Worksharing with Bluestreak

If your not aware of Project Bluestreak, you should go check it out.  Over at Revit Op-ed, Steve Stafford has a nice post about the latest update. 

What is interesting about this update is that it includes the Autodesk Revit Activity Stream App, a new way to see the updates that are happening with a workshared project and it works with Revit Server. 

From the download site:

"The Revit Activity Stream app connects Revit to Bluestreak cloud services to help distributed teams more effectively collaborate as they work on one model. This Bluestreak app combines automated notifications of Revit worksharing events with informal team comments so team members can communicate when models are saved to central to ensure efficient hand-offs. The Revit Activity Stream app is compatible with the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Revit Architecture 2011, Revit Structure 2011, and Revit MEP 2011 software, as well as the Revit Server environment. Note: In order to use Autodesk Revit Activity Stream, you must also install Bluestreak Desktop."

You might remember that the worksharing monitor doesn't work with the new Revit Server (from 10 things to know about Revit Server), so here is a way to help you keep up to date with what is happening across your model. 

I highly encourage you to check it out.  Pretty cool stuff. 

Comments

[Chris Stevens]

Hi, I'm an Architecture Graduate student and have been using Revit for 4 or so years now. I really love your blog posts and am glad to have found the site. I have a question for you that I just ran into, do you take suggested topics that you could address??

[Harlan Brumm]

Hi Chris, We love suggestions for topics. Please let us know the topic you are interested in and we will try and do our best to cover it. If you need technical support though, as a student, I would recommend going to students.autodesk.com and posting your question there. We'd love to hear your suggestions for a topic though.

[Chris Stevens]

Ok, thanks. Its a problem I'm having with rendering a material on multiple objects. On the exterior of a building I have 4 'separate' Generic models representing siding (one on north side, west side, etc, and they're not all the same size). Each generic model has the same material applied to it, but with a rendering the materials are not lining up with each other. They all have the same material, but is there any way to adjust the material on a couple of the objects, without having to duplicate and create 4 separate materials for each side of the building?

I hope that makes sense. Maybe I'm the only one with this problem!? If there was a way to show you an image, you might understand it better.

But if you can, I'd appreciate any tutorial dealing with the issue.

Thanks

[Harlan Brumm]

Hi Chris,

We have talked about how to do this a little bit. See our post on rotating a material by instance or Type: http://revitclinic.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/07/rotate-a-material-by-instance-or-type.html

You can use the same method to adjust shift the location of a material so that it lines up correctly.

The key is to zoom into the material so that you can see the surface pattern on it (in a 3D view) and then use the TAB key to select one of the lines of the pattern, You can then use standard tools like move and rotate to position that line where you need it so that it matches the others. I hope this helps you out.

[Chris Stevens]

Wow, that is super helpful. Just a quick followup, what if I have a material that I created/modified, how do I make a unique surface pattern for it?

Thanks for those tips, that will be super helpful in the future!