Revit 2012 - What is new and what Add-ins you can Expect

Usually soon after the announcement of the next Revit releases there are a slew of blogs that light up. Mostly because Autodesk removes the non-disclosure agreement constraint on people who have already been briefed or have started testing Revit. I expect most of the readers of this blog know all those great blogs so I will not waste your time listing them. If you are trying to find out what is in the actual API then you also probably know about the most popular blogs for that.

So what I am going to do in the next few posts is share with you the new features in the Revit Verticals and the API then try to project what you may expect from the next generation of Revit Add-Ins based on these new features. So let’s get started

REX Framework SDK now part of the Revit SDK

New:

OK let’s start with the TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms).

• SDK - Software Developer Toolkit. It can be installed when you install Revit. It contains API documentation and more sample code then you can shake a stick at.
• REX - Revit EXtensions Framework. It is a RAD (rapid application development) framework and is now part of Revit. The framework SDK is now part of the Revit API SDK.

REX is used extensively by Autodesk to develop many of the Revit Add-ins found in subscription. It is also used by a few partners as a pilot program. Originally it was developed for internal use and now has been upgraded and made available in the SDK to everyone. What does REX provide? Well it provides libraries and a UI framework so add-ins developed for Revit can be developed with a consistent UI paradigm and also developed a lot faster because many common libraries required to develop applications for Revit are available in REX. To be clear, the common libraries don’t avoid the need to write Revit API code, they help with other aspects of development typically needed for add-ins.

You can find a good post on REX at the Building Coder.

This is an example of what can be built quickly with the REX framework:

 

What to expect from add-in applications:

Hopefully more add-ins. Also more add-ins that look a bit more consistent across developers. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect every developer will use REX. It is not the cure all but it can reduce development time for some types of add-ins and in turn reduce the barrier to entry for developers. For those of you developing internal tools to improve your company’s productivity, you may find out that REX will make your life simpler too. A number of products like BIM Link by Ideatehave already started using REX and others are in the works. I do hope that REX is used appropriately, being mindful of Usability and also mindful when the user experience should be inside of Revit and when it should be through a separate dialog.

 

Point Cloud API

New:

As you have read in my blog posts before. Point Clouds are becoming more and more important to construction, renovation and property maintenance. Revit 2012 verticals have new point cloud capabilities built into the product. The team designed the solution with a lot of flexibility by exposing many of the Point Cloud features through the API. This includes the ability to feed point clouds to Revit, to create instances of point clouds in Revit, to interact with instances, and to extract points based on geometric filters.  One interesting thing that the point cloud team did was to expose an API to allow an application to act as a point cloud engine – this should allow some of the big names in laser scanning to provide direct integrations to Revit.

What to expect from add-in applications:

Expect to see this API and feature set used to deliver even better point cloud tools in Revit. Had I posted this a few weeks ago my statement would have been prophetic but my delay has allowed Imaginit to preempt me by releasing a new version of Scan To BIM for Revit 2012 that leverages the Revit 2012 Point Cloud capabilities. They may actually be the first product release for Revit 2012 – Impressive!

Some related Point Cloud Posts:

Revit AppStore - Point Clouds

Some More Point Cloud Info

Scan to BIM

Comments

[David Sammons]

Hi Emile,

When will the Revit Extensions for Autodesk Revit Structure 2012 be available. I have an immediate need to use the reinforcing steel extensions in the 2012 release.

Dave

[Emile (blog Author)]

Dave - good question. I don't know the answer off hand but I will reach out to the team and see what info I can get.

[Emile (blog Author)]

Dave - I got word back that the expected release for this and some other add-ins is most likely around "Early Summer" (assuming you are in the northern hemisphere). I am sorry I can not be more specific but at this point there is no specific publically anounced release date and so something unexpected may come up and delay the release. I am sorry I am not able to be more specific but I hope this info helps out a little bit in your future planing.