Level and View Renaming

In your Revit model, the level is the key starting point. Everything, ultimately, relies on the level.

Floor plans and RCPs are directly associated with a specific level. You cannot have a plan without a level. And once a plan is tied to a level, it cannot be associated with any other level.

This tight integration between level and view also can cause the NAMES to be tightly integrated. By default, the name of the plan or RCP view for a level is the same as the actual level name. Renaming one can change the other. And this is precisely where you need to pay attention.

We all have gotten somewhat lax about reading the warnings that any software pops up, usually clicking YES or OK without thinking. In Revit, we need to read the pop ups. It is trying to tell us something and quite often, it is trying to tell us something important.

When you rename a level, Revit will ask you if you want to rename the associated views. Likewise, when you rename a plan/RCP view, Revit will ask you if you want to rename the level. There is no set rule about clicking yes or no, the only rule is that you need to read what Revit is going to do and figure it out.

Example 1: you start a new model, and you rename the default “Level 1” to “FIRST FLOOR”. Revit asks if you want to rename the associated views. Well, yeah, you probably do. It wouldn’t make sense for you to have your level be “FIRST FLOOR” but the associated plans be “Level 1”. So let Revit rename away.

Example 2: you have a model that you have been working on and you create a new floor plan to show the existing phase of FIRST FLOOR. You go to rename the view to “EXISTING FIRST FLOOR” and Revit asks you if you want to rename the level. In this case, no, because it would change the level name from “FIRST FLOOR” to “EXISTING FIRST FLOOR”, which in this model makes no sense for the levels.

So, the big rule is to read what Revit is telling you, and make a proper decision from that.

Revit RVA Presentation Last Night

Last night I was fortunate enough to do another presentation for our local Revit user group, Revit RVA. It was a quick 15 minute walk through of the day in the life of a Revit support guy. I hope folks got something out of it. Thought I would share one of the slides that shows a critical factor to getting through the day.

Quick Tip – Group Origin

So, you’ve created your group, and you are about to place an instance of it. You want to nudge it into the corner of the room, but the origin of the group is smack center in the group. So you place, then align, then align again. And you have to do this in each room. Too many clicks.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could move the origin of your group? Wouldn’t this be a bizarre article if you couldn’t?

So, to “slide” the origin, selec the group. You’ll see a half compass with X and Y on it. Just click and drag the “center” grip and move it to the new origin. That’s it. Your group has been updated and any new instance of that group you place will use that origin point.

Uninstall All Autodesk Software

The instructions found on this blog saved me about 57 mouse clicks the other day. Maybe not 57 precisely, but a LOT OF CLICKING.

Basically you get into Windows WMIC and tell it to find all the software from the vendor “Autodesk” and remove it.

One tiny snag I hit was that it forced a reboot after one of the uninstalls. Just logged back in, ran the command again and voila! A ton of Autodesk software was gone!

Kudos and big thanks to the original author over at Prosoft.

Quick Tip – Align to Circle Center

Let’s say you need to align something to the center of a circle or arc or ellipse, or vice-versa, you need to align the center of a circle or arc or ellipse to something. When you are in the ALIGN tool and try mousing around the center, nothing shows up. You also cannot override your snaps to find it!

Calm down! It’s gonna be OK. Select that circle (or arc or ellipse) and check out its Properties. See that parameter? CENTER MARK VISIBLE.

Check that box!

Turn that guy on, and then you can align to it!

Weird Walls: Depth, Height, and Function

Put this in the category of “The Missing Revit Manual” in the same chapter as “View Discipline“.

Turns out, Wall Function isn’t just an extra parameter to filter by. We just came across this one. When you change the Wall Function to FOUNDATION, it forces the placement of those wall types to be “Depth” and not “Height”.

Did you even know that was a thing? I would say that 99.99% of the time when a wall is placed, it is assumed to go in the positive Z direction, or in other terms, “up”. The good old Options Bar lets you change the placement from “Height” to “Depth” meaning you can make your wall go “down”. Who changes this? Does anyone ever change this?

You didn’t even know it was there, did you?

Anyway, if you change your Wall Function to “Foundation”, you can ONLY use “Depth” which can cause some hilarious errors as you place a wall.

I am confident some of you knew this already, but it’s news to me and it was news to everyone who I talked to in real life (or “offline” as the kids say… they don’t really say that).

The HELP file has nothing that lays out what specifically happens when you change the Wall Function. I guess it’s time to dive in and see what else might change when we adjust that previously-thought-innocuous parameter.

Revit RVA Presentation

Had a great time presenting at Revit RVA last night. Gave a quick chat on Plug-Ins 101. Despite going over my time, I think it went OK.

Got a few chuckles at the below slide, warning folks that I could sometimes dial the Nerd Level up to 11, but would try to avoid to. I think we only hit 6 or 7.

Revit 2015 Update 2 – This Isn’t Confusing At All

Autodesk recently released Revit 2015 “R2” for subscription customers (sorry people who don’t like to write a check every year!) and while it has some nice features that I am looking forward to, the versioning of Revit 2015 to this point has become almost labyrinthine.

In the beginning…

First, there was Revit 2015. Makes sense, easy to remember.

Then we had Update Release 1. OK, I’m with you. Then Update Release 2, which was the “Security Update” because of Heartbleed.

It’s usually around this time that I start looking at creating my deployment. Hooray! Update Release 3! But when I add it to the deployment under Service Packs, it’s called “Revit 2015 Version 4” there. Um, OK. I’ll play along.

And now we have R2 (their words). And when I apply that to the deployment, it’s called “Revit 2015 Version 5” and after it gets installed, if you look at HELP > ABOUT, the version says “Update Release 4”.

Nice and consistent.

Don’t Forget – Schedule Text Styles Cheat

When is a Text Type not really a Type?

Sorry, bad riddle. This is one of those stupid seemingly insignificant inconsistencies within Revit that I 1) forget about after a few weeks and 2) when I remember I scratch my head and say “Really?”

I love View Templates. The new ones that actually do what they should do. Not the old passive ones. It helps keeps documents in line and looking sharp.

Did you know you can assign a View Template to a Schedule?  You can. Pretty smart that you can set some line weight and gridline and text settings. Well, mostly.

Mostly.

Turns out the Text Type that you assign to Title Text and Header Text and Body Text gets about 90% of the settings pushed through.

For some reason, the schedules have decided to ignore the Width Factor from the Type. It just leaves it at 1.

I know a lot of firms that like to squeeze info on there and have dialed their width factor down to .9. I know a couple that like to play with fire and have set it at .8! The maniacs!

Below is a screen grab showing simple annotation text on the top and to the right and the same word from a schedule; all three are using the same Text Type.

Whatever your level of text shrinkage, the schedules don’t care. This frustrates me. It poo-poos all over the idea of a View Template and leads to head scratching. I am already losing my hair, I don’t need bizarre incongruities like this leading to more hair loss.

Be the Miracle Worker

I want to preface this by saying that I never lie to end users. But here’s some advice that I’ve picked up over my almost two decades of doing this: sometimes you have to keep the magic alive.

If you are general IT support, or if you are specifically BIM support, it often helps when folks pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. This might seem deceitful, and a good argument could be made that it is, but on a practical level you often have a fix for something that on the surface seems really easy, but you know from experience that there’s that one step that people always miss and then they are just going to call you anyway, doubling the time it would have taken to fix it.

So, sometimes, I don’t offer up the information about how I did something. If they ask I would tell them, but I try to be a little obtuse. And this is a tricky line to know when you need to hang onto certain tasks and what tasks you can safely give away. And it might vary per user too, it’s your tricky job to be able to know what to dole out to whom.

As an example, I had a user today ask me about a particularly slow model. The file was tiny (Revit speaking) and there was no reason for it to be so slow. I made a detached copy and did a couple first run fixes, figuring out that a simple Save As made the darn thing pretty zippy. So, I had my fix.

Saving a new copy of a Central File successfully has a lot of steps, and I wasn’t sure about the experience level of some of the users involved. So, instead of simply saying “Go ahead and just save as a new copy,” I said, “let me try a few things.” Innocent, true, and implies that this is a tricky IT task that requires a hydro-spanner and possibly a flux capacitor.

In the “First Word of STAR” universes, I fall way more in the camp of “Wars” than “Trek”, but I am often reminded of a quote from Mr. Spock in The Wrath of Khan:

Saavik: You lied.

Spock: I exaggerated.

And that’s how it goes. I took the numerous steps to make sure everyone had synced, verified no one was accessing the central file on the server via Windows management, opened a detached copy while maintaining worksets, renamed the original’s extension (just in case), moved the backup folder for the “old” central file, saved the “new” model in the same place with the same name as the old one, then did one last sync to relinquish everything. Then I told everyone to get a new local.

Simple, easy steps, but enough little steps that someone could easily miss. Especially that last sync. That seems to be the one that throws people off.

And guess what? The file opened way faster after that.

So just keep in mind that another part of your job, one that isn’t written down anywhere, is to know when to let someone in on the secret and when to keep the secret to yourself.