Reacting to our clients’ recent request on our BIM solution for Revit, Precast Concrete was updated with many useful features, delivering even more automation, flexibility and efficiency to the workflow of structural precast modelling.
Smart Details – tool to create connections and Smart Assemblies – tool for shop drawings were updated.
Here is a short overview of these new updates.
New functionality of SMART ASSEMBLIES
- A few small tweaks that enable user to automate position of views and section view heads, lock 3D view after it’s created or copy orientation of 3D view from template assembly and place Spot dimensions on Top/Bottom of host element.
- Automated Rotate by 180° is now possible as well, which helps a lot while working with precast floors and other elements in structural Revit model.
- Huge improvement for dimensioning – Smart Dimensions functionality is added to Smart Assemblies. It opens up new ways to dimension elements in the view, making preparation of shop drawings easier.
In the configuration window of Smart Dimensions you can:
- Define different grouping and filtering options;
- Define different dimension and text styles for different details;
- Separate dimensioning of Front/Back details;
- Define side of dimension lines where it should be located.
Furthermore, Smart Dimensions can dimension more categories and be used separately in any Revit view.
A few examples of automatic dimensioning:
4. Position of notes now has some additional options, which again provides more flexibility meeting customer’s requirements.
5. Far Clip Offset value and position of the view is now copied from template assembly. This saves time spent on adjusting view depth for each created view. Note that views must be on the sheet of Template assembly if you want to copy these properties.
6. Now you can apply Create Assembly command on assemblies, which were created with Revit. You can select two walls and create assembly with Revit. Then select this assembly and apply Create Assembly – now all hosted details will be added to the assembly, views created, dimensions placed, and views placed on the sheet.
Keep in mind, that you can apply Smart Assemblies on assemblies created with Autodesk Revit Precast, so it gives more tools to work with for an end-user.
Here is an example of L wall, created from two walls:
7. Build in place details. If you have 2 details, one Family is nested into the other one. When you want to leave one of them outside an assembly, you can add Build in Place, Yes/No parameter to it, switch it on and this detail will not be added to assembly.
New functionality of SMART DETAILS
Multi-Detail Manager. With many users’ requests on better handling and flexibility of details during insert, modify and update stages, we have added big update to Smart Details – possibility to use several configurations on the same element.
Just use the Insert Details command on the same element several times by using different configurations.
Afterwards with the help of Multi-Detail Manager you can define which configuration should be modified, updated or deleted.
- Template File Location. What does it do? First, create configurations that define how details should be placed and what families should be used. Save this file as a Template file. Now, if you open configurations in a new empty file – Smart Details will load all the families that are used in your configurations in the saved template file. This way you will no longer need to load all necessary Revit families manually to a new project. Just open configurations and start working.
- Group configurations. From now on you can assign configurations to groups. That enables a better management of configurations, it’s easier to separate them and find in the list before inserting.
In the Insert Details dialog – configurations are separated to different groups:
Those are all the updates in our BIM software Precast Concrete that can help you prepare your precast concrete models even more easily than before! We encourage you to click the little red bubbles in the TOOLS4BIM Dock – if you haven’t already! – and use these latest updates in your structural precast project today.
And if you’re not using our BIM solutions yet, we invite you to give them a try! Take a free trial of any of our BIM solutions. It’s very simple – just download the TOOLS4BIM Dock for your version of Revit, open Revit, and select the tool you’d like to try out.
