Design Review Mobile

So I just wanted to post a little something about the new Design Review Mobile and Autodesk Cloud services. I've been able to test this new service from Autodesk using one of the ipads in our office. In my opinion this will at some point become a usable service, but right now...not so much. I was able to download the app and get up and running easy enough. Uploading files to the cloud was a piece of cake. The markup tools are simple and easy to use, and because you're working on the cloud those mark ups are automatically visible from the viewer on the cloud.
I had a bit of trouble manipulating the 3D model. It's a bit difficult to spin the model around to the opposite side if you need to see that. In fact I haven't been able to get around to the back side of my model using my ipad yet. Pan and zoom work great, orbiting is a bit tricky especially when you can't establish a pivot point.
In addition to the 3D model viewing trouble I, and a few others, had problems with viewing 2D dwf sheet views generated from Revit. We all had the same problem. When trying to view the sheet view we'd get an error saying "The page you are attempting to view is too large to be displayed on your device.", which didn't make much sense since the 2D views were much smaller than the 3D view.
This was the explanation from Autodesk:
"This error means your device's available memory isn't large enough to hold the data contained in a given sheet. There are many factors which contribute to this size, including the number of and size of embedded bitmaps and the number of total drawable objects in a sheet.

This error does not mean that the sheet's resolution is too large, that there isn't enough storage space on your device, or the original document's file size is too large. It has no relation to your Autodesk Cloud Document storage capacity.

 We are investigating what options there are for supporting larger 2D data sets on these low memory devices. However, currently if you encounter this error on your device it means the sheet takes up too much memory on the device to be viewed."
 
Still waiting to hear from them on what options there are for supporting large 2D data sets. All in all I'm pleased to see this type of move from Autodesk. I think once we're able to work out the kinks this will be a great way for CA folks to work in the field. No more lugging around a huge set of drawings, quicker response times for errors and problems in the field.
 
So if you've got an ipad download the app and give it a whirl.

I'm back!

So I understand this is the first post I've done in a while, but I've turned a new leaf what can I say.

While reading a post from David Light's blog this morning he referenced an article written by Martyn Day for AEC Magazine. Below is a quote from the article. I'm amazed at how software is driving the hardware these days.


"The single model utopia also does not make sense from a hardware perspective. Depending on the software being used, BIM models get very big, very fast. David Light from HOK recently told me that the firm is stipulating 24GB of RAM for its new workstations so it can hold the Revit datasets without paging to disk on its biggest projects. This is a considerable investment. BIM simply cannot run on old machines designed for running AutoCAD or VectorWorks. Other BIM modellers are not quite so memory hungry but they still quickly start to swell as the model detail grows."

Great article...give it a read.