Guru-G

As Quoted in the Microsoft Imagine's website - "Microsoft Imagine connects students with the tools, resources, and experiences they need to elevate their skills for today's working world. Whether it's building a game, designing an app or launching a project, Microsoft Imagine helps students develop their ideas and boldly bring them to life." Microsoft provides Free Software and Operating Systems to certified schools and institutions to help the students with their skills and career. You head to the My School's Webstore  page to search and find your school and the software available for your school. Once you find your school and click on the link for your school's webstore, it'll redirect you to a separate page with all the tools, software and operating systems available for your school. The following is an example link  for the webstore of  Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT). As you can see in the following image, the webstore provides var...

Microsoft Outlook is by far the best email service provider which provides lots of customizations for the user. One of such features is to view similar/related emails/tasks in groups. We can use Outlook tasks windows to create, assign and have a track of all the tasks that you need for a project. But if you're involved in too many projects or are the manager of too many projects, having a track & identifying all the different tasks based on different criteria can be difficult. To help with this, Outlook has a feature called  "Group by box" when your view is set to "list view".  Open Outlook task pane and change the view settings to your desired view. Then right-click on one of the columns headers to select an option "Group by box (1)". The drag and drop the desired column header(2) to sort the view 

Gmail is currently the most basic email provider that almost everyone uses. So how can one organize their basic email provider so that it'll be easy to search and find emails? To help with this, Gmail has features like tabs & categories , labels to organize emails into different sections/tabs with custom categories and labels. But even with this manually moving emails into tabs or manually assigning categories and labels can be tiresome. So, here is where " filters " come to rescue. In Gmail, you can create rules to automatically move/assign emails to specific folder/labels using filters. But even this can be over-used if you don't know how to organize all you filters. So here is a video that shows you how you can combine multiple filters into a single rule.

Autodesk has created a website separately for users to upload and play with customizable dynamo scripts called Project Fractal . This tool lets you upload & view your parametric dynamo scripts/design . You can even see multiple iterations of a specific design to choose which iteration best suits your need. Unfortunately this website needs WebGL to run, lately, I'm getting an error while trying to view the example files in project fractal in chrome & I'm being presented with an error saying "Requires WebGL". Using Firefox would be the best option that worked well for me. Here is a getting started video that shows the capabilities of Project fractal and Dynamo

Grasshopper is an awesome plugin for rhino which lets us customize the design using programmatic nodes. It is the best design conceptualization tool that I've found. There are few other similar software's like dynamo for Revit, Para 3d for 3ds max, but they all have their own limitations. But grasshopper is limited to your imagination and a little bit of understanding the plugin itself. Once you get the hand of the user interface and the nodes, you can almost design anything you want. But, often times we might want to compare between alternative options of our own design. So going through each node and changing the values is time taking. So Grasshopper allows you to save the values/state of the nodes  so that you can revert back to them with just a single click. In the following example, I've got a simplistic script for a twisting tower where I want to compare between to alternatives. So I set the values of the 1st alternate and save it at Solution> Save state ,...

In my previous post, I have explained how we can use the Visibility/Graphics Override window to customize the graphics and visibility settings of all the objects and categories. So using those methods we can change the colors, thickness, line types of grid lines(or any other) to our necessity. To change the color of the grid line, select one of the grid lines and click edit type in the properties window and change the " End Segment color ". This will change the colors of all the grid lines. To change the color of the Grid heads(bubbles), go to object styles from visibility graphics)shortcut VG) Visibility/Graphics window In the Object Styles window go to, annotation categories and find Grid head &change the line color Object Styles window This only changes the color of the lines, to change the color of the text, go to project browser > Families and find Grid Head - circle . (M is just a suffix for metric family).  Right-click and select edit ...

At times we might want to change the colors of various lines, categories with the model. The well known and easily foundable way for this is using the properties window. But, selecting each and every object and changing their properties can be ver tedious. So Autodesk has provided us with a  single window called " Visibility/Graphics Override " which can be found in View > Graphics > Visibility/Graphics or can simply be accessed using "VG or VV" shortcut key. This post focuses on model & annotation categories. Head to the following post to change the graphics of Object Styles . Visibility/Graphics Location Visibility/Graphics window Once you have made the necessary changes to the visibility/graphics of the view, you can save it as a view template, so that you can apply the same settings to multiple other views. The VG window can be used to change the visibility/graphics settings of any type of elements that exists in the Revit project. Y...

Autodesk has given us many new updates with the new Revit 2018 release. One of the very useful updates of such is the " Multi-storey " settings of the stairs. If you have used Revit (2015 and later) for a while, you must be familiar with the multi-storey option available to simply create a single stair(core) for all the floors. But it had an issue if the floors are of different heights. So the new 2018 update solves this issue and provides us the multi-storey stair for all the floors irrespective of the individual floor height . The best part of this is, it's parametric, i.e., you can change the parameters like height, width, landing length etc., and see all the stairs update along with it. The  information in the help website gives a detailed explanation of the update. The following video tutorial show how to use the feature.

Revit doesn't have a feature that allows us to edit the profile of a curved wall. so if we want to edit the profile of a curved wall, it's very difficult. There are few tricks that can help you with it like attaching the base of wall to a curved roof etc.., But if you ever want to intersect a curved wall with another curved wall, there is only one way possible i.e., creating a straight wall with minimum length beside the existing curved wall, so that it can be perceived as a curved wall. Then we can use the "Edit Profile" option on the straight wall. The following video (at the bottom of post) shows a technique to edit profile of a curved wall in a mass form. The exterior walls of the mass are created using "wall by face" tool. Mass form But the problem with this comes while working on the plan. As seen the curved opening is not straight. So the curved vertical walls in the building tend to project out into the opening. Intersection of cur...

If you've ever noticed the options under Massing & Site > Show mass , you might have wondered what the " Show Mass Surface Types & Show Mass Shades & Zones " option are for. Energy Analysis These are used when you are doing the energy analysis of the model. Those options are usually grayed out unless you use the " conceptual mass mode " which is available under Analyze > Energy Analysis > Use conceptual mass mode.  Energy Analysis The following video  from youtube explains how this is done. and this video what's the use of the surface type and zones in the energy model using Schedules & Quantities.