PDF’s into hyper(link)space! Revit Panoramas and Revu.

Taking PDF’s into hyper(link)space. Revit, Panoramas and Revu.

This is a short article that I hope will give you some insight into some presentation tools that you may not be aware that you have and in the case of Bluebeam Revu, you may not know you need 😉

I’ll be preparing a more detailed explanation of how to create Panoramas in an Autodesk Knowledge article in the near future. But to summarise, creating a 3D perspective out of your model is a way of powerfully selling your design and it can take little work depending on how you have modelled the project.

When you Render to the Cloud in Revit (it’s in the View Tab in Revit) you have a choice to create a still image, a Panorama (as per the screenshot above) or a stereo Panorama. We’ll be looking at the non-Stereo Panoramas here but if you want to use Google Vr or other technologies of that sort then Stereo Panoramas will be of interest to you.

Once you created your Panoramas, you can go to your Cloud Rendering Gallery (there is a link in Revit next to the Render command) or you can go to your A360 Drive and log in.

Inside the gallery (see the screenshot above), there are multiple options such as the ability to adjust the exposure settings in the render, the ability to re-render it (perhaps at a higher quality setting) and the ability to create a hyperlink that you can easily copy and paste into an email or in this case, a PDF. The also have a nifty QR code which is used more commonly on mobile devices but you can for instance copy the QR image and place it on a brochure to direct people to the gallery if you want.

In this case, I have created 3 Panoramas and copies the hyperlinks. I then printed out a floor plan in Revit and opened it in Bluebeam Revu. You may be able to do this is Adobe Acrobat or other software of course.

Bluebeam Revu allows you to create markups on a PDF using preset or customised elements of a wide variety of types. In this case, I elected to use a simple coloured triangle with the numbers 1,2 and 3 and placed them in a position than roughly equated to where the Camera was in the Revit 3D View that I used to create the 3 Panoramas.

Whilst not going into too much detail, you simply create a hyperlink in Revu and assign a link or action (e.g. jump to another page) or in this case, open a new Tab in Revu to display the webpage or open a web browser (if you are using another type of PDF viewer).

There are many possibilities with this. The example that I have created below is very simple but if you get create you could do some very interesting things. One example is that Revu installs itself as an add-in in Revit and it allows you to print 3D PDF’s. You could then assign a number of hyperlinks in the 3D PDF to open webpages displaying images or Panoramas of that particular part of the model.  Some food for thought perhaps!

And here is a link to the PDF document itself complete with the links to the Panoramas (click on the triangles to open the links!)- Panorama Demo Bluebeam Revu