Beyond Design

Autodesk Suites: Building Design Suite Ultimate will not install with Autodesk Quantity Takeoff

If are having problems installing the Building Design Suite Ultimate and have QTO on the machine already then this article should help out.

Autodesk Suites: Building Design Suite Ultimate will not install with Autodesk Quantity Takeoff

When installing the Autodesk Building Design Suite Ultimate, it will fail with the following error:

2012/1/23:09:50:38 USERNAME COMPUTER-LT Installing Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable (x86): C:\Autodesk\Autodesk_BDS_Ultimate_2012_English_Win_64bit\3rdParty\x86\VCRedist\2010\vcredist_x86.exe /q2012/1/23:09:50:42 USERNAME COMPUTER-LT Install Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable (x86) Failed Installation aborted, Result=1603

The Building Design Suite Ultimate includes Autodesk Quantity Takeoff which is the clue to the cause of the problem. Autodesk Quantity Takeoff actually will not install because of an updated Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86/x64 Redistributable. When this occurs in the Building Design Suite Ultimate, the entire Suite will rollback and not install!

Please check out this reference post to solve the problem:

http://upandready.typepad.com/up_and_ready/2012/01/installation-the-case-of-microsoft-visual-c-2010-1603-error.html

We also turned off Windows UAC as well.

http://upandready.typepad.com/up_and_ready/2011/05/windows-user-access-control.html

Thanks to Clark Morgan for confirming that this resolved the issue.

Epilogue

What made this workaround interesting is that the Building Design Suite Ultimate was installed once on the computer.  I suspect that an Windows Update updated the version of the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86/x64 Redistributable to the  10.1.40219.  

Building Design Suite was then uninstalled but it will not uninstall this shared component as other Autodesk products may use it.  When you  try to re-install Building Design Suite Ultimate this problem will surface.

via upandready.typepad.com

Free technology preview of Point Cloud Feature Extraction for Autodesk Revit Now Available

Here's a great bit of technology in Autodesk Labs to work more easily with point clouds in Revit.

Point Cloud Feature Extraction for Revit is our free technology preview that allows you to work with point cloud more easily in Revit. This plug-in automatically extracts useful geometry features from point clouds of buildings and creates basic Revit elements in Revit. How cool is that?

via labs.blogs.com

Quantity Takeoff 2012 – Hotfix 2 now released

Quantity Takeoff 2012 - Hotfix 2 has been released and is available for download from the Autodesk Website.

Please note: This installer requires that QTO Hotfix 1 is already installed on the system.

This hotfix is designed to resolve some specific PDF file related issues:

• Large PDF sheets consuming too much memory
• PDF sheets not displaying after the project is reopened
• Error message "There was a problem displaying the page"

  

• QTO shutting down after switching sheets

The hotfix can be downloaded from here: -

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=18403022&linkID=10381885

Why does my model look sectioned?

More and more people are working with big models, or models on large ground planes. On rare occasions there can be some odd behavior where the model doesn't display as you would expect.

Sometimes it may look like the model is sectioned in front of the camera, like this.

Sometimes objects in the distance may be cut out like this.

And sometimes you may not see anything at all

To optimize performance Navisworks doesn't draw everything at once. We will calculate how to draw as much of the model as possible needed for the view, versus not showing things you don't need to see, as they would be behind or below you.

The next image shows how we ideally draw the model, including as much as possible but clipping any objects that would be behind, below, or just in front of the camera that you would not see in your field of view, and cutting anything so far in the distance you would not see it. If you stand up and look straight ahead you would not see anything just in front of your feet, it would only be when you look down that you see the floor there.

So the model will have two clipping planes, a near one and a far one; the red dot signifies the camera position relative to the two clipping planes.

The reason why Navisworks doesn't draw everything level with your eyes is that a ratio (of 1000) is used to include as much of the model as possible, meaning if we bring the forward clipping plane closer to the camera, we also need to proportionally bring forward the far clipping plane, this results in objects in the distance not being visible. The ratio is limited to 1:1000 to prevent issues with faces displaying incorrectly.

Problems can start when there are spurious objects a long way from the model as in the next image, or there is a very large ground plane relative to the rest of the model.

Where this happens Navisworks will have to move the far clip plane much further out, meaning the near clip plane is also dragged forwards, giving the effect of a section in front of the model. In the worst examples this can mean the entire model disappears.

The three best ways to rectify this are

• Delete the spurious object from the original CAD data and bring it through again
• Hide the spurious geometry in Navisworks, you can use Page Up to zoom to the entire model, and the Select Box to look for any items you cannot see.
• Manually modify the clipping planes, to bring forward the near clip plane, or force back the far clip plane. To access this you would need to open the File Options from the Home tab. In this example I have constrained the near clip plane to a set distance. As a general rule of thumb when I come across this, if the near clip plane looks wrong, I would divide the amount listed by 10, if the far clip plane looks wrong I would multiply it by 10, any changes you make could affect the other clip plane.
  We strongly recommend you only modify these if you are having problems.

In examples where a large ground plane causes this, you should look at modifying the ground plane to take account of the vanishing point, often very large planes are not necessary. Alternatively modify the clipping planes as above.

We calculate the clipping planes differently in certain situations depending on what you are doing, for example, collision detection and using an avatars. This can sometime affect the far clip plane, ensuring you are working to the correct scale, ensuring your avatar is at the correct size or modifying the clipping planes should resolve this.

What's on your Navisworks soundtrack?

Here's a bit of Friday fun inspired by a tweet from @jtocci2 yesterday.

What would you have on your Navisworks Soundtrack. Leave a comment below or tweet with the hashtag #nwsoundtrack.

And here's a little inspiration: -

Top Gun - Highway to the Dangerzone

Golden Earring - Radar Love

Cleaning up Revit files for Export to Navisworks

If you are having difficulties exporting large Revit files to NWC, or just want to clean up your files prior to export then this article gives some tips about how.

1. Create a new View in Revit specifically for Navisworks, then in the Visibility Overrides of the view switch off things you won't need such as Lines, or specific details that won't be needed for your TimeLiner Simulation or Clash Detection.
   
   

   Once you have created your View, you can save this as a template for future use.
   
   
   Then when exporting, change Export to 'Current View' in the settings.
   
   

2. Now look at your Navisworks Export Settings; is there anything you don't need - rooms, URL's, or even linked files?
3. If you do have linked files, do you need them all? Just keep the ones you need. If you are having problems when exporting files with many links, do they export correctly individually?
4. You can use the 'Purge Unused' button on the Manage tab of Revit to delete unused families or unused family types from the model. You will be able to select which items are Purged before proceeding.
   
   

   You may want to open each individual linked file and purge it until there is nothing left to purge; this may take two or three passes. After all individual linked models have been purged, purge the main model and try again to export.

Other things to check if you still have problems exporting

1. Does Revit needs a restart? If you are working in the application all day and then try to export at the end of the day, you have been potentially caching your project all day. Save the project, restart Revit, reopen the file and try to export. If you still have problems and the machine has been left on for days or weeks then a restart of the machine may also be a good idea.
2. As with any memory hungry operation, try to minimize the number of other programs competing for resources.

We know there other methods you use to pare down your files - please get in touch if you feel there's any that you can't live without that we should include in this article.

Troubleshooting Navisworks when it doesn’t start up and no error report created

Happy New Year to you all! I thought I'd start this year off with an article to help troubleshoot one of the rarer but most annoying problems some people have with Navisworks.

Most of the time Navisworks closes unexpectedly, a dialog appears asking you to send some details about what happened and an error report, to us at Autodesk. These are then used to improve the product so we strongly recommend you provide details whenever this happens of what you were doing at the point of the crash.

However there are occasions, particularly on start-up where an error report is not created. This blog post should help run through a series of steps to resolve the problem, or at least help us in support to narrow down the issue.

1. If this is a Network installation, you should be running the latest License Manager 11.9. http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Installation-Licensing/Autodesk-Network-License-Tools-11-9/td-p/2988862
2. Delete the Cascadeinfo.cas file. A new one will be created when you start Navisworks again.
   On Windows XP:
   C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Autodesk\Adlm
   On Windows Vista and Windows 7:
   C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Adlm
3. Delete your Navisworks user profiles under
   C:\Users\**YOUR USERID**\AppData\Roaming\
   C:\Users\All Users\Autodesk Navisworks Manage 2012
4. A Reinstall of Navisworks (not a repair) through 'Add or Remove Programs' in the Control Panel and restart the machine as an administrator.
5. Turn off Hardware Acceleration in the Navisworks Options > Interface > Display, you can access these options through Programs > Autodesk > Navisworks Manage/Simulate 2012 > Options Editor.
   If this resolves the problem then the Graphics Card/drivers aren't interacting well with Navisworks. A first step here would be to update the graphics card drivers from the manufacturer's website and re-enable Hardware Acceleration.

If Navisworks still doesn't start after trying these steps then please post on the Navisworks forum or log a support request through the Subscription Center if you have up to date subscription explaining the steps you have taken, details of the machine this happens on, any error messages and if anything has changed on the machine since this last worked.