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.

Detail Groups

Seriously? You’re still using Detail Groups? Stop it. Just, stop it. I’m not kidding. Make a component. I have witnessed Detail Groups murder a model. I can never forgive them for that.

My Heart Breaks a-new

Another new Revit, another disappointment.

Yes, I know new features lists have been out for a while and people have been using 2015 for some time now, but some things just… the hurt is TOO MUCH, you know?

Seriously, now that View Templates are working like they should, and have been for some time, why must I still rely on the antiquated Phase Filter?

Just give me access to the Phase and Phase Demolished parameters in my View Filters! While we are at it, open up all the parameters to the View Filters!

Yes, this is a total recap of a previous post, and yes, kudos to you for remembering that, but this has got to be one of my biggest pet peeves at this point. Keep Phases. Dump Phase Override and Phase Filters. Give me one place (granted, it’s a BIG place) to control what my views look like.

Cloud Credit Chaos

So, this has happened twice now. Autodesk has lost my Cloud Credits twice.

I think I understand the changes that Autodesk made to the credits since they were introduced; the migration from overall pooled to individuals having 100 credits, the introduction of having to buy “shared” credits, etc. All I can do about these changes is whine, of course. We have a couple of individuals who eat credits like candy, which forces me to buy more, even though we have dozens of other users with their 100 credits sitting there, untouched (and yes, we could cheat and have the candy-eaters just login with the non-eaters 360 account, but that is obnoxious). It’s a business decision that Autodesk made, and it I want to play in their cloud, I have to follow their rules.

But when something stupid happens, I get a little ticked off.

We had an individual who tore through the credits, as I expected. We bought a BIG batch of Shared Credits. Late last year I got a frantic email from this user, stating he was doing some rendering, but the amount of available credits was reported at none. Zip. Nada. He was confident that the day before, it was reported at over 2,000. Whoa. That’s a LOT of rendering.

Honestly, my first guess was that he was mistaken. Luckily, the Autodesk site has reporting tools that you can look at to see what the credit usage is. So I logged on, expecting to see a long list of renderings from this user over the last couple days that will show all the “lost” credits. But, when I got there, the reports weren’t working right. It showed no usage, which I knew was wrong. My theory on what happened quickly changed.

Long story short(ish), we got in touch with Autodesk support, got some semblance of the reports working, figured out how many credits disappeared and had them restored. The problem is, this took about a week. I could have bought more credits, but really didn’t want to give any more money to Autodesk until they got the rest of my money back. You see, 1 Cloud Credit equals 1 dollar. So this was over $2000 that was missing. Nothing to sniff at.

I assumed this was a one time event. Spoiler alert: I was wrong.

Flash forward to just a couple weeks ago. Same user. Same email. Same missing Cloud Credits. This time, the reports were sort of working, and it report that this user had used 600 credits, which is WAY lower than it should be. Reached out again, track down my invoices for when I bought the Shared Credits, send them in, wait a week, and get my missing credits back.

Here’s the thing: Autodesk could never precisely tell me what happened to the missing credits, and my reports show that I never purchased any AND now my reports show that nobody has any credits, when I know they should all have 100, used or unused.

Support has been as helpful as they can on these issues, but they shouldn’t be issues at all. Something seems VERY broken with however they are tracking the usage on the Cloud Credits. I now have to plan to go in weekly to check the status; not to see how many have been used, but to see if it’s broken. It needs to be fixed.

Autodesk Application Manager Annoyance

If you’re like me, you get annoyed with extra software getting installed on your user’s PCs without your control. I like streamlining deployments as much as possible, I do all I can to keep users from installing software on their own, etc.

With the 2015 branded software, Autodesk introduced the Autodesk Application Manager. In theory, a cute little piece of software that can let you know when your Autodesk programs are out of date. In my environment it’s another memory suck, another pop-up, and another phone call from a user. My users simply cannot install the updates on their own even if they knew about them. They don’t have admin rights.

Luckily, according to the FAQ, if I don’t want it for a network deployment I can just uncheck the box! Perfection!

(Cue ominous music)

My AutoCrap deployment and my Revit deployment did this wonderfully. Uncheck the box, no Application Manager. And then I got to 3D Max Design…

If Autodesk had pants, they would be on fire right now

Of course we had a problem. The deployment wizard said I couldn’t have Max if I didn’t install the App Manager.

Well, I wanted Max. There are some notes in the FAQ about editing the setup.ini file for a non-deployment installation, but I worried since I wasn’t doing a stand-alone install, this wouldn’t work.

The workaround I opted for was to tweak the Application Manager settings before the deployment. Like a lot of the software, you can first install it, set it up the way you like, and then save the settings to apply to your deployment. So that’s what I did.

I got Application Manager installed on my machine and tweaked the settings to tell it to not start on Windows start-up, to only check for updates once a week, and to not show any pop-up when it finds updates. Not ideal, but it should at least stay hidden mostly from my users. Mostly.

Once that is done, you export your settings as a tiny .ini file. I put mine in the same location of the deployment, just in case.

When you created you deployment, under the options for Application Manager, you can then import this .ini file to suck up those settings.

VERY IMPORTANT!!!! When you export your settings to an .ini file, there is a setting for “Files Location”. The default is the current users Windows Documents folder. The installer will NOT re-interpret this as a variable username and will deploy with the precise path that’s in there, so BEFORE you export your settings, change this to some universal non-user specific file location.

Change this path before exporting your settings

 

Infraworks 360 Quick Followup

Right now, I would LOVE more export options on my Infraworks model. Had to track down some FBX importers/converters. Just sayin’.

Infraworks 360 Initial Thoughts

I’m having a lot of fun with my 30 day trial of Infraworks 360. Being in the arch end of the design world, I never paid much attention to Infraworks Naught, but our friends at Autodesk have been pushing the 360 end of it hard, specifically Model Builder.

“Pushing”. We’ll come back to that in a second.

The Model Builder is easy to get started and get your initial data downloaded. Amazingly easy, actually. I found the importing of AutoCrap and Sketchup models to be a little confusing when trying to place (be sure to tell Infraworks what type of thing your thing it is), and my Revit test model didn’t even load up properly.

But so far, the slickness of the software has impressed me. I might need to get a few copies. And that’s where the fun comes in.

Our Suite subscription allows us to have a handful of Infraworks licenses (sidenote: Infraworks is surprisingly hard to type, and really hard to say). This is NOT Infraworks 360, which is what you need to have the Model Builder awesomeness. Bear with me here. My Infraworks licenses are networked, so I have a nice pool of available seats and can maximize usage, and can leverage expenses and all that business jargon crap. Infraworks 360 requires you to upgrade an Autodesk 360 account to be able to access it, which limits who can use it and totally makes me shrug and say “wha?” BEYOND THAT, the use of 360 is going to require Cloud Credits (don’t get me started on Cloud Credits), but Autodesk can’t tell me how many yet.

Yeah. The pusher. They are going to get us hooked and then tell us how much it costs for the sweet sweet GIS and satellite and infrastructure candy.

So, I am EXTREMELY cautious about buying even a single seat of Infraworks 360. Even if that is not a huge investment, who knows if it will be prohibitively costly to use the portions we want to use. My suggestions: dump the extra license fee for 360. I know how much I spend on my Ultimate Suites. You can have Showcase back. Gimme Infraworks 360, or at least Model Builder. On top of that, let me know how many cloud credits I am going to have to spend. I REALLY want to share this new technology with everyone, but I am REALLY nervous to do so right now.

So, yeah, get the 30 day trial and use the Model Builder, but watch out for when the pusher comes to you with the bill.

Here’s An Idea to Help Me Cheat

I just realized I have a lot of Donovan on my iPhone.  Not hours and hours, but like 8 songs.  That seems like a lot of Donovan.  I might need to reevaluate some things in my music listening life.  Hm.

Sorry about that.

After working with Revit for years and years, I’ve come to realize that it likes things a certain way.  Case in point, is the relationship between model elements and annotation.  There is a distinct line between these two categories of items.  I know, this seems like Revit 101, but there are times that I would like these lines to be a little more wuzzy, or maybe to have Autodesk incorporate my latest genius idea!

So you know how when you are placing an element, you can specify (in your project) what tag to place with it?  This works nice for rooms and doors and windows for the most part.  You only have a couple different tags to work with.

We come across problems with items that are a little more vague in nature, elements that are usually associate with symbology and not a representation of the actual element.  In our case, that includes items like fire extinguisher cabinets, ceiling speakers, cameras, wall joints… stuff like this.  Stuff that is hard to tell what it is on its own, and really needs to be represented by a scale agnostic symbol.

In theory, I could load in tags for each, then before I place each one, go to my OPTIONS button and change what tag to use for whatever category of element I am using (a lot of this stuff ends up being SPECIALTY EQUIPMENT or GENERIC MODELS) and Revit will tag it with my symbol.  Sounds OK on paper, but in practice this is pretty annoying procedure and easy to mess up.

So, here’s my idea, stop me if you’ve heard this one.  I wonder if it would be possible to link a specific annotation symbol to a model family at the family editor level, so when the element is placed it simply uses that attached tag all the time.  Right now, we embed symbols into the above mentioned items, but that’s not the same, and we end up having some very odd glitches when a view range just happens to snag an element and the element itself is below a roof or ceiling, but since the symbol is annotation it draws it “on top” of everything.  If a default tag could be tied to components at the family level, and get placed in the view with the component that would definitely lower a lot of the confusion that I see.

Do you see my problem here?  Am I overthinking it?  Have you already solved it?  Curious what others are doing about this.

That’s Why It’s Called ‘Mirror’

Being the IT/Revit guy in my office means lots of things.  It means that chances are I am a giant nerd.  It means I get to help people work through their problems.  It does NOT mean that I have a Batman style red phone to call Autodesk and tell them what I want.

Sadly, not me

For some reason, people in the office seem to think that if they tell me something to change in Revit, I can just contact the developers and snap my fingers to have it done.  It doesn’t work that way.  The closest thing I get is to vote on the AUGI Wishlist like everyone else.

Here’s a “wish” that I get a lot.  And this post is my therapy to try to work past it.  You see, I can’t answer the people how I want to answer this.  It would be… unprofessional.  So you get to read it.  Lucky you!

We have multiple disciplines under one roof here: architects and engineers.  So, when it makes sense, we create one piece of content that works for everyone (SYNERGY!!!!!).  This problem always comes up when folks are using our lavs and faucets.  The architects LOVE to mirror these things around the plan to save time.  What they forget is that the faucets have hot and cold on them and when you mirror those, they get flipped around, because, you know, MIRROR.

Got an email from someone the other day complaining about this, and how I needed to get in touch with Autodesk to let them know that this is wrong and it should never do this.  I gnashed my teeth and filed the email away.  What I wanted to tell him was this:

The definition of mirror is “to show a reflection of”.  When we mirror elements, we see a reflection of them along the line that the user defines.  If this tool were to simply rotate the elements 180 degrees, then IT WOULDN’T BE CALLED MIRROR ANYMORE, WOULD IT?!!  And if ONLY Revit had a tool that could ROTATE AN ELEMENT.  Wow. That would be fantastic.

Thanks for letting me vent.  If you have to deal with these folks, keep your chin up and just keep fighting the good fight.

You Know What I Would Love?

I would really like to be able to “convert” a view to a drafting view.  I could totally use this with some 3D views we have of mock up panels from one project that we want in another project, but we don’t want the mock up panel itself (because where would it go?  And don’t tell me another phase.  That’s a waste).

We have been exporting to DWG to get it 2D, then reimporting into a new blank project, then spending hours cleaning it up so it doesn’t corrupt the main model, then copying THOSE drafting views into the model.

You know how much easier it would be to just right-click, Duplicate View, Duplicate as Drafting View?  That would be SO easy and SO cool.

And more importantly, it would be one less thing I have to do in Autocrap.  I barely even know how to open that software anymore.  It’s dead to me.  Like Crocs.

God, I hate Crocs.