(click to expand the tl;dr) Every project generates thousands of photos. They’re taken in good faith: someone walks the site, notices something worth recording, pulls out a phone, and clicks. The assumption is that the job is done. It rarely is. Six months later, those images are buried in folders, email threads, or a CDE. The person who took them…
Digital
You know that moment when you finally hit Test Upgrade and the HTML drops into your inbox. You open it, scroll a little, and your stomach tightens. Hundreds of warnings. Maybe a few errors. Sometimes a model or two that just… refused to cooperate. It’s incredibly easy to treat that document like a report card. Like Revit just graded your…
Every few months a story does the rounds about a job that gets “optimised” out of existence. A door greeter, a receptionist, an admin. The pitch is always the same: we can automate the visible part of the role, save some money, and nothing important will change. Except something important always changes. Rory Sutherland tells the classic version with the…
Revit 2026 changed how cloud model caches can be configured, and BIM Cache Cleaner wasn’t picking that up properly. In Revit.ini, Revit now allows the cloud cache to be redirected using: On a few machines I tested, [Directories] ProjectPath was empty, but CacheLocation was set. BIM Cache Cleaner was still scanning the default location: So it simply never saw the…
Most upgrade failures don’t happen during the upgrade. They happen six months earlier when everyone was “just trying to get drawings out the door”. By the time you hit Upgrade, the Revit upgrade process is simply showing you the consequences. This is the checklist I run before pushing a single model through the ACC Project Upgrader. It’s boring work, but…
Upgrading a Revit model isn’t just a file conversion, it’s a forced rebuild of geometry, constraints, joins, and parametric logic. And when that rebuild fails, the cause is rarely the upgrade itself. More often, it’s exposing instability that was already baked into the model. As discussed in Revit Cloud Model Upgrades Part 1, most upgrade warnings — and complete upgrade…
Upgrading cloud-shared Revit models via Autodesk Construction Cloud’s Cloud Model Upgrade tool can initially feel daunting. It often surfaces a flurry of errors and warnings, but the key insight is that most issues indicate pre-existing model “technical debt”, not bugs in Autodesk’s tool. Understanding Technical Debt Technical debt is a concept originally coined by software developer Ward Cunningham in 1992….
I haven’t posted here since December, I’m calling it a Christmas break. But it’s mid-February now, which means it’s time to get fired back up. Rather than jump straight into a heavy technical deep dive, I wanted to share a quick outline of what’s coming over the next few months on digitalBBQ. 1. Cloud Model Upgrades I have a few…
Back in 2017, I wrote a post about cleaning up Autodesk Collaboration for Revit (C4R) cache files. I then wrote a small windows application, C4R Cache Cleaner, that helped the end user work through that process without having to trawl through the journal files manually. That application became one of the most downloaded tools on revit.com.au Fast-forward eight years, C4R…
I came across this video recently, and it nails the problem with so much of the AI hype right now. At the end of the day, most of it is just fancy autocomplete. The video makes the point from a using AI in coding perspective, posing that every extra line of code you add is another liability. The same is…