Greetings Ladies and Gentlefucks!
So there is this retard that I assume is named 'Nick Middleton', whose parents are almost certainly related by blood, and who keeps spamming my comments. I barely keep up with this blog anymore since I only tangentially have to deal with Revit - but I still get the occasional e-mail telling me that someone has posted a comment, most of which appear on a blog post from April of 2019 where I was reviewing the 2020 release of Revit.
I generally just deleted them (forever...), figuring dude is probably just some kind of bot - but now I'm making it a small side-project to see if I can get through to this guy that nobody wants any of the idiotic products or services (which are all over the place - today's was about weight-loss coffee for fucks sake). I don't really care if he actually fucks off or not, but I'm going to have fun trying.
Anyway.
All Quiet On The Revit Front.
I hear the occasional dickweed stumbling through talk about clients wanting us to share in their 'coordination model' hell - but I laugh them off, and/or tell them to go fuck themselves (mostly depending on my mood at the time). The pair of 12 story towers project was one such mongolian clusterfuck, but the drawings I issued actually only came back with a small handful of fairly simple comments (so far), and it actually seems like they might've learned something about how to correctly do things after trying literally every single other way possible (just in case doing it incorrectly might work better).
I'm not holding my breath, because they still have to install it, commission it, test it, etc., but now I know most (if not all) of the players - including who I can and can't trust. Yesterday I did take-off from my own drawing in order to put together a bill of material for one of the systems we are using. I thought it was going to be time consuming because there were six iterations of it, but then I realized I only had to quantify three of them, then carefully extrapolate from there - so it only ended up taking an hour.
I'll be thrilled to see how badly they fuck it up in the field - and it will make my day if someone asks us to put them into their 'coordination model', because while they are actually designed in 3d, they aren't (to the best of my knowledge) in any kind of format that Revit would recognize - being that Revit is as useful as a sack of dismembered donkey dicks when it comes to importing or linking files from the various pieces of software that I actually use to design, calculate, and produce drawings (on time and on budget) from.
Nobody at Autodesk Autodick seems to be the least bit concerned with this problem - since, as it was the day I first posted on this Blog, nobody gives a fuck about helping the poor little peons who are stuck using it from day to day (granted, most people developing 3rd party software aren't that concerned with having their shit be compatible with Revit either - because fuck it).
The only thing that Revit has managed to fuck up for me lately was a set of drawings that we were forced to convert from .pdf to CAD (have fun trying to do that with Revit). We actually finally bought a set of conversion software - billed to the project that wouldn't provide us with CAD files (well, I think we *could've* gotten them, but they wanted an exorbitant amount of money per sheet). Prior to that we had been using various free online converters - but they tended to have 2 file/day limits (I found a few ways around that).
When it comes to converting from .pdf to .dwg results vary widely - mostly depending on what software was used to make the original drawings, what .pdf printer they used (scanned files, you might as well just shoot yourself in the head). Sometimes you get goddamned near 100% CAD files, with immaculate linework, text, etc. - but more often than not you get 'everything exploded'. And I do mean 'everything', i.e. - text is made up of individual line segments, arcs are individual lines, hatching is individual lines/dots, etc.
The one I had them buy was the one that I had the best luck with, but it can only do so much. I started converting files for a school that had been broken up into six sheets - one of which had a library/media center. The .pdfs had obviously come from Revit, as there was 10 billion times as much detail everywhere as necessary - but no place more unnecessary when it came to the desks/tables/dividers/etc. in the library. The file took forever to convert, and then the person who was trying to import it into their project file said it wouldn't come in.
I took a look at it - and sure enough, if you kept zooming in, you kept finding more and more and MORE detail - most likely because they used a manufacturer's families for their fancy-ass media center furniture that showed EVERY SINGLE GODDAMNED BRACKET, SCREW/BOLT, etc. all lovingly crafted in full 3d (which I can guarantee resulted in a bloated Revit file - and, in this case, a bloated .pdf).
I sketched a handful of the pieces of furniture in 2d, and deleted hundreds of millions of individual line segments, before cutting and pasting the top-view shapes into place. Suddenly the file went from buttfuckloads of megabytes to something more useable - and they were able to use it to design and issue drawings for the system we were hired to do.
Then it turned out there were other systems that nobody bothered to mention - but since I had just finished up some other projects and they were already onto another project, I decided to jump in and take care of them myself. The only problem I had with the way they had done their drawings is that they had left the project broken up into six pieces (the way it was broken up onto sheets) rather than combining them into one drawing and then breaking it up in paperspace views - but whatever.
If it had been my project from the get-go, I probably would've cleaned up the drawings a little more - as we don't care about 95% of the wall hatching (except for rated walls - but we usually call those out individually since we don't have a wall legend on our sheets), as well as fixing some of the other glitchy looking shit - some of which came from Revit - as you can see it on the .pdfs, and some of which came from the .pdf to .dwg conversion.
I definitely would've combined them - as it makes it easier to run a contiguous system throughout the project, and, since our drawings are not part of the Architectural/Structural/MEP/Civil set (like they were at my last job), I don't have to follow the sheet size, scale, or even break them up the same way at all onto sheets, but since they had already done the first system like this, I just kept it (I may or may not regret it by the time all is said and done).
As always -fuck Revit, fuck Autodesk, and fuck anyone willfully using, propagating, selling, promoting, 'developing', or profiting off of it.
Oh - and fuck 'nickmiddleton010'. Twice. With a whole roll of barbed wire coated in rubbing alcohol.
Since-fucking-cerely,
-The Revit MeP Skullfuck
Next Time: Fuck This Shit.
