Star Wars - Lego Porn

A long time ago, I gave up the right to think that anybody has too much time on their hands....

I love this kind of crap...Its probably old news but when a guy who calls himself 'Marshall Banana' makes a 3 foot long Sandcrawler out of Legos, I don't think there could be enough recognition and applause.

Marshall's Flickr Gallery

Work in Progress Images

Good on you buddy!

Noah's Loaf - Resorts World Sentosa

I am a strong proponent of learning to use the Conceptual Massing Editor in Revit by modeling the buildings we see everyday.  Well, this one, The Maritime Museum at Resorts World Sentosa, had been bothering me for a while.

I am not aiming to accuratley recreate the form.  I am more interested in generating a family that could get me there!  So in this post i'll tackle the general, boat-like shape and in another week I'll go for the ribs and other stuff.  So join me as we look at how i did this...

and this...

and this...

and this...

Its a long way to the top....



This is the list of parameters if anyone is interested, notice that none of them are reporting parameters, this is all straight-forward behavior.

Here is a link to the family:

Noahs Ark.RFA

Authentic Vietnamese Pho

Its been a while since posting.  I have been traveling....and I went to Ho Chi Minh City.  This isn't a food blog, I know, but this place is worth mentioning because it was awesome.

I got a tip on this place from a random HCMC food guide.  The review is at the bottom of the page, they said:

Ut Nhung: 109/7 Nguyen Thien Thuat Street, Dist.3.

Jon Dillingham from the What's On Guide to Ho Chi Minh City claims this is one of the best phở shacks in the city: "This tiny phở shack doesn't have a menu," he writes. "The little hole-in-the-wall doesn't even have tra da, drinks are supplied by neighboring vendors. All Ut Nhung does is make one kind of pho: phở bo tai nam (pho with rare beef and well-done beef flank). They serve one of the best versions of this dish in town for VND11,000. In a hem off Guitar Street where Districts 1, 3, 5 and 10 meet, Ut Nhung has no sign. Just look for the tiny house with a huge cauldron of broth tended to by a bald lady surrounded by hungry pho eaters.
"The broth here is extra fatty and marrow is served in your soup. The raw meat is healthy and red before thrown into your bowl. The taste of the rare beef is likely to be some of the freshest you'll ever have in a city.
"Pho in Vietnam is a lot like burgers and fries in America or fish and chips in the UK: hundreds of places do it well, but special places like Ut Nhung make it nearly perfect."


With a recommendation like that, I had to give it a shot!

We found it pretty easily and though there was a language barrier, these people were so happy we'd come, they bent over backwards to help us out.  We asked for cold water but the shop didn't have anything, so they grabbed a guy with a motorbike from the house next door and sent him off to 7-11 for us...It was awesome.

Google Map to the general area:


View Nguyen Thien Thuat - Guitar Street in a larger map

Found the street:

Found a guitar shop

Found the Alley

This is the guitar shop at the alley entrance

This is the place....Both the smell and the fact that it was the only PHO shop in eyesight gave it away.

"Mr.Only-Guy-In-The-Neighborhood-Who-Speaks-English" and "Mrs. Brisket-Chopper"

The Menu.  Direct, to the point.... In the morning, they serve the clear broth Pho that most foreigners know and love.  In the afternoons, its the hearty, marrow-laden stew that i can no longer imagine living without!

The Broth...I'd like to make a request for the AUGI Beer-Bust next year!

Chopping the Brisket

Into the broth....this is how heaven on earth is created....

Some Noodles

Some garnish...

And Voila!

If you are in the area, I highly recommend it....

Regularly scheduled REVIT Non-Sense will return shortly...

Comment Tracking Using Noteblock Scheduling

BACKDROP 1:

A long time ago, I came across a very talented young man named Justin Rumley who was working for a facade manufacturer in the Mid-west on the Sprint Center.  He was giving me a model of all the facade embeds and parts and pieces.  The model was very good, very accurate, but i asked him why he had done it all in Sketchup when there were so many other more sophisticated tools around.  His comment was very straightforward and i have always remembered it:

"Sometimes SMART is DUMB, and DUMB is SMART"

This statement alone could be the basis of a lengthy discourse....for another day.

BACKDROP 2:

I recently had a brief email discussion with some other voices from the blog-o-sphere about the various strengths and weakness of the many available 3d and online collaboration tools.  How some of them don't yet play well REVIT....tracking documents, comments and changes is still a bit of a hassel...etc. etc....no holy grail yet exists...

THE CURRENT SITUATION

The builder/client for my current project is very dedicated to using Revit and has trained up a crew to both review our models for coordination and manipulate the models for their own use.  A coordination reporting work flow was developed where they would:

1. Create a model called COMMENTS.RVT
2. Link our submitted design models into their COMMENTS.RVT
3. Create a series of sheets with plans, sections and 3D views to illustrate the coordination errors.
4. Print and send us PDFs of these sheets.  Just PDFs, nothing more.

A rather simplistic method to communicate errors, but effective for certain...yet one problem existed.  Their comments were all made as simple text with leaders on the sheets, thus couldn't be tracked without a ton of additional, separate effort.  I watched the guy on the architectural team struggle as he spent more than 2/3 of his time organizing the comments into an excel spreadsheet so we could respond/act appropriately.  A similar amount of time is wasted finding a view in our own models to examine the problem

We spent far more time organizing the data and finding the problems than correcting the errors.  Effective system? Yes. Efficient system?  HELL NO!

BIMTroublemaker to the rescue!

Trying to get the team to start using navis to review and generate comments isn't really an option.  Additionally, the documents they were sending us were extremely effective at describing the problems.  The problem lay in how comments are generated, tracked and resolved.

I recently found the NOTEBLOCK schedule in Revit's bevy of scheduling tools and realized that a solution could be found there:

This schedule will track pieces of annotation and their parameters.

 Sooooo....I made a simple generic annotation that would graphically show a comment and a number:

 I loaded additional text parameters in the family like this:

 unfortunately, i couldn't automate either the sheet/view reference or the errant condition locational parameters....maybe on the next job.

but now, i can schedule generate my note-block schedule and i get:

 But wait, there's more!

Because I have taken the FUZZY MATH ESSENTIALS course at AU, I was able to figure out a slick way to make the comment change color according to its status!  The trick with this is controlling status through a series of fixed check boxes.  There is even an error message that comes up when more than one box is checked, or no boxes are checked!

This is the programming if anyone is interested:

Sure, navis and tekla bimsight and horizontal glue are really great programs.  I like them.  But this tool works in a very simple and DUMB work flow:

1. Client sends me his COMMENTS.RVT (sans links its less than 5mb) along with a PDF print out showing what they want to illustrate
2. We open the COMMENTS.RVT, link in our current design models, which will then show up in all the preset views.
3. Address the comments accordingly and version the COMMENTS.RVT model
4. Send COMMENTS.RVT back and forth until all comments are resolved

Yahtzee!  The architect is really happy.  The client guy is really happy.  Dumb is Smart, Smart is Dumb.  And i feel like i did something useful...rather than the other monkey-business i spend my time screwing around with.

Download a sample of the block here:

Trackable Comment Annotation.RFA

BTW, if anyone knows the whereabouts of Justin Rumley, I'd love to hear from him.  BIMTROUBLEMAKER@gmail.com

TBT

Complex Rigging pt.3 - and now for something completely useless

Once i saw Phil Read's crazy star.  I tried to build it and succeeded.  but this was long before i figured out how to use surface patterns and nodes.  This is going to be a little variation on the star things, with a bit of David Light's ideas about helixes thrown in.

Make 3 reference circles with parameter-driven radii.  Connect them and suck in the waist line.

divide the surface so that there are only 2 panels vertically. 

Go to the SURFACE REPRESENTATION and pick NODE.  Place Reference Points on the appropriate nodes.  Pick them 3 at a time and hit the CONNECT POINTS WITH LINES button.  Once you have gone all the way around, you should have something like this

 I placed a reference point on each leg which hosts a circle to make some bones.  I dunno why but i had to do this individually for each leg....and i got this:

I brought the assembly into a project environment, copied it and rotated it a bit and got this:

see...absolutley worthless...

BIM Related Lawsuit: Sounds like Trouble to me....

A board member at a very successful architectural practice once told me that "We get paid to DESIGN the buildings, not build them"

Case in point from Architectural Record:
BIM Lawsuit Offers Cautionary Tale

How long until this story gets blown wildly out of proportion?

BCA Buildsmart Conference

Speaking at BCA Buildsmart today.

Can you spot the troublemaker in this lineup?

http://conference.sgcpw.com/build-smart-conference/speakers-biographies/track-1-bim-and-construction-i-t/