to keep them organized.

The next thee images show several samples of the content in plan view. For this post, we will pretend my Law Office model building was sold and is now an appliance store:)



And to answer the question you all are thinking... what does this stuff look like rendered? Let's load it into Enscape and take a quick look... not too bad, IMHO. Click to enlarge image!






For the final image... a nighttime view with some lights in the range hood!

Enjoy!