Disconnect Markers

If you are like me, (and I trust that most of you are not), you don't really rely on disconnect markers in AutoCAD MEP that much. So image my surprise when I noticed the new disconnect markers with no real idea what they were. See the image below with the new markers on the left and the old on the right.

I may be even dumber if indeed these showed up in 2009 which I skipped. If you have not upgraded past 2008, I thought I would mention it, so when you did see the new ones, you will look so very smart and get a big raise.

e0434f4dh Exception at 7c812aebh - Crash AutoCAD MEP

Me: "Knock Knock, You say who's there?"

You: "Uh.. Who's there?"

Me: "Control Freak, You say control freak who?"

Yeah, I can' help myself. I want to lock everything down. You know, for every one's own good, but also because I like it my way. I ran into a bit of a downer with AutoCAD MEP 2010 because of my controlling nature. I placed the enterprise cuix menu on a read only drive. Turns out there is a bug in this version which means if you attempt to do just about anything with a read only enterprise cui the program will just crash with the error shown in the title of the article. Funny thing is, this did not happen to all of my users. However, moving the enterprise back to a read/write location folder did fix all of my problems. I chose to just access the cuix in the docs and settings folder of each user because if they do jack something up, they will only hurt themselves.

I have to go breath in a paper bag for a bit now and learn to let go.

Inside the System... Again

Looks like things are shaking up over at Inside the System blog. I will truly miss Kyle B., but I have to get over it sometime... so welcome Dave Pothier. Dave is promising to cover more than Revit MEP. He has Autodesk's whole MEP team on the case and they will be sharing the inside scoop on AutoCAD MEP as well. Check out his first blog post here.

Autodesk University 2009

I received confirmation today that I will be teaching Implementing Revit MEP 2010 A to Z at Autodesk University in December. I hope any readers I have can attend. I aways enjoy teaching at AU, and this one should be good.

I am still fleshing things out, but I will be sure to cover everything from setting up line weights and plotting to simple, effective Revit families. The last class I taught for implementing AutoCAD MEP came with an 80 page handout. I'm going to beat that by documenting everything I know on this one. Be sure to start making plans to attend, I'm hoping to see you there.

Floor Families

I have issues.

One of them is Families that are wall, ceiling or floor based. I have had bad results with hosting on these linked objects. Faced based, that's different. Things have been good here but I did run into some trouble with the annotation objects for my families hiding under the surface of floors rather than showing themselves in plan view.

The simple remedy is to let the model portion of your family protrude ever so slightly above the face of the floor object. If you are making families right now, I hope this helps.