A+I Enscape Asset Creator - Development Update!

Pieter Schiettecatte from A+I in New York City is continuing to develop the A+I Enscape Asset Creator tool that was mentioned in this blog post: Tutorial: how to create custom Enscape assets

Today's post highlights the developments that have been made to that tool.

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Enscape Blog Post: Meet Pieter Schiettecatte: Early Enscape Adopter and Custom Asset Pioneer

In today's post I wanted to share a link to an Enscape blog post about industry expert Pieter Schiettecatte. 

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Enscape custom assets - how to make leaves

Today's post comes compliments of industry expert Pieter Schiettecatte from A+I in New York City. Click here to see all this posts on this blog, include the very popular recent post: Tutorial: how to create custom Enscape assets.

Many of you have reached out on how to create custom Enscape assets with cutout maps. A typical example of this is vegetation: because the polycount must be kept low, each leaf cannot be modeled in full detail. Instead the shape of the leaf is approximated with just a few polygons and then extra definition is added by using a transparent .png image for the leaf’s color texture.

In this tutorial we will use an ivy plant as an example. You can download the Blender file here.

Ivy model rendered with Blender 2.9 

Ivy model with wireframe, notice the leaves are only roughly modeled with 6 polygons each

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Tutorial: how to create custom Enscape assets

Today's post comes compliments of industry expert Pieter Schiettecatte from A+I in New York City. Click here to see all this posts on this blog.

I want to share a workaround we’ve developed to set up a custom Enscape asset library. We’ve been using this workflow for 10 months and it has worked well for us. That said, use this at your own risk because it’s not officially supported by Enscape.

A screenshot of our custom library with 347 assets

To create an Enscape asset you will need:

• A 3d model (.gltf file + .bin + textures )
• Optional: a simplified placeholder (.obj)
• Optional: a thumbnail (256x256 jpg)
• Our in-house Asset Generator tool

Enscape uses the open source .gltf format for its assets. We’ve build most of our custom assets in 3ds Max, exporting them to Gltf with the free Babylon Exporter.

However, for this tutorial we will be using the powerful new Blender 2.82, as it’s free, open source and has a built in .gltf exporter.

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Duplicating a Material and its assets

It is important to know how to properly duplicate a Material in your Revit model, so you do not unintentionally affect another Material. Today's post highlights how to do this and promotes a Revit Idea I created to better deal with challenge in Autodesk Revit (please vote!).

If you Duplicate a Material in your model, the Appearance Asset will be associated to the new Material AND the Material you copied it from! For example, in the image below, we will right-click on Carpet (1) and duplicate it. Before we duplicate it, notice the Appearance Asset named “RED” is not shared.

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A well kept Revit secret: the CTRL key

Today's post comes compliments of industry expert Pieter Schiettecatte from A+I in New York City.

Did you know that the CTRL key has special powers when using modify tools like moving, copying, rotating, mirroring, aligning, join...?

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One Button Shortcuts in Revit

Today's post comes compliments of my friend Pieter Schiettecatte from A+I in New York City.

Did you know you can have 'one button shortcuts' in Revit?

Normally, Revit requires two buttons for any shortcut (MV for move, CO for copy etc). However, these commands are used so often it would be faster to just have one button (M, C, ..). 

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Turning Off 'Double-click Rename' Behavior in Revit's Project Browser

Today's post comes compliments of industry expert Pieter Schiettecatte from A+I in New York City.

Lately, I have found myself accidentally renaming views and sheets in the project browser by slowly double clicking on them.

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Revit Content Cut Plane Study

Today's post comes compliments of industry expert Pieter Schiettecatte from A+I in New York City.

Pieter shares a study he did on how Revit content in cut, or not, in the project environment based on a few variables. He even provided a really nice diagram (snippet shown here in the intro).

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Don’t Make New Types While in a Design Option

Today's post comes compliments of industry expert Pieter Schiettecatte from A+I in New York City.

There is a bug in Revit 2019 that you might want to be aware of if you work with design options a lot.

If you create a new family type (wall type, floor type, furniture type, …) while working in a primary design option, something weird happens: if you now try to change the Primary, you will get a message saying: “No element in a secondary Option can be referenced by an element outside that Option.” Your only option will be to cancel (the OK button is grayed out).

Additionally...