RobiNZ CAD Blog

Autodesk Design Review is dead, long live Autodesk Design Review!

Like a forgotten child, Autodesk Design Review (ADR) has been ignored since it was updated to the 2013 version (so really 2012). It was so forgotten the installer offered by Autodesk until today came complete with a security flaw that required an immediate additional ‘hotfix’ upon first use of the application! The corporate response from Autodesk is ADR is obsolete, surpassed by the impressive A360 cloud services. In many ways this is correct as cloud hosting made file sharing much easier and integrated viewing eliminated the need/pain/hurdle of a local viewer install (albeit introducing browser compatibility hurdles for users who... Read more →

DWF and Design Review debate is Alive in the Lab

Scott recently posted about the new A360 Integrated Viewer which can view many native design file formats. It is integral in many of the A360 portals but is also available as a separate on-line viewer: Just open https://360.autodesk.com/viewer Drag your file into the viewer to upload it (having read the associated terms and conditions…) View and share! Scott’s post has a lot of info on the new viewer but the discussion about the future of Autodesk’s Design Web Format (DWF) and Autodesk Design Review (see the comments in addition to the article) is well worth reading for current users of... Read more →

From DWF to PDF with transparency

While Design Web Format (DWF) is better for drawings, and models, you sometimes still do need to make PDFs. If you already have the DWF the simplest way to do this is ‘print’ to PDF from the DWF file. Many machines already have PDF writers, installed by other software, but if not get the excellent free CutePDF Writer. This works really well, often better than direct PDF output from the apps, with one little hitch. Some mark-up tools, like area measure, in Autodesk Design Review use transparency (below left) and some PDF writers output it as solid (below right). The... Read more →

Design Review Uninstall/Install Issues due to C++?

Beyond the Paper, DWF Blog, has the solution to a problem which caught me out recently. During a machine update I attempted to remove Autodesk Design Review 2011 prior to installing Building Design Suite 2012 and got a C++ related fail message from the uninstaller. The details & suggested fixes are here: Recent Design Review Uninstall/Install Issues Related to Microsoft Visual C++ - Beyond the Paper Autodesk Design Review customers are having trouble uninstalling and installing the latest three versions of our software related to a recent Microsoft Windows fix (KB2538424 “Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package... Read more →

Why doesn’t Revit have a model browser?

Sometimes you can look at something for, literally, years without seeing the obvious. While using a 3D DWF (during a phone conversation) I gazed at the List, Thumbnail, Markups and Model panel and wondered, why doesn’t Revit have this? Why does a Building Information Model application only offer a document’centric representation of its model? The project browser is configurable, but only for view/sheet related items. I can see plenty of uses for the sort of model tree seen in Autodesk Design Review when you export a 3D DWF from Revit (or AutoCAD Architecture for that matter). One place a hierarchy... Read more →

So Revit 2011 really does need Internet Explorer 7+…

Do you have a 32 bit Revit 2011 deployment which works fine until a machine where it fails with nothing more than this it the log; Time ~ Logon ~ Machine ~ Message 0:00:00 ~ robin1 ~ Deployment Started 0:01:00 ~ robin1 ~ Deployment Finished You could waste a lot of time investigating what went wrong but I’d suggest first looking to see if IE6 is still installed. I blame the machine’s lame old HP recovery build (after a hard drive failure), rather than my own ineptitude, but that was the problem. “Windows® Internet Explorer® 7.0 or later” is clearly... Read more →

Autodesk Design Review 2010 and MindManager, the ribbons nest!

A recent email regarding MindManager + Autodesk Design Review (ADR) had me looking for this post on my blog only to find I'd never published it! Some time ago Last year I posted how MindManager can... Read more →

Autodesk Design Review 2010 - I'm loving this Ribbon

Although there are new features, which I'll cover in future posts, for me the major change in Autodesk Design Review 2010 (ADR) is the new User Interface. I hope I don't offend those who made the prev... Read more →

Autodesk 2010 releases shipping, the little boxes and electrons are on the move!

The Autodesk website has had its out of season "Happy New Year make-over" for 2010. Many of the 2010 products are shipping including several* that matter to me: AutoCAD , AutoCAD Architecture , Autode... Read more →

DWF Viewers not working with Internet Explorer 7 on your intranet

I'm not sure if this will apply to other Intranets, or future Autodesk Design Review versions but, for what it's worth, it fixed a problem I had on ours. On my machine the browser would launch a blank... Read more →