After my trip to Germany I had to spend all day yesterday catching up with my email. This can be a daunting task when it seems like you need to respond to everything at once. With the help of some friends over at Without A Net (Tom Stoeckel) I was led to a nice site that seems to have some very helpful ideas.
Check out: www.43folders.com It has some good information and tips on task management and ties into Getting things Done.
Now on to something completely different....
While in Munich, I received a lot of questions via email and live at the event about large coordinates in Revit products. It seemed to be the week about coordinates. I've blogged about coordinates before in The 2 Mile Barrier.
In 2010 Revit products there was a change to the way Revit imports DWG files with large coordinates that might be causing some headaches.
In 2010, you might see this error message when importing/linking in a DWG file:
This error message is meant to prevent problems with the accuracy of your BIM. Due to limitations with computers (not just a Revit problem!) and floating point math, when models get larger than two miles in Revit, the application can no longer be accurate enough to display geometry and dimensions correctly all the time and this can cause instability in the application (like crashes).
What do you do if you have a project that is bigger than two miles?
The best answer for the stability of the model would be break the project into chunks that are each smaller than two miles. This will allow you to model your project in Revit without problems. You will need to break your DWG file into pieces in order to insert it into Revit (because the error above gives you no other options), so you might want to consider breaking up your project as well. Besides this 2 mile limit, with a project this big, you probably will run into Memory related issues as well at some point as the file grows in complexity (that topic is for another day).
If you must model everything in one file, you can break your DWG file up into 2 mile by 2 mile pieces and insert them one at a time side by side. I remember doing this a lot for importing Aerial photographs into DWG files for doing pre-design work at the Civil Engineering office I worked for (those photos came in 1 mile by 1 mile quadrates and we had to line them up), which worked pretty well.
By importing smaller DWG files and piecing them together, will get you around this error message so that you can model everything in one file. I wouldn't recommend this to much though, because like the message says, this can cause Inaccuracies and Instabilities in your Revit project.
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I can get past the 2 mile radius for my revit project, but what if I am linking in a site plan that is using the state plane coordinate system and the origin and location of site is 100 times that distance?
I'm working with a civil engineer whose site is roughly 360miles,438miles away from 0,0 (origin). I have Revit Arch 2010 and I am not having any luck on getting the building project base points to do what I think they should do.
So far I have been able to move the site, in my dwg file, to the point 0,0. This will allow me to first of all get it into my Revit project, but then I logically think that if I move the project base point to the Northing/Easting given to me by the engineer it should work when going back to Civil 3d along with using the shared coordinates. The site itself is not larger than 2 miles, but it is located farther than that from 0,0.
Please help.
Posted by: Steve | October 13, 2009 at 03:01 PM