You’re probably thinking those 2 acronyms just plain don’t belong together and for the most part you’re right. However, it has been kind of a running gag among the HOB crew and I thought I’d share what fuels our after hours adventures…. After Hours Adventures I am working on adding an AutoCAD like command line into Navisworks; we do love consoles! Andy is currently working on using Microsoft Access as an SQL gateway into our SharePoint system for bidirectional data sharing and linkage with our models; very cool! Skylar is currently refining his latest Autodesk App Store offering. It has been a lot longer process than I would think it should be, but at least I can confirm that Autodesk is doing everything they should be to protect their customers. The Music Queue It is important to note that we do listen to all kinds of stuff, but we do spend a lot of hours muscling our way through new ideas and we’ve found that some good electronic influenced music booming from a high end computer...

In a prior post I discussed my need to dig into the Plant 3D API for the purpose of converting P3D content into Autodesk Fabrication content. Well, it was a pretty huge success and works comparably to the Revit export workflow. Check out this Sch10 stainless underground conversion example. Blue is the original P3D content and Red is my CADmep converted content. I appropriately named this project after Zero Wing’s iconic “All your base are belong to us” phrase. Project Alyobabetous is indeed my Plant 3D converter, but that vague context is about all I’m going to share of my converter. I will however spend the rest of this post talking about the Plant 3D .Net plugin I made to extract the necessary information, provide the code to that plugin and some generic examples of how you might be able to leverage it. Disclaimer I provide the following code entirely without any notion of support and it should be considered a starting point for your own projects. Your welcome to ask a question...

A while back I did an overview of the VLA properties Fabrication objects expose to us. If you haven’t read that or aren’t entirely familiar with Fabrication VLA properties, then I would suggest reading this first: Autodesk Fabrication - VLA Properties Exposed While I was composing that post it was clear to me that the Notes property would need its own post. So, without further ado let’s talk about the Notes and why it is so important. Here are a couple bullet points: This is the only Read & Write property we have through VLA on Fabrication Objects. The Notes property is an ideal way to pass information to & from Fabrication COD scripts. By using Notes as the common information pass through we avoid writing information to text files and the information will always be contextually valid since it resides on the Object it pertains to. Prevents the creation of unnecessary amounts of COD scripts by passing valid data into the Notes for operations. By using the notes f...

Like AutoCAD, Fabrication MEP has its own API that can be used to read/write properties, and access different Fabrication objects.  If you have used .NET to create commands for AutoCAD in the past but had difficulty setting up a project to access Fabrication Items, this post may help. If you are new to setting up an AutoCAD project in .NET (the example below is in C#) the link Here will show you how to set up a new AutoCAD project in visual studio using VB.NET, but the setup for C# is the same.  If you are new to .NET and or programming, I recommend checking out Josh’s post: “Update my C# Roadmap”, particularly Bob Tabors class on Microsoft Virtual Academy: “C# Fundamentals for Absolute Beginners”.  After going through the videos and reading some examples in the help files and online, you should be ready to start poking around with customizing AutoCAD. A common object that users interact with in a Fabrication drawing is an “Item” which, depending on the version of Fabrication, has ...

In a previous post, “Son Of A Batch! AutoCAD Core Console Through Lisp”, I wrote about how the core console could be initiated through Lisp to run batch operations on a group of DWGs with the use of Static and Dynamic Script writing. While learning .NET, I wrote a plugin a few months ago that was the inspiration for that Post so I thought I would outline and share that plugin here. The plugin is called SonOfABatch and has three batch processing capabilities. This post will outline the general layout of the plugin, how to change attributes, how to plot, and how to remove X-Refs from a group of DWG’s. I am a Novice Programmer but with some research, it was not hard to find many useful resources online. I find that whenever I am researching how to do something in AutoCAD with .NET, I end up at the same site: Through the Interface. It is an awesome source of information that I am thankful for and if you are interested in learning to use .NET to customize AutoCAD, I highly recommend chec...

It has admittedly been a little quiet around here, but we have been very busy and switched gears multiple times. We got our internal buyoff and now waiting on the 3rd party budget approval for an extensive (6 month) BIM VR workflow research project; this looks like it’s a go. Skylar is getting ready to release his first Autodesk App Store offering and you will be seeing a post about that soon. Andy has been pretty bogged down developing new SOP’s and setting up a slew of new projects. While I have literally been bouncing around and dabbling in various API’s and trying to migrate onto C# as my primary language. With that said I have a nice DLL gift for Plant 3D users out there that will be in a future blog post. It will basically let you use lisp to request the common string properties, connector locations and connector vectors from P3D parts. I needed this to make a P3D -> Autodesk Fabrication converter. I don’t plan on providing that conversion tool, but I have been a starving...

It was another fine AU conference and my head is spinning with new or even evolved ideas. I had a two classes that pretty much tanked, but despite being sore from the 30 miles of walking I did have a good time and learned quite a bit about the future. This post is going to be a little rough and relatively short, but I am afraid it has to be to highlight a few important things and still be concise. The HOB crew has a particular interest in AR/VR and I did take some of this time to understand the state of the industry on these matters. One of the standouts in this area was Skanska, they seemed to have their hands in all kinds of cool stuff I fully intend on exploring for myself. I would say that our goals are more practical rather than presentation and I have clearly determined none of the presenters are really approaching the topic from the virtualized desktop we are badly wanting to pursue. We will be digging into that topic quite a bit next year and I think my starting point (for ...

Many of the posts so far have been about AutoCAD customization and Autolisp tips, so I thought I would write a post about a workflow that you may be able to incorporate into your BIM process (this is after all, the “House of BIM”). I was introduced to both CAD and programming by another contributor to this Blog, but I am a union Steamfitter by trade. I have been in the field on BIM projects and have seen some of the challenges of making the connection between the Model and the job site. Let’s say for example the craftsmen in the field attempts to install a piece of pipe fabrication and there is a bust (aka clash) with some electrical. The first step would of course be to make sure the fabrication is built to the dimensions on the spool drawing. The next step would be to locate the spool in the Model to see if all trades are installed per the approved coordinated model. Locating this spool on a large model can prove to be difficult, but with Search Sets, locating multiple spools in a...

In the 2000 release of AutoCAD we saw the introduction of Visual Lisp and it was very large leap forward that I couldn’t possibly convey the magnitude of its importance. This release brought Lisp wrappers for ActiveX/COM objects and the ability to properly debug a LSP file in a true IDE. An object of any kind has some form of basic method and/or property because everything derives from more fundamental object definition. When 3rd party (or vertical) objects are created they will receive some form of VLA exposure just by deriving from a base form like AcDbObject, but in the case of CADmep we were specifically given a several important ones beyond the standard implementation. These have served me quite well and I hope to document how you too can leverage their power. Throughout this post I will cover what VLA properties are, which CADmep properties are exposed, why they are important, where you are already using them and how to better use them moving forward. A brief introduction to ...

AutoCAD Plant 3D is a fairly robust program with one well-known and useful feature, which is the production of complete isometric drawings directly from model content. Plant 3D utilizes the PCF file format which is a standardized text file that contains information describing the pipe and fittings in the model. Plant 3D also uses its own standalone application to process these files into isos, called PnPIso.exe. If you use any of the iso production commands in Plant 3D and open your task manager, you will see that the PnPIso.exe process will be running and will terminate as soon as the drawings are produced. A few days ago, a colleague sent a screenshot of a post from Peter Quinn, the Plant 3D Product Manager at Autodesk, in which he briefly discussed initiating the Plant 3D PnPIso.exe through Python scripting (see below). I searched far and wide for the post to see if there was any further information but was unable to find anything at all related to the subject. Being of curious ...