FormIt 360: Powerful Preliminary Design with Robust Revit Integration By David Cohn Simple design meets powerful functionality in FormIt 360. I have had the opportunity this year to develop several entirely new CADLearning courses, including Autodesk ReCap, Advance Steel, and FormIt 360. All three are relatively new to the Autodesk lineup. By far, the most fun and exciting has been FormIt 360. FormIt has actually been around for nearly four years. Back in 2012, Autodesk previewed a version that ran as an iPad app. This clever new tool enabled users to sketch and create architectural study models on their iPads. For the first time, you could produce 3D models on your tablet using your fingers. It worked well and was pretty cool. a morning commute, continue working on your computer once you get to the office, and switch back to your tablet for a lunch-time meeting with a prospective client. At first glance, FormIt 360 appears to be very similar to SketchUp, as the FormIt interface is deceptively simple and easy to use. You can begin a model by sketching lines, arcs, circles, and so on. When they form closed shapes, the program immediately creates a face. You can then click and drag that face to extrude it into a solid. Or, you can quickly place solid primitives—cubes, pyramids, cylinders, domes, and so on—and combine them to create more complex shapes. You can then sketch additional lines on the faces of solids to divide faces and continue to push and pull faces, edges, and vertices to refine your design. Fast forward a few years. FormIt is now called FormIt 360 and is available on four platforms: as a free iOS app for the Apple iPad, as a free app for Android tablets, as both a free and paid application running in a web browser, and as a paid program The FormIt 360 interface is deceptively simple for a program packing so many for PCs running Windows. And—incredible as capabilities. it sounds—the functionality is nearly the same regardless of the platform. Using FormIt 360, you For example, after sketching a simple rectangle, you can click and drag to convert that rectangle can literally start a design on your tablet during www.cadlearning.com 19