We’re excited to release a new iteration of Ideate BIMLink 2011 today (2011.3 officially) which has several new features and fixes, most of which came from user requests and input.
New 2011.3 Features:
Generic Annotations: We’ve added support for General Annotation objects. Thanks to our valued AEC users for this request! Why would you care? Generic Annotations can be used in many different ways. Generic Annotations are often scheduled via Note Blocks for use as Demo Notes, Construction, and Renovation Notes but are also used in many creative ways to manage other data that needs to be in the model. Now with Ideate BIMLink you can edit the related text notes quickly in Excel and push the data back into your model. (Ryan Duell has a nice post and video on how to use Note Blocks.)
Swap Materials: Material parameter values are no longer read-only and can be imported if the value matches that of an existing material in the Revit project. Why would you care? If you are managing lots of custom FFE content and including material-based parameters, then this new feature will be a tremendous timesaver. Here’s a quick screencast demonstrating this functionality. Note that in addition to letting you Swap Materials, Ideate BIMLink also gives you access to all the Materials themselves so they can be quickly renamed to assist with project organization.
New 2011.3 Improvements:
- Material parameters now display as the material name instead of the associated element id.
- Material parameter values are no longer read-only and can be imported if the value matches that of an existing material in the Revit project.
- Schedule key parameters now display as the schedule key value instead of the associated element id.
- When previewing an import, the Excel cell is now reported for all Import Issues.
- Import now treats the empty value ("" or 0) and the 'null' value as different values when importing parameters. Groups that contain objects that are not being edited by Ideate BIMLink will no longer report that they are being changed. Thanks to our valued users for reporting this issue.
- Shared and Project Parameters now report for Materials. Thanks to our partners in Australia, AEC Systems for bringing this one to light.
And lastly, regarding the Ideate BIMLink and Ideate Explorer 2012, we’ll be posting soon to let you know what we’re planning but in the mean time, we’ve launched a new support page where you can log a feature request online. For now, I’ll only say that we are removing the requirement for having the Extensions Manager installed for the 2012 version. Let us know what you’d like to see in the upcoming versions of Ideate BIMLink and Ideate Explorer!
You can find more information about Ideate BIMLink and how it is being used by following us on: Twitter, this blog, YouTube and of course Ideate’s BIMLink website at ideatebimlink.com. In addition, don’t forget to download Ideate Explorer to further enhance your Revit BIM experience; ideateexplorer.com.
