From the course: HBIM: Historic Building Re-creation

How to join the project wiki

From the course: HBIM: Historic Building Re-creation

How to join the project wiki

- So now that you have a better idea what Project Soane is all about, let's go over how you can actually join the project and participate. So the first step is to go to projectsoane.com There you'll see a page that greets you with some basic information. There's some tabs across the top and you can learn more about the project, and if you just click this Register For The Mission button right here, you'll be able to follow the steps on how to join the project. They'll send you an email with instructions on how to access the Autodesk 360 website that's devoted to the project, and you go through a few basic steps and you're in. Now whether you choose to just be a spectator or participant is really up to you, and it also depends on when you're watching this course. The initial modeling phase of the project does have a finite lifespan, but the intention is for the website to remain available long after the project is complete. So even if you join much later, you should still be able to access all of the materials that have been contributed by other members. So let's assume that you've joined and you've gotten the instructions and email on how to access A360. I'll just click over to that site now, and at the time of this recording, the A360 portal looked like this. Now of course it's changing all the time as Autodesk improves the website, and of course, the activity page will always be different. But you'll see any projects you belong to listed right here, and in my case, that's Project Soane. If you just click on that link, that will take you into the project. And the very first stop at the top is the Wiki Pages. So if we click into there, there's instructions on how to participate. So of course, there's a "Welcome to Project Soane" at the very beginning that has some details on how the project works. It has a little key map here explaining the different rooms that we're focusing on in the project. So there's two interior spaces and some work on the exterior facades. And then more details on how to access the files, how you build your model, and the various things you can do to participate. Then there's other Wiki Pages available for each of the major areas of work. And of course, over on the right-hand side is the Activity pane and pretty much on every page in the project, there's the ability to comment, so if you want to ask questions, or if you just want to give somebody kudos, or if you want to share your own information on a particular subject, you can add those comments and they will become part of the conversation. So I'm going to click back one link here to Project Soane, and then if you actually want to download any of the models or even possibly do some contributions, then the first step really is to go into one these folders and just kind of look around at what's already there. I'm going to be focusing on Tivoli Corner. Now Tivoli Corner is part of the exterior, so if we click into the Exterior folder, there's some more information in here. There's some .jpeg's in here, there's a readme document, and then there's some sub-folders. Now the way the Exterior model's been built is there's different sections that are all linked together. So there's actually a Links folder here, and within that Links folder you'll see each of the different parts and pieces with the various names that you can see from that Key map back on the Wiki. Now as new versions get updated, the old ones typically go into a series of Archive folders. Within the Archive folder, you can go back almost to the beginning to some of the earliest starter files that were in here, way back at the beginning of the project, but the most current versions should be right here in the main folder. So if we were to look at Tivoli Corner right now, and one of the really wonderful things about A360 is, you can actually view these Revit files right here in a web browser without even having to have Revit or any special viewer. So if click right here on this link to view this model, it'll take a few moments while it loads it up, and then you're going to see the model here with some navigation tools down at the bottom. I'll click this Orbit tool right here, and just sort of spin this thing around, and this is the current state at the time of this recording of Tivoli Corner. And I'm just rolling my wheel to zoom in, and you can drag your wheel to pan. Let's just tip that up a little bit, and these are the columns that we're going to build together here in this course. These are the ones that I contributed to the model. Now I'm going to do an interview later in the course with a gentleman by the name of Andy Milburn. And if you explore the project, you're going to see his name all over the project. Andy has contributed a ton of files to the project, and these bulls' heads up here are Andy's work, for example. So you can look around inside the A360 viewer, and then when you're ready, you can back up and take any one of the models that you want to work on, and use the little download link here, and download it to your desktop. Then you can work on that file, make changes to it, and post it back up to add it to the rest of the project. So it's a good idea when you download one, to leave a comment somewhere to let people know that you're working on it, just so that somebody else won't try and work in the same area as you at the same time. Now when you're ready to upload your contribution back, you can use the upload link here, and you can upload a file. You can even upload from your Dropbox if you want to, but then it's just the standard Windows Explorer window and you'll upload it into the location. I don't know that it's the exact requirement, but what you'll start to see is that a lot of folks are using their initials in the name to kind of indicate their contributions, and then they let the curators archive the old versions and kind of consolidate the new versions. Don't feel like it's your responsibility to do the curation. Your responsibility is just to create your contribution. Now there's lot of ways that you can contribute. If you don't want to download an entire portion of the model and built an entire room, sometimes you can just build a small little detail like one of those bulls' heads or a piece of garland or something like that. And then you just upload that family and then it can be incorporated in. So there's a lot of ways to participate, but even if you're not planned to upload anything, there's just so much that you can learn from downloading these models and just looking around at what other folks have contributed.

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