BEP - Building Energy Performance: Extension calculates Building Energy Performance and generates calculation reports. More than 400 building materials and products with physical parameters are provided in the software. The software is created for Revit® and works on top of Building Information Detailing (BID).

For more information about Tools4Revit visit:  http://www.kadsolutions.net/products.html

Computers Turn Flat Photos Into 3-D Buildings:

The new system, PhotoCity, grew from the original work of a Cornell computer scientist, Noah Snavely, who while working on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington, developed a set of algorithms that generated three-dimensional models from unstructured collections of two-dimensional photos.

The original project was dubbed Photo Tourism and it has since been commercialized as Microsoft’s Photosynth service, making it possible for users to upload collections of photos that can then be viewed in a quasi three-dimensional montage with a Web browser.

However, Photosynth collections are generally limited to dozens or hundreds of photos. The researchers wanted to push — or “scale” — their technology to be able to handle tens of thousands or even millions of photos. They also wanted to use computer processing power to transform the photos into true three-dimensional images, or what they refer to as a “dense point cloud.”

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DFW Construction Expo:

Over the years, I have received several tweets and links a week to download Revit Families from multiple shareware sites.  Most recently, RevitSpace, which seems to be a great place to share families but BEWARE, you are at the mercy of the family creator.  I think anyone that takes the time to give Revit Families to the community for free is doing a wonderful job of keeping our industry involved.  Although, I have to say just because it looks like a great family does not mean it is one.

I recently downloaded some families from different shareware sites such as RevitCity and RevitSpace to see how well they were built, and to no surprise they could have been done with a bit more thought and planning.  After recreating some of these, I found that most could be cut by about 10-20% just in size alone and  that is just the beginning.  Some of them will even crash your programs if they are not made properly.  Even though 10% size reduction does not sound like much; multiply that by a few hundred or even a thousand families and your project is now multiple Gig's larger than it should be.  This is just one of the issues with downloading families so beware or be aware and use a trusted sources like KAD Solutions, REED Construction, or Autodesk Seek.