Project Dragonfly

I stumbled upon something new from Autodesk in all places, Facebook. The Autodesk group pointed me to the Project Dragonfly site. It's a Web based residential design modeller where you can create a plan and 3D model of a house or apartment. Sort of remins me of a cross between those 99$ 3D Home style products and creating a house in "The Sims".

You work based on a room basis, starting with basic shaped rooms and then modifying them with new room elements, Then add door and windows and then built-in elements furnishings, and materials.

It's really a toy at this point at this point, and there are plenty of features missing, but I like it's simplicity, reasonable intuitiveness and the direction of being able to model a design online. You could very easily share this design with others. Then there is the ability to output to .DWG and .RVT formats, interesting. I'd like to see where Project Dragonfly goes...

Revit Market Contest Deadline

Revit Market Contest Deadline Coming Up! March 31

If you have original Revit families (ones you’ve created yourself), you can put them up for sale at Revit Market, then use them in a project and enter the contest. Not only do you get a chance to win $2500, but you can get cash from ongoing sales of your families.

Revit Contest: www.turbosquid.com/Revit-Contest
Revit Market: www.turbosquid.com/Revit
Press Release about the contest: http://www.turbosquid.com/revit-family-contest

Revit Family - Online course

Recently, I jumped into creating Revit families. Unfortunately, throughout my use of the program thus far, creating families was this "do I really want to go there" kind of issue. I've never seen a family created live in a demonstration. Sensing complexity, I avoided creating them completely.

Finally, I dug into them and what I found was amazingly easy. So I thought I would help people get started, and I created my own online course in creating Revit families.


With the urging of my friend at TurboSquid, I've made this available on their site. Go to the Revit Market on their site and search for "Roger Cusson" and you should find it easily.

TurboSquid Revit Marketplace

Well the folks at TurboSquid finally did it, they have launched a market dedicated to Revit families. If you have worked with Revit at a superficial level you will probably think of family libraries of one of the mysteries of the software. If you have been fortunate enough to have received some good training, you will probably know some of the basics of creating families and know how much time can be invested in creating a good Revit family.

On the heels of all of TurboSquid's success in the visualization space they are now launching a beta version of a combined visualization and BIM site for Revit. Some of the families are render ready, others are for quantity takeoffs and creating a Building Information Model.

Creating Revit Families

Lately, I have been getting into creating Revit families. It's mostly been driven by personal interest in Revit and the co-incidence that TurboSquid is developing a market place for Revit families. My long time friend Michele Bousquet has been working there and it seems like TurboSquid is going to branch out from static 3D models into this new generation of parametric Modeling meant for AEC and BIM.

Here are a few of my efforts. Getting into creating parametric families has not been as difficult as I had imagined.




I'm hoping to put together a short crash course soon for those who would like to get into this as well.

Tree Storm

Trees Plugins for 3ds Max. I have no idea how many of them are out there but there seems to be tons. There are the standard foliage objects, and the 2 plugins who have demo versions shipping In the box.

Typically the problem with foliage is the amount of geometry which it adds to a typical scene. Well Tree Storm is no exception, but rendering times do not seem to be adversely affected. After some experimentation I was able to place about 100 trees in an empty scene, and render it with mental ray on my test system in about 3 minutes.

Recently, some of my students in my CGSociety course introduced me to trees created by Onyx. So I contacted them and they were kind enough to send me a version which I could evaluate. Well at first I was not sure I liked them, but after closer inspection and examination they are working great.

At the heart of the program is the Adjust Polygons dialog which allows you to adjust the number of polygons that an individual tree will use. Those who are familiar with adjusting foliage in 3ds Max should not take long to get familiar with this dialog.

Now the trick to get mental ray to play nice with this plugin was to use instances extensively when cloning the trees. Take 3 or 4 unique trees, instance them, use rotation and scale to give some diversity and your memory requirements go down. Therefore more trees.

I think you'll agree the results look great.

Architectural Interior Space Rendering

I've been working on some courseware for Autodesk and just thought I'd post an image which I created for the project.

The space (Walls, Doors, etc.) was created in Revit and linked into 3ds Max 2009. Equipment and accessories were modeled in 3ds Max. Rendering used mental ray with ProMaterials and Arch & Design materials.