Collaboration for Revit Crash

We recently experienced our first "glitch" with Collaboration for Revit

One of my users recently experienced C4R crashing when opening up the project.
We couldn't find any obvious triggers for the crash, other users on the project went having any issues and the project and linked files were all audited and working fine as were the families being used, there was no obvious reason for the crashing for this specific user.

So if your getting unexpected crashing on your C4R project try deleting the recently opened files/families directly from your Revit.ini file.

Seems to be working fine now for us...

Sc

Collaboration for Revit - New to us....

Were starting to use Collaboration for Revit on a number of projects, subsequently I’ve had a couple questions about local files and back-ups for C4R projects.

Here’s a couple quick points about C4R that are different to what we normally do.

Autodesk A360-Collaboration for Revit is a Cloud Subscription service that hosts building information models in the cloud, enabling project participants from multiple companies or locations to concurrently author models.

Locals:

There technically is a local RVT + an RVT for each linked model. They are tucked away in the Collaboration Cache but you’re not meant to access them.

This is purposely located in special location because team members using Revit shouldn't need to access their locals. Team members navigate to A360 within Revit's file browser, and Revit makes sure they are working on fresh local versions of the CloudWorkshared model in C4R.

You can Publish, Rename and Relinquish elements from C4R.

Saving a back-up file.

Currently there is not “official” way to create a back-up file. However every time we share our model with the consultants we keep a duplicate which can be considered as our back-up file. You can do a "Save As" from Revit for any cloud workshared model and that'll detach it and save it locally. You can also download RVT files in bulk from the A360 Hub, and they'll be downloaded along with any links into a zip file.

I’m sure something will be developed soon as I think it’ll be a commonly requested task.

How does C4R cache Data?

Collaboration for Revit, proactively caches updated model data locally on the machine. This helps to significantly improve the overall performance experience.

It caches the date differently to how Revit Server does

Will there be any “Latency” in accessing the file in the Cloud?

Since Collaboration for Revit operates with a Revit application naively executed on a Windows PC, the overall performance experience depends on the hardware of the machine and the size of the model(s) being operated on. Operations that require a transaction with Collaboration for Revit will depend on the latency and bandwidth between the PC and the Collaboration service. Basically it depends on your PC and your Internet connection, so far I haven’t seen any latency.

Here are a couple links with further information on C4R.

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/a360/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/ENU/123112/files/a360-collaboration-for-revit-cloud-subscription-faq-html.html

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/Revit-CAR/files/GUID-AE6DBCDF-3DB1-41CB-9DC5-B0C336E6C851-htm.html

Collaboration for Revit Explained (in Brief)

I recently attended a demo of Collaboration for Revit  (C4R) for a project were working on, it answered a lot of questions for me. 

I looked everywhere for a good explanation and couldn't find one, so here is my brief explanation of how it works.

Currently we use Revit server to facilitate internal collaboration as it’s more stable and deals with multiple working on the one project much better. However we cant use Revit Server when working with consultants or collaborating with another Architect as it doesn’t play well through firewalls etc, it’s very difficult to set up and run. C4R treats your local computer like an “accelerator” similar to how Revit Server operates. It also manages the data exchange a little differently to make it sync faster.

C4R is much simpler because it’s cloud based, it basically stores everyone’s (A,S,M,E,P) Revit model on the cloud and we each link each others models, similar to to our existing workflow but automated.

We each link in each others models from C4R, these links are live so it eliminates the need for detaching saved copies of the files and sending them to the consultants for coordination. We still manage our own worksets, views and model content, R4C just manages the model links.

There are still a few things that need to be worked out such as saving a back-up copy, currently you’d have to detach a copy to back-up. If you didn’t want to have the most current copy of the consultants model the only way to manage this would be to “not reload links”. This would be difficult to manage if you had a large team working on your project. Also C4R does not allow for non Revit links (same as Revit Server) which is one thing on my wish list!

So far to me it looks pretty good, apparently they’ve done a lot of testing and are pretty confident in it’s stability. For now it looks pretty good, I’d use it on a project as long as I had an exit strategy, I believe it’ll evolve into something much better. In conjunction with C4R you also get A360 as a project communication tool but I'm not going to get into that on this blog...

It’ll be interesting to see how it’s adopted in the design community. This is one more tool to facilitate collaboration.

Sc