Automate ALL the things!

January 31, 2012 by Leave a comment

Just came back from a client visit and the project this time was helping to upgrade their license server. Pretty straight forward stuff, but I’ve come to realize that what I do as “straight forward” is actually pretty impressive to quite a few people.

We all know [at least you should if you follow my blog] that there are three spots that Autodesk uses to define where the license servers are.

  • Environment variables
  • Registry Entries
  • LICPATH.LIC

These are read that in that order, and when the system finds the key (ADSK_LICENSE_FILE), it will stop and put it to memory. So how does it affect my deployment? Well, if you have a license server (let’s call it OldLic1 and OldLic2) already serving up licenses and you want to upgrade/retire it and move licenses to your new, awesomely robust virtual server (NewLic1 and NewLic2), most people think you need to touch every workstation to update those values so that AutoCAD and Revit will get license from the right servers. NOT!

With the all-powerful Group Policy Management Editor and some nifty GPOs, you can make the change to all your workstations to all your branches… at once. Yes, we did this to well over a thousand machines for this project, even to their branches, WITHOUT having to touch every single machine. Thank goodness too, cuz I would’ve gone crazy!

Wait,… what? What GPOs do I need, you ask? I dropped enough clues; I’ll let your IT group figure that one out 

Filed under Autodesk, Licensing Solutions

Test: Cloud Rendering in Revit 2012

January 7, 2012 by Leave a comment

In a time when ‘to the cloud’ is a common refrain in the techroom, Cloud Rendering is an obvious ‘Duh…!’

Well, it is a reality (finally!) with Revit and other Autodesk Products such as 3D Max Design and AutoCAD. My primary interest being Revit, I was more excited to avoid the drudgery of waiting forever for getting something rendered in Revit.

I’ve made a comparison between renderings produced natively in Revit and those produced in the Cloud – and the results are comparable. The interface is simple and the options are limited, but hey the reason you render anything in Revit is to really understand how the space appears and as a consequence impress the buyer of the space. I love rendering in Revit because it is a WYSIWYG (what you see…is what you get) impression of the model and hence there is hardly any ‘faking it’ unless you are intentionally mis-representing objects.

The interface is pretty straight-forward. You do need to be on subscription to be able to access it (and recently, I am told, you should also own the Building Design Suite Premium or Ultimate). Once you sign in, you get a very simple screen that looks like this:


Read more of this post

Filed under Architecture Solutions, Autodesk, BIM Solutions Tagged with , , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 82 other followers