Wednesday, July 22, 2009

3rd Party Applications - Eagle Point and Tools4Revit

There are a growing number of companies creating specific products intended to expand or enhance working with Revit.

Building Framing and other Utilities:
Recently Tools4Revit made their work available to me and I've been slowly working through their pretty comprehensive set of tools. I plan to post about some of their tools as soon as I feel competent to do so.

Site and Land Development:
I hope to get a chance to see the latest development from Eagle Point Software called LANDCADD for Revit. LANDCADD is hardly new but support for Revit is brand new, new enough that there isn't much information on their site yet. The release is tentatively scheduled for October 2009. You can read their press release HERE.

5 comments:

ixxx69 said...

I'm disturbed by this trend of adding modeling and documentation tools via third-parties to make up for Revit's deficiencies. It's one thing to create functionality that's not in the core scope of the application (e.g. energy analysis). It becomes a management nightmare keeping everything compatible with each other. Some apps are updated quickly for new versions, some not so quickly, and some not at all. It also feels like being nickle & dimes to death.

Steve said...

I have a post sitting in "drafts" about this very notion...guess I'll have to finish it.

Gregory Arkin said...

Ok, everybody delete all of your AutoCAD lisp routines and all of the plugins developed over the past 26 years.

Next, everyone stop developing iPhone and Pre apps. All of you Windows program developers and Gadget creators, put down your keyboards.

On a serious note, shouldn't we relish the creativity, freedom and flexibility of programmers adding features that Autodesk doesn't have the bandwith or resources to create?

Being the US distributor of Tools4Revit, and having our technical staff just having today, finished two days of intense training on their products, I can proudly say that the time savings of their products vastly supersedes the annoyance of having plugins in Revit.

The Sort & Mark program is beyond amazing and solves huges problems for Revit. The BID product which was just released is an amazing tool at having the flexibility to insert objects and changes paratmeters. The Truss program, although it'll have to wait for the home building market to bounce back, is an engineering masterpiece.

Steve, let me know anything we can do to help you maneuver through the products.

...and now back to my rant...Maybe we should all just go back to AutoCAD release 1.0, while talking on our rotary phones.

I have to go now and delete all of my firefox extensions.

I say, bring on all the tools that help design and build better buildings. Did you read today about how painful it will be to upgrade from XP to Windows 7? Now that's a logistical nightmare.

I had all Tools4Revit products installed in about 2 minutes. I'm sure we'll be addressing this for years to come.

Lastly, as far as managing all the software. Absolutely a IT/BIM Manager's nightmare and ixxx69 does have a great point there. The price we pay to have all of our toys.

Steve said...

Well if add-ins cost as little as an iPhone app or add-ins for Firefox we'd be on to something!!

Many of the apps are redundant and superfluous...do we really need a "Lighter-flame" on our iPhones, sure once for the sake of a laugh but really??

Tools we can't live without in Revit ought to be part of Revit. Tools that make "my niche" work viable in Revit are great for API development.

Mook said...

I mostly agree with G. Arkin. Look at all the 3rd party apps that were developed on top of Autocad, with many of those 3rd party apps being quite expensive.

Does anyone know why Autodesk chose to develop their new Plant design software suite on top of Autocad instead of using Revit? 3D Plant modeling would have been a natural for Revit. Seems to me that was a huge strategic mistake that Autodesk made with that decision to develop their Plant design suite on Autocad instead of Revit. What were they thinking?