Rent. That. Revit!

I’ve been waiting and hoping for this to happen for awhile now. For the past few months it’s been possible to do a monthly, quarterly, or annual rental of the AutoCAD Revit LT suite. I was looking at their site this morning, and see that now they offer a rental of the Building Design Suite as well! While this is not the ideal path long term (the break-even point compared to standard purchase plus subscription is about 19 months), this is a great solution for a small business trying to build capital or a company needing to do some temporary hiring to meet a staffing need for a large project.

I’ll post links below, but here are my takeaway points after reading through the FAQ:

• Standalone Named User license only – no Network license.
• Program is a local install, not the cloud version.
• Cloud credits are provided, and more may be purchased.
• There are no previous version rights, because no previous versions have been available on rental. The wording in the FAQ makes that sound like 2014 will be available as a previous version using rental plans once 2015 is released.

The main rental page: http://www.autodesk.com/buy/rental-plans

Building Design Suite (Standard, Premium, and Ultimate available): http://www.autodesk.com/suites/building-design-suite/buy

And of course, the FAQ: http://static.autodesk.net/content/dam/autodesk/www/docs/pdf/autodesk-rental-plans-faq.pdf

Preview Your Leader

I just realized I never shared this tip. It’s something that drove me nuts until I figured it out. Sometimes when adding a keynote, the keynote tag would be visible while placing, but not the leader. After placement, the leader and keynote both show up just fine. In my case, the reason was that my current workset was one that was hidden in the view. Changing the current workset to one that was visible brought back the leader visibility. Apparently keynotes (perhaps other annotation as well?) take on the internal workset of the view, not the user-defined workset that happens to be current. If anyone knows of other culprits that cause this visibility issue, feel free to comment and I’ll update this post.

P.S. I recognize the interesting timing on a post with this title. It’s just that I started this draft a long time ago and didn’t want to change it. If you came here expecting something else, sorry. I think #BigBird is still trending on Twitter.  .-)

Key? Not!

When using sheet keynotes, I’ve encountered the problem of an entry appearing in the list on the sheet, but not appearing in any view on the sheet. Even if the list and all views are removed from the sheet and replaced, the rogue entry still comes back.
The reason for this is that the keynote actually does exist in the view, it’s just not visible. The visibility of the keynote is dependent on the visibility of the item it is attached to. The trick is figuring out how to display the missing object. The most common culprits I’ve seen cause this particular problem are tagging linked models and keynoting before a view is finalized. If the view range or far clip are adjusted, items disappear. If a section is flipped, there could be even more. So be careful out there!

Also, for a bit of fun, add a dimension string along a wall, including windows. Then adjust the view range so the windows are not shown. The dimension string will no longer include them, but when you bring the view range back they will again be dimensioned. This is the same concept, and even though it can be frustrating and confusing coming from a CAD background, this ranks up there with one of the things I like the most about Revit.