Revit across the internet?

Great post today from Steve over at OpEd. He brings up a good point about trying to make Revit do things it's not really designed to do. Often time these work arounds end up costing you more time and money in the long run. I had similar issue this morning. My firm is currently working with another firm on a project located in a different state but close to one of our offices. The local firm is the prime and we're handling the interiors. At the beginning of the project it was decided that everyone work in the same model and we'd use Revit Server to host the models. If you used Revit Server before you know that working over different networks is very difficult and not really supported by Autodesk anyway. However, we do it because we are gluttons for punishment and because we want the ability to work in the same model. 

This method worked while the model was small and few people were working in it. Once the model grew and more more links were added it became apparent hosting the model in a single location and creating local files over VPN access was the wrong decision. At the worst point it was taking 4.5 hours to open the model. This was not sustainable and of course it disrupted the work flow of all those involved in the project. We then had to brainstorm to figure out the best way to resolve the problem. We settled on creating dead links for the MEP model as well as the structural model which has it's own set of problems. The project is now running somewhat smoothly with 30min. sync times. If it gets worse we're thinking of sending our staff to work from our partners office until the project is done. 

I guess the moral of the story is two fold. Planning is everything and if at all possible don't try to make Revit do what it's not really designed to do.    

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.