Cross post - Revit Corinthian Column video

Please see my latest blog post over at my website:
http://paulaubin.com/blog/revit-corinthian-youtube-style/

Thanks.

Latest updates.

Please be sure to visit my new blog location for all the latest news and updates on books and other related items at Paul F. Aubin Consulting Services. Here is a recent Facebook page update.

Blog is moving

I have officially moved my blog to a new location. Please change your blog readers and bookmarks to point to: http://paulaubin.com/blog/

Thank you very much.

Christmas Wreath Sale - Support Boy Scout Troop 1615 - Till Nov 8th

Please pardon this interuption, but my son is selling Christmas Wreaths for his boy scout troop. If you would like to consider supporting his efforts, please visit this page: http://paulaubin.com/blog/wreaths/

Thank you.

Off Topic - Celestia

When I am not writing about Revit or AutoCAD, doing training or consulting, shuttling kids to ball games and activities, I have an interest in astronomy which I try to feed whenever I can. I try to drag the telescope out a couple times a year, I have a subscription to Sky and Telescope and I have a wonderful open source program called Celestia! This little wonder is an accurate 3D representation of the solar system (or really the galaxy). There are thousands of stars and other celestial objects in this program accurately scaled. You can jump in your virtual rocket ship and fly to the moon, the sun, the stars or beyond. best of all, since all distances are accurate, you really get a sense of just how long it would take to travel to these places. It is mind-blowing really!

Well, Celestia also let's us do the impossible. We can turn on our warp drive and just like the movies fly instantly to distant stars and planets. I have spent hours marveling at the wonders of the universe in this spectacular program.  Best of all it is FREE!

I also give presentation son this program every year to the children at my kid's school. They love it. To help me with the presentation, I have turned to a wonderful set of education resources for Celestia created by Frank Gregorio. Frank is a teacher in Manassas VA. Frank's education version of Celestia is NOT free, but it is priced VERY reasonably and I think worth every penny. He provides a customized version of the program complete with many exciting add-ons and over 40 hours of education activities and tutorials that you can follow alone or in a group to learn all sorts of fascinating facts about our solar system and universe. Since I have ordered Frank's education version, I am on his email list and recently he sent along the following offer for the holidays. If you are looking for something truly unique for the astronomy buff in your life, then Celestia Education Activities is worth a serious look:

-----

I hope you have been enjoying Celestia Educational Activities and the wonders of the cosmos it has taken you to.  If so, perhaps you know of someone else who would love to take these exciting educational journeys through the Celestia Universe.

Celestia Educational Activities would make an ideal Xmas or Hanukkah gift, or birthday or appreciation gift for a family member, friend or work associate who is captivated by Astronomy and the stars, and would love to also travel deep into space in the Celestia 1.   At only $29 (plus shipping) for a personal use license, its 40+ hours of space journeys can provide many thrilling hours of enjoyment for your family and friends.

To order a gift DVD or CD set today in plenty of time for the holidays, just visit http://gregs-educational.info.  We will ship it to your home or business address, or to any shipping address you wish.

Warmest Regards,

Frank Gregorio  


-----
In the interest of full disclosure, I do not receive any of the proceeds for sales of Celestia Education Activities. I was not asked to promote them. I simply love the program and want to share it with as many folks as I can. 


I hope you will give it a try. And remember, the program is also available for free if you are not interested in the customized education version or the activities, you can learn more here. I hope you like it. Thanks. 

Launch!

The new Paulaubin.com is here. Over the next few days, we'll be tweaking it and making minor updates and corrections, but we are live (and thankfully my email is working again). Please pay us a visit at:

www.paulaubin.com

Thanks very much. Books are actually starting to publish now, so stay tuned for more announcements.

PaulAubin dot Com Overhaul

My website is currently undergoing a major upgrade. As such, if you are trying to visit today or in the next 48 hours it might appear to be down. We are moving to a new server and rebuilding all the backend. It is a very exciting time for us and I hope that this little hiccup in service is not an inconvenience to anyone. I may also experience some hiccups in email during the transition, so if you need to reach me, please use my gmail: paulfaubin and/or give me a call.

Thank you very much and stay tuned for an announcement when the new site is up and running!

The Book is here!

After a VERY long wait this cycle, I am happy to announce that today I received my copy of The Aubin Academy Master Series: Revit Architecture 2011.

This is the 2011 edition of my Revit Architecture book: Paul F. Aubin's Mastering Revit Architecture 2010. This year we have re-branded this and other books under the new banner of "The Aubin Academy Master Series."  This was done for a few reasons. First, there was already (and has been for some time) another title called "Mastering Revit Architecture." It is by another publisher and by different authors. So part of the re-branding is an attempt to eliminate some of the confusion caused by having two different books with essentially the same title. The other reason for the switch is to help group all of my books (4 titles this year) under a single banner.

Here is a photo of the actual book! Now I really do believe that it has published because I am holding it in my hands!

To give you a sneak peak at some of what you can expect to find in its pages please visit some of the previous posts like these which include excerpts from the topics in the book on making custom elevation tags:
Elevation Tags Part 1
Elevation Tags Part 2

And this excerpt that details the process of setting up shared coordinates in a Revit project.
Excerpt for Chapter 6.

Book Dataset
The book no longer includes a CD/DVD. You download the dataset online.
You can find the complete dataset for the book here.
This is on a page hosted by the publisher. To see the complete book page on CengageBrain (the publisher's site), click here.

The other three books in the Aubin Academy Master Series are:

The Aubin Academy Master Series: AutoCAD Architecture 2011 - Due October 27

The Aubin Academy Master Series: AutoCAD MEP 2011 (co-authored with Darryl McClellan, Martin Schmid and Gregg Stanley) - Due October 27

The Aubin Academy Master Series: Revit MEP 2011 (co-authored with Darryl McClellan, Martin Schmid and Gregg Stanley) - Due in December

And don't forget my Revit Architecture Essentials Training at lynda.com.

VICO Software is hiring

VICO Software is fast growing company offering 4D and 5D solutions to the AECO industry. And, they are hiring! VICO is actively recruiting Project Engineers in both northern and southern California. Please read through the job description.

Autodesk University Schedules

Hello:

I hope that you will all make the trip to Las Vegas this year for Autodesk University 2010. I am speaking at 6 classes total this year! Three where I am the primary speaker and three where I am co-speaking with others. I will be teaching two sessions with my MEP co-authors - Gregg, Martin and Darryl. and another with my longtime friend and collaborator Matt Dillon. Each of these guys is a top notch AU speaker as well and they have been speaking for years both individually and separately. I have included all of our schedules here in a handy chart in case you are looking for good classes to attend. Thanks and again, hope to see you there!

Aubin Academy Master Series: AutoCAD MEP 2011

It has been an interesting summer. The exciting news is that all of my books are rebranded this year as the "Aubin Academy Master Series" - Exciting! This includes AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD MEP, Revit Architecture and new this year: Revit MEP! (need to get that one finished, but more on that later).

The disappointing news is that we have experienced delays at the publisher and all the rebranded books are LATE. Arrgggg. Well, to try to soften the blow a little, I am going to post some sample chapters. Let's start with a sample from the new edition of the AutoCAD MEP book. You can find the complete text of Chapter 6 here.

Please enjoy!

Custom Revit Elevation Tags - Part 2

Sorry it has taken me a while to get back to this post. In a post a couple weeks ago, I shared the steps to create a custom elevation tag with a PDF excerpt from the soon to be published Aubin Academy Master Series: Revit Architecture 2011. (Sorry the book is slow to store shelves. I am assured by the publisher that it will be here soon...)

Meanwhile, here is the second part of the tutorial on creating and adding custom elevation tags in Revit Architecture 2011. This part of the tutorial is from Chapter 4 in the new book. The previously posted excerpt was from Chapter 10. (In the book, I show you first how to load a pre-built tag that I provide in Chapter 4, and then how to build it yourself later in Chapter 10).

You can find a PDF with the steps here.

If you did not build the tag, the previous post explaining how to do so, or you can simply download the completed Revit file here.

I hope you find this post helpful. Have fun creating your new elevation tags!

Teaching Revit at Moraine Valley this Fall

I'll be teaching MDT-292 at Moraine Valley Community College again this Fall. The course is Tuesday and Thursday evenings 6:00 to 8:15 PM. The college description for the course is found toward the bottom of this page: http://www.morainevalley.edu/schedule/bin/descriptions.asp?prefix=MDT.

Moraine Valley Community College is located in Palos Hills, IL. If you are in the Chicago area, you might want to check it out.

Aubin Academy Master Series: Revit Architecture 2011

The 2011 edition of Paul F. Aubin's Mastering Revit Architecture is almost here. The book is being re-branded this year as part of the Aubin Academy Master Series. As we do every year, the entire book has been revised, new material added for 2011, existing content enhanced to reflect current best-practices and techniques and where found, errors and omissions fixed. This year's edition will be a little larger than last years reflecting new features for 2011.

To give you an example, I would like to share an extract of the text with you here. An exciting new feature in 2011 is the long requested ability to customize elevation tags. The 2011 edition of the book includes two tutorials, one detailing how to load and apply a custom elevation tag (in Chapter 4) and another detailing how to build the custom tag from scratch in the Family Editor (this is in Chapter 10). I have extracted the text of the tutorial from Chapter 10 and posted it here. Enjoy! I will post the steps from Chapter 4 in a future post, so stay tuned.

Excerpt from Chapter 10 of Aubin Academy Master Series: Revit Architecture 2011:

Creating Custom Elevation Tags (download PDF).

More free Revit videos on lynda.com

Several samples of the Revit Architecture 2011 Essentials training that I authored on lynda.com are available for viewing on YouTube.

Here they are:

Revit Architecture 2011 Essential Training now on lynda.com

I am pleased to announce the availability of my first course for lynda.com. lynda.com has been providing high quality video training for creative software for many years. There are thousands of courses to choose from including Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dream Weaver, Flash), Microsoft projects (Office 2007, Office 2010), portable devices (iPhone) and much more.

The list of Autodesk product training offerings has been increasing each year as well with courses currently available for AutoCAD, 3ds Max, Maya, Sketchbook Pro and now, just released, Revit Architecture 2011 by yours truly! I am thrilled to join such an expert team of authors as those assembled by lynda.com.

In this 8 1/2 hour course, I cover all the basics of Revit from modeling, adding annotation, creating basic Families, linking files, plotting and more. You can read the complete description of the course and view free sample movies here.

Autodesk University

I'll be speaking again at Autodesk University this year. I have quite a mix. I have a very exciting class on Revit Architecture planned called "Make a Strong Finish! - Revit, Interiors and Finishes". I'll be joining Matt Dillon and Matt Stachoni in a class called "Real Life Stories of the BIM Patrol". Should be fun and exciting.

 

I'll be teaching two classes on AutoCAD Architecture: One on creating the ultimate Door Schedule, and a reprise of my popular "Breaking free of the plan" class. Finally, I will be joined by my co-authors Martin Schmid, Darryl McClelland and Gregg Stanley for two panel discussion: one on AutoCAD MEP and the other on Revit MEP, both titled: "Ask the Experts."

I'll post more details when I have them, but if you haven't attended AU before, this is the premiere training and networking event of the year. If you have attended, then you know what I mean. Hope to see you all there!

Book Updates

So its summertime again and that means trying to get book updates finished! We have four books slated for release this year and some re-branding as well. The four books are:


















The Aubin Academy Mastering Series: Revit Architecture 2011 (formally Paul F. Aubin's Mastering Revit Architecture).

The Aubin Academy Mastering Series: AutoCAD MEP 2011 (formally Mastering AutoCAD MEP)

These two are slated to hit stores late August. 

The Aubin Academy Mastering Series: AutoCAD Architecture 2011 (formally Mastering AutoCAD Architecture). This one should hit the streets by mid-September.  

Finally, we have a new title this year: 

The Aubin Academy Mastering Series: Revit MEP 2011. I am co-authoring this my three existing co-authors Gregg Stanley, Darryl McClelland and Martin Schmid. We don't have a pub date for this one yet, but hope to have it out late Fall.  

Workset Crash Solved

Thanks to some folks who left comments here on my previous post, I have figured out the reason for my Revit Workset Crash! Thanks very much.

Here is a cross-post of the solution. This is my response to the AUGI thread that ultimately led to the solution.
If you want to read the entire AUGI thread, you can find it here.

--

I was having a similar issue. I placed a post about it on my blog and got some comments back, one of which directed me to this thread. Steve's reply about the factory post (and disabling addons) did the trick! (Isn't the Internet great? Blog post > Comment > Link to AUGI > Post > Link to Factory > Success! )

Anyhow, here is the summary: In Revit Arch and MEP 2011, I could create a Workshared project, but the next time I tried to open the Worksets dialog, I would crash Revit. STC worked, Save worked, just if you click Worksets, poof.

So, I dragged all Addins to my desktop, tried it, it worked fine. SOOO, I began adding them back to the folder one at a time.

Worksharing monitor - check
Batch Plot - check
MEP Space Naming - check
Revit DB Link - check
Model Review - check
Google Link - check
Avatech Utilities - check (so glad this wasn't it. I use these tools all the time - great stuff).
Revit Extensions - POOF - This is the one!

When I launch, I get the following error:

Revit cannot run the external application "ARECRevitStart" contact the provide of this external tool with the information below

System.IO.FileLoadException
System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'AREXManager,
Version=2011.0.0.1408, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The
parameter is incorrect. ﴾Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070057 ﴾E_INVALIDARG﴿﴿
File name: 'AREXManager, Version=2011.0.0.1408, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' ‐‐‐>
System.ArgumentException: The path is not of a legal form.
   at System.IO.Path.NormalizePathFast﴾String path, Boolean fullCheck﴿
   at System.IO.Path.GetFullPathInternal﴾String path﴿
   at System.IO.Directory.InternalGetFileDirectoryNames﴾String path, String userPathOriginal,
String searchPattern, Boolean includeFiles, Boolean includeDirs, SearchOption searchOption﴿
   at System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories﴾String path, String searchPattern, SearchOption
searchOption﴿
   at System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories﴾String path﴿
   at 16X1KUK4svrrlwHMOP.vhGAR3PPbtEL1aD7bU.7KsIl5cW4﴾Object , ResolveEventArgs , String ,
Assembly ﴿
   at System.AppDomain.OnAssemblyResolveEvent﴾String assemblyFullName﴿
   at REX.Common.Start.REXStartProxy.OnStartup﴾﴿
   at REX.AREXRevitStart.AREXRevitStart.OnStartup﴾UIControlledApplication application﴿
   at revitManagedAppStartup﴾MFCApp* pMFCApp, AString* assemblyName, AString* className,
AString* exceptionName, AString* exceptionMessage﴿


You can click CLose and continue. Now admitedly, this is not the first time I have seen this error. I just figured, well, until I need that addon, I won't worry about it. :-) Silly me. Well, I have uninstalled it, submitted the report to Autodesk and all systems seem to be a go now.

Thanks to the folks who posted on my blog and helped out here.

Workset Crash

Anyone else having this issue? In Revit 2011, anytime I try to access the Workset dialog, Revit crashes. Happens both when I click the Worksets button and when I try to use the Specify option during open.

What is most annoying is that I get this message about four times before it finishes crashing. Even worse than that, it happens in both Revit Architecture and Revit MEP 2011. I don't have Revit Structure installed, but i suspect it would happen there too.

Anyone have a potential solution? I have tried the repair and reinstall options. I have not tried to uninstall and reinstall yet, because I am not looking forward to having to do that and wait an hour or so for the process to complete, but that is coming next...