Seasons Greetings

I'll use the politically correct version of the holiday greeting. All the best to you and yours this season and in the new year.

Since starting this new job, I have stepped back to ACAD 2008 so all of those wonderful new features that I enjoyed in 2011 are not with me. Ribbon, I miss you!
One of my coworkers had that problem of not being able to select something on defpoints. Remember to check to see if layer 0 is frozen or off when this happens to you. 0 and defpoints have some weird relationship that I still don't fully understand.
Cheers

Mysterious Width Changing Mtext

One of my counterparts had a problem today with a drawing he had saved last week. He had adjusted the width of literally hundreds of pieces of mtext to fit between some detail lines. When he opened the drawing this morning, all of the widths of his text boxes were very narrow and text was all over the place.
The culprit was his MTEXTCOLUMN system variable was set to 2 where it should be set to 0. It was always trying to make columns in his text. You want your mtext toolbar to look like this:

More Rendering in Revit MEP

I have been doing even more rendering in Revit to show light distribution patters to clients. To do this effectively, I have to use manufacturers IES files and make my own luminaires and put them on the model. Sometimes the the luminaire breaks in the model and I get no light from it.
You can tell when this happens because your distribution pattern turns into the generic type with the sphere around it. I have my IES files stored on a network drive, so I moved them to the C: drive of my computer in the Revit/IES folder with all of the other IES files. I then have to completely remove the family and then reload it and place it again. I then get light output from it and it is in the pattern that I expect. This seems to be working so far.

Rendering with Revit MEP

I have been doing a lot of rendering lately to present lighting layouts to a client. I have had to make my own light fixtures and use ies files from varying manufacturers. I have found that if you place the light source behind the glass in a fixture, the light will not show in a rendering. All I get is a point of light that appears to be on the surface of the glass and nothing is emitted from the fixture. When I pull the light source outside the glass, the light spills out and is reflected off surfaces around the fixture accurately. I then make the glass material self illuminating so it gives the illusion that the light is coming from inside the glass.
This seems to give me the best results in term of looking realistic for the client.

Vote for the Autodesk University Classes you want to see

I have voted for the classes that I want to see. They are mostly BIM centric with lighting and electrical thrown in there for good measure. If you haven't voted, go here to register and have your say:

AU Class Voting