Built on the Fabrication MEP Engine, Virtual Mechanical leverages and extends Autodesk Fabrication features and functionality, turning your Revit MEP workstation into a POWERFUL MEP design build platform. Virtual Mechanical is under continuous development and is constantly improving! Questions, comments, suggestions and bug reports are tremendously appreciated! Please direct any or all of the above […]

It’s no secret that Unity has been blazing a trail on the AEC front lately. One of the selling points of Unity Reflect is that it enables us to “Easily bring our Autodesk Revit, BIM 360, Navisworks, SketchUp, and Rhino models into AR/VR“. Some extremely impressive AEC apps are being developed with Unity, including real […]

Every MEP connector in Revit has it’s own coordinate system – it’s own idea of which way is “left” and which way is “up”. In fact all 3D MEP software uses some implementation of a connector coordinate system. It’s not optional, and some do it better than others. In all Fabrication MEP products excluding Revit, […]

STEP 1: DISCONNECT THE NEGATIVE BATTERY TERMINAL Navigate to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Fabrication 2021\SDK\Samples\CSharp. Right click the FabricationSample folder and select Copy. Paste this folder in a working directory somewhere, it’s nice to leave the SDK Project unaltered for later reference. STEP 2: COPY THE ADDIN BUNDLE Open the copied FabricationSample folder and navigate to the ACAD […]

Recently a collogue and I were brainstorming a simple CAM script to remove Stiffeners for all Items with a Dimension named “Length”, who’s value is under 30″… (This is obviously not an all-encompassing solution. What if the Fabrication Part in question is 100″ wide? We may want Stiffeners here!) However, in many cases we spend […]

The Revit API includes Methods to retrieve Bounding Boxes of Model Elements. There is a catch however… The Bounding Boxes returned are always aligned to the default axes of the model coordinate system. This is “close enough” if the software you are engineering only needs to get within the ballpark. An “Auto Connect” software tool […]

Traversing a MEP System is a difficult endeavor to say the least. This is why many of the Hanger and Spooling automation software tools we see today are unusable. We must know the structure of a Tree before we can automate things on it’s Branches. Given a Leaf at random, how do we find the […]

The VDC REVIT Beta has completed. Thank you to all who participated. For links to current downloads of the software please click here.

A Rose by any other Number would smell as sweet… Sorry Shakespeare, this is a Software Blog. Whether we are talking about Ductwork, Piping, or Walls, Doors and Windows, the “Item Number” is arguably one of the most important bits of information we can find in a Model. It’s how we identify, quantify, locate and […]

Much of our Fabrication Data in Revit is inaccessible and in many cases, it doesn’t exist at all. VDC REVIT aims to change all of that, exposing your vital Fabrication Data to Tags, Schedules, Filters, Calculations… Virtually any Data you would otherwise expect from native Family Elements. Here are some examples of  “Auto Parameters” that […]