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Wednesday, January 22, 2014

2013 – Year in Review

Awards season is upon us and it's once again time to recognize exceptional performers and my favorite products on the Revit Add-ons blog.

Products that I presented Editor's Choice awards to during 2013 are as follows...

As a Bentley BIM user for 7 years, one of my frequent requests to the development team was to add what I called "depth queuing" to 2D elevation views, presenting what was closer to the "camera" as darker linework and what was further away lighter. This request was often met with puzzled looks, and sometimes even downright disdain. Paolo Emilio Serra's View Depth Override macro provides the solution I always wanted, but for Revit...and it also works in 3D views! Bravo Paolo!

With the alpha release of TTX, the Advanced Computational Modeling group at Thornton Tomasetti delivered on a vision of interoperability between structural analysis and modeling packages including Revit, Grasshopper, Tekla, SAP and very soon RAM and ETABS by adding a database for syncing between the different packages.

Over on his dp Stuff site, Dima Chiriacov releases free Revit Add-ins. I was happy to award Dima an Editor's Choice award for his UpdateAreaCalcs add-in, a time-saver for rooms and areas that can be used to perform simple mathematical calculations on two parameters to populate a third.

KiwiCodes Bonus Tools won for sheer utility and value. (KiwiCodes has really great branding too.)

Purveyors of many quality add-ins, Case won an award for their free Room and Space Insertion Point to Centroid add-in for centering text in areas. It's perfect for anal retentive sorts like me.

Tools4Revit landed an award for their free Cut Opening LT add-in, used to automatically create penetrations for ducts, pipes, cable trays and conduits.

The free ClarkDietrich Wall Type Creator "intelligently incorporates detailed information on wall elements and design properties, such as UL assemblies based on fire rating requirements, STC sound ratings and limiting height design" for powerful wall assemblies.

Case won a second award, this time for their productivity-enhancing free View Template Controller add-in for Revit 2014 which is used to quickly and intuitively manage which templates are assigned to what views.

SparkFrame is a free cloud-based collaboration platform for Revit projects. It offers an efficient way for A/E/C design teams to communicate while using BIM.

On the People's Choice front, below is an image showing all-time pageviews through today's date:


With 5,176 pageviews since I posted about it in April 2013, Crowd, a free random element generator, was a true crowd pleaser.

CTC's self-descriptive Revit Excel Link netted 3,684 pageviews since the last awards on March 27, 2013.

CADtoEarth, the add-in for coordinating Revit with Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth and last year's People's Choice champion, netted 1,665 pageviews over the same period.

Excluding industrial vendors Autodesk and Graphisoft, LindabRevitTools, an add-in for light gauge steel framing, drops in at #4 overall, but has held steady since March of last year.

Rounding out the chart is AR Software Solutions for Revit: ARUtils, ARRevision, and ARHead of the Family which weighed in with a strong 1,209 pageviews all time.

Thanks to all the developers out there who work to make our Revit lives better, and congratulations to this year's award winners!

Related –
Award-winning add-ins
Annual roundups

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