Borrowing Licenses

Let me preface this with a warning. I hesitate to tell everyone how to do this, but it's important to know how to do it to avoid catastrophe. Do not abuse this capability. (End of Warning).

Ever had the network crash the day you were supposed to send out a job, leaving you unable to pull a Revit license? The feelings of helplessness and anger at the system are shared by many. This can be avoided with some planning. A day or two before the deadline, copy the project folder onto your desktop. Keep this updated as you continue to save your work onto the server. In the event of a server crash, you're still up and running with your project files. At the same time, open Revit and go to Help-Product and License Information. Click the button that says "Borrow" beside the network license. A calendar will open up asking you to select a date to borrow a license until. Select the day after your project deadline. You now will have a borrowed license on your computer till that day. After that day, the license will automatically return itself to the server.

Let the network die, server crash, whatever. You'll still have your files and be able to work in Revit (though you might have some issues printing and emailing).

Rendered Walkthroughs

Revit 2011 (and 2010) allow you to create walkthroughs that are rendered. No more cartoon-like shaded with edges walkthroughs. Granted, you need a computer with enough juice to output renderings, but still, pretty sweet. To make things easier, here's a few tips on creating walkthroughs.

1. Keep the image small (the videos below are 8"x4").
2. Be sure and clean out the windows temp file (solution here).
3. Render at a reasonable quality (for the smaller images, medium quality is usually fine).
4. To make the rendering a bit quicker, uncheck the lighting movement.
5. Output to jpeg, not avi, and only output a few hundred frames at a time.
6. After all frames have been exported, use VirtualDub or a similar program to reassemble.

Here's a couple of examples (they look much better in real life, not on the small flash video)