CTC Revit Family Processor - Powerful Content Management

Someone who works for a large manufacturer, who was just acquired by a larger manufacturer, ask me how they can update the company name parameter and URLs in thousands of Revit families. It occured to me that the tool I recommended, I had not written a specific post about (just referenced within other posts).

CTC Software makes a "Cadillac" tool that can be used to maintain large and complex Revit content collections. The tool is called Revit Family Processor. Today's post I will share the highlights of this tool and a little trip down memory lane with CTC and this tool.

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NEMA Webinar - BIM Data Requirements for Electrical Products

Check out this upcoming webinar, lead by industry design professionals, on a new standard by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA).

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Content Management - Hive by CTC Software

I recently had the opportunity to write an Autodesk University 2020 sponsored article on content management in AEC for CTC Software. Today's post talks about that and a little on my history with CTC Software.

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Staff Training During The COVID-19 Pandemic

Last week I had the opportunity to deliver staff training, here at LHB, during the COVID-19 pandemic with everyone working from home. Turns out, having a captive audience is highly conducive to favorable attendance! Thus, this is the topic of today's post.

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2019-20 ACEC/MN Engineering Excellence Awards

An LHB project I initiated back in 2011 recently won an ACEC of Minnesota Honor Award. The project, which is a bit unusual for this type of an award, is the MEP Productivity Pack for Autodesk Revit. We submitted for the award with our fellow ACEC-firm-member and technical partner Gausman and Moore (G&M).

This past Friday evening (2020-01-24) a few folks from both teams attended the 53rd Annual ACEC/MN Engineering Excellence Awards event in Minneapolis, MN. I am pictured below with my "partner in crime" Blake Guither from G&M.

Last year, LHB won a Grand Award and the Peoples Choice Award for the The Promenade of Wayzata, located in Wayzata, MN.

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Upgrading Revit Projects and Content with CTC BIM Batch Suite

Its that time of year, when the latest version of Revit has been out long enough to make it viable to deploy firm wide. For some, that also means upgrading content... others leave a single depository of families at the oldest version of Revit still being used internally.

This post will highlight the tool I use for the massive upgrade project... CTC Software's Prog & Fam Upgrader, found in their CTC BIM Batch Suite add-in for Revit.

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Managing Light Level Design Intent in Revit - Average Illuminance; MEPPP New Feature

As I mentioned in this post, Introducing the MEPPP Universal Lighting Fixture Family for Revit, we recently rolled out an updated version of CTC Software's MEP Productivity Pack (MEPPP). One significant development on the electrical side is around lighting fixtures. In this post I want to share another new feature/workflow added related to managing light level design intent and visualizing preliminary results using analytical views.

Most of the following information is from the MEPPP User Guide, which can be downloaded for free via a link in this post: Promoting Industry Standards for Revit MEP plus Free User Guide, Shared Parameters & More.

Preliminary Illuminance Calculations

Target Illuminance levels can be selected for each room using the Schedule Key shown below. This schedule can be manually edited for a firm’s own standard. Additional rows may be added by clicking the Insert Data Row command.

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Introducing the MEPPP Universal Lighting Fixture Family for Revit

We recently rolled out an updated version of CTC Software's MEP Productivity Pack (MEPPP). One significant development on the electrical side is around lighting fixtures. Over the 8+ years this product has been sold, a lot of customers (electrical engineers and contractors) have requested an un-hosted version of the content. I don't like the idea in principle, and we would almost never use them in our multi-discipline practice here are LHB, but there is always the exception (e.g. architect working in 2D AutoCAD). The main issue deflecting effort in this develop was that we would essential need two families for every fixture; face based and level based (aka un-hosted).

I am happy to report we were able to develop a hosted and un-hosted set fixtures in a single family. It even has a native, non-nested, light source to making modifying the photometry simple and facilitate a smooth workflow for lighting analysis (using ElumTools, for example).

BTW, we have been collaborating with Steven Bunker on this content. A electrical engineer and Revit guru I met in an Autodesk beta meeting! He is fairly active in the Autodesk Forums - click here for that.

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Promoting Industry Standards for Revit MEP plus Free User Guide, Shared Parameters & More

Please consider the following information which promotes BIM standardization within the AEC industry for Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing (MEP). I highly encourage you to share this with your colleagues, consultants and resellers to help promote this ambitious effort!

This is not a sales pitch for the MEP Productivity Pack (MEPPP) per se, but a call to action. We are giving away, for free, our Shared Parameters file, User Guide and some reference material to promote and facilitate this cause.

" Imagine a world where an engineer or designer can use any manufacturer’s family to drop in the model, and have the family tag and schedule instantly or even better yet by having the schedule already filled in with actual selection information"

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