Florida Day 3

The first session "Get Up-and-Running on AutoDesk Revit Structure" was long (3 1/2 hours) but interesting. The instructor was all over the place and didn't cover all the material he had on his outline but it was still interesting. Then we broke for lunch.

After lunch AutoDesk and Disney Imagineers put on a huge 2 hour Keynote Presentation to show off their latest software both shipping and in beta / production. Some really cool stuff. CEO Carol Bartz spoke then COO Carl Bass came out and shoed off a senario that showed all their software integrating various disciplines in pulling together a new product and building for a fictitious company. The Disney Imagineers were there to show us how they use the software in real life. This was a one of the events that everyone was scheduled to attend. There were over 5,000 attendees in the room.

immediately following the Keynote we had the Building Solutions industry specific Session. Which was really just a rehash of a lot of the stuff they showed us during the Keynote Presentation with a little more detail.

The final session was creating details in Revit Building 8, which was great. The speaker was an architect from Rancho Cucamunga, CA. and has been using Revit since version 1.0. He has some great ideas on getting our existing AutoCAD drawings into Revit and in some cases just using them as they are. He showed us the parametric power native in Revit and how to assign constraints and dimension variables to parts both 2D and 3D and when it is better to use 2D to save on space and complexity in the model. We will be able to get his whole library of Revit "Families" as well as many others submitted to the AUGI Web site by the many members. Both Tom and I are AUGI members though my membership came over from the old NAUG days before they changed names and went international.

There are people here from all over the world. Lots of people from Europe, England, Australia, as well as from all over the US. The final event this evening they called Industry Receptions which turned out to be another social meet and party with others in your industry. I didn't stay long, even though the music was good, it was impossible to talk and the food choices were limited. Tom stayed until it ended at 10:00.