Wall Jogs and Tough Clean Ups

UPDATE – Please check out Bjorn’s quick and easy technique in the comments.  It’s one of those things that makes you say “no way!”  You still might need to do some “dancing” with some elaborate stacked walls, but the below tip is an excellent first step that should resolve a lot of the issues.

There comes a point in any Revit wall’s life that it just cannot clean up.  It’s not when the wall is too big, Revit LOVES big.

It’s when it gets too small.

Look at the below two wall strings.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

All set?  Great.  Now, they look fine, right?  Clean up nice and pretty.  But look what happens when I scoot that lower wall in both strings up just 1/8″.

What in the world happened to the wall string on the left?!  That jog got all messed up!  But the one on the right is fine!  What’s happened here?

Well, the overall width on the wall on the left is 1′-1 7/8″.  That’s the key.  Once a jog, or clean up length gets less than the overall width of the wall, the wall gets very confused and mad.  The top two “horizontal” walls are overlapping the lower “horizontal” wall, and making cleanup a nightmare.

Is there a solution?  Sort of.

First thing you need to do is think about how it would actually be built… you know… in the real world.  Would it really be jut the wall walking around this gap, or would it be a different wall type, etc?

From this point, there are a couple options, none of which are ideal.  We have tried them with mixed results.

You can make an architectural column and slap it on the wall.  We’ve done that.  Works… OK.

If you want to use walls, there is a very round about way to try and get these things to clean up.

First we need a frame of reference on our walls.

So, walls 1 and 5 are our major horizontals, 3 is the smallish horizontal, and 2 and 4 are our right and left verticals, respectively.  You’ll see from the above image that I have already started my work. 

The first step is to disallow the join between 2 and 3 and 3 and 4.  On the appropriate end for each wall, you need to right-click on the grip and select DISALLOW JOIN.  You’ll do this for the lower grips on 2 and 4, and both gripd on 3.

Then you need to do some aligning, and you will only figure this out with trial and error and a lot of undos.  For this case I ended up aligning and constraining the left face of wall 3 to the left (interior) face of wall 2 and the right face of wall 3 with the right (interior) face of wall 4.  Then I aligned and constrained the lower face of wall 2 to inside the finish material of wall 3.

The final step is to simply JOIN GEOMETRY on each combination of walls: 2 to 3 and 3 to 4.  And here’s the thing – THE ORDER THAT YOU SELECT WHAT WALL FIRST MATTERS.  In this case, I selected the “verticals” first, so I clicked 2 then 3, and then 4 then 3.  It “feels” like the first thing you select when you join geometry “wins”.  I have zero scientific data to back this claim up, but that’s what my gut tells me.

Poof!  Nice and clean.  And if I nudge or straight out move wall 3 up, the clean up stays with it.

This is definitely one of those cases where no one solution fits all problems but if you know the possible solutions, you can hopefully pick an appropriate response.

Getting Your Sheets in Order

Revit is always touted as a modeling application, not a documentation one.  I have even heard an Autodesk folk say that you should do your modeling in Revit and then print from AutoCrap… sorry, AutoCAD.  Well, that’s one horribly insane idea that we’ll file neatly in the “crazy person said it” category.

Still, Revit out of the box leaves a little to be desired on the documentation front.  We like to refer to it as the last 10%.  Revit almost gets you there, it gets you 90% of the way to amazing documents and gorgeous sheets that I would want to frame and hang on the wall, but that last 10% rears its head and bites you.

There are ways to work around the last 10%, thanks to customization and parameters that you can create.  One of the out of the box issues is ordering sheets.  The sheet index is an amazingly wonderful schedule that you can plunk on your index sheet or cover sheet and be done with it… as long as you want to list everything alphabetically.

If your firm is like ours, the A sheets don’t come first (they do in our hearts, but not in the set).  What is a Revit user to do?  Here’s where some parameters come in. 

Make a project parameter and call it Sort Order and apply that parameter to sheets.  Numerically determine what the order for each discipline is (general = 1, architectural = 6, etc) and then fill in the correct value for the sheet.  We also added a parameter called Sort Order Name which contains the discipline’s name.

Now, create a Drawing Index Schedule and add the Sort Order (and Sort Order Name) fields to it.  Hide Sort Order under the Appearance tab.  In the Sorting/Grouping tab, set the first sort by to Sort Order.  And for extra points, set the second one to Sort Order Name and mark it as Header.  The final sorting is done by Sheet Number.

This will organize and group your sheets by the numeric Sort Order and put a nice header of the Sort Order Name above them.

We may never fully make it past the last 10%, but we can get close.

Toilet Partitions

I know, it’s a fun topic.  But it is one that is debatable out there in Revit-land.

The best approach we have found is to simply have a wall type whose construction is 1″ formed plastic.  Then when it’s placed, our Revit modelers need to pay particular attention to the offsets to make sure it’s “hung” right.  We don’t model connectors or hangers, that’s just more junk to bog down our model.

The most complicated wall… EVER

Now, here comes the fun part.  If my cut plane is slicing through the partition, it’s going to show up with a nice fat line, just like any other wall.  We don’t want that.  We want our toilet partition to be a trim slim line.

So comes the beauty of view filters.  I love view filters.  Your view filter lives in the Visibility Graphics for your view (VG).  They can also be saved in view templates (which I am also in love with – don’t tell the view filters!)

On our plans, we add a view filter that looks for any wall type whose name includes the word “toilet” and we dial down the cut lines for it.  Voila.  Slim lines for our partitions.

Adding the filter…

… and applying it to the view

The only potential issue is that we have to make sure we name our wall types properly.  If any non toilet partition wall has the work “toilet” in its name, then it will show up thin.  But, this really really should never happen.  If it does, feel free to pull out your BIM Stick and beat the tar out of the person who did it.

Ceilings Need a Facelift

I’ve had it up to here (about 8′ above finish floor – HA!) with ceilings.

There are a couple things in Revit that feel like they need an overhaul, and I would like to nominate ceilings and their related functions.

First off – The structure of the ceilings for ACT.  Why a hatch?  Why can the grid not be some kind of smart element.  “That’s too much modeling overhead,” I hear someone in the backrow say.  Well, here is my response to that: first, sometimes it’s just nice to see the grids in section.  Revit Structure allows floors to add metal decks (why not roofs – ahem), and that’s pretty cool.  Seems like some of that modeling love could stretch over to ceilings on the Revit Architecture side.

Second, and this is my big grief, we sometimes find ourselves needing to do a demo ceiling plan.  Don’t ask, but sometimes we need it.  So we have had to create a new ceiling type for demo ACT ceilings.  On top of that, we have had to make a new hatch style(s) with dashed lines indicating a demo’ed grid.  It has to be a model hatch, so it will be 2×2 or 2×4, so the demo lines show different at different scale.  I hate that.  My architects have to demo a ceiling AND THEN CHANGE THE CEILING TYPE, which is something we told them never to do.

My other beef with the ceilings has to do with their interactions with room objects.  So, there’s a toggle on a ceiling instance for room bounding, right?  And it controls the height of the room when you calculate volume.  But only when you calculate volume, which they tell you not to do too often.  Why can’t the room just look for the ceiling on placement?  Why does the room have no parameter showing me its height, even when I do turn on calculate volume?  It only shows UNBOUNDED HEIGHT, which is the height I originally gave it.  Our RCP tag has room number and ceiling height.  So, it’s two tags… a room tag with number and a ceiling tag with height.  That’s stupid.  My room should be able to see how tall it is based on the ceiling height and register that.

I was hoping that 2010 might address some of these concerns, but the NDA for the Revit Beta keeps me from telling you anything about it.  So, hypothetically, I couldn’t say “No, it doesn’t look like ceilings have gotten any attention at all,” or something like that.

Small beef?  Yeah.  Silly?  Maybe.  But every time I have to explain it to someone, it takes the “I” out of BIM.

Where Is My DWF Viewer That Fits In My Pocket

I wrapped up the three day class today and went over Revit’s nice DWF integration. It’s clean simple and works well. Beautiful.
Right now, I’m sitting in an elementary school hallway waiting to pick up my kid from play practice (they’re doing Willie Wonka, since I know you asked). I have downloaded the WordPress app to my iPhone and blogging from it. Awesome.
So, these two paragraphs are related in my mildly OCD brain, and here it is: where the heck is my DWF viewer for the iPhone?!!! Don’t send me to Freewheel. Freewheel has not been tricked out for my small form factor multi touch wonder. I want a reader. I can open PDF files, Office docs, etc. But no DWF.

And that makes me sad.

Autodesk did release an app for the iPhone. It was fun for about five seconds. Absolutely no practical application. A DWF viewer would be more than practical.

Come on, Labs. Throw one together and let me stick my roll of drawings in my pocket.

Boot Camp and Phases

Second day of training wrapped up.  I always get a bit panicky, looking over my notes and thinking that there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that I can cover all the material.  But we always seem to make it through.

Each time I do the class, I find myself adjusting the emphasis on certain sections.  With the economy in its current state (opposite of “awesome”), our firm has a larger percentage of renovation work than we typically have in the past.  In previous classes, day 3 of training has had a 20 minute discussion of the phasing available in Revit: “Hey, look that each element has a phase.  Neat?  Neat.  And, no, that demolish button doesn’t mean delete.  DELETE means delete.”  Tomorrow I intend to spend at least an hour on it.

We have not seen much need to go beyond the standard “Existing” and “New” phases.  Mainly the way the phase filters forces us to display things pretty much exclusively based on chronology, we just weren’t able to produce the documents we had expected.  There are workarounds, but overall, I would love to see a revamp of the phase filter system.  Instead of seeing it as “now” or “prior”, I would like each phase filter to be able to control the different phases and phase states individually.  Basically, the chart would get more columns based on the phases in the project.  Then one could select on, off or some override settings for that phase and state.

Ah, to dream.

And while I’m dreaming, a root beer float would be great right about now.

Bad Pun? Worst Pun

So I thought I would take a stab at the rendering side of things for an easy Sunday morning.  It’s Super Bowl day and I am an idiot, so I give you…

THE SUPER BOWL

Where are the chips?

The materials dialog has gotten an upgrade from 2008, and it is using the same back-end as Max now.  So if you are familiar with Max, it should be a piece of cake.  I am not familiar with Max, beyond a courteous “hello” to each other as we pass in the hall.

Modeling the bowl was easy.  Since this was a quick test, I just made a generic model in-place family.  A simple revolve of a hand sketched shape, and the bowl was done.

Then it was onto the material.  I found a nice cheap looking white plastic and used that as the base.  I started a new material based on the plastic, and modified the RENDER APPEARANCE of the new material.

I added the IMAGE FILE of my recently downloaded logo (thanks, Google Images!)  Started to look OK.  But it needed some depth.

I then took the original file into Photoshop and took a stab at making a bump map.  A bump map is imply a black and white graphic that will add “depth” to the rendered material.  Black means low and white means high.  Grays are the in betweens.

I added this to the FINISH BUMP of the material, noting that there is also a BUMP PATTERN listed below it, with the same potential settings.  The help file was a little vague on what the differences were, so that is something to add to the research list.

I applied that material to my bowl and did a render.

Something was clearly wrong.  There is no ways I would have eaten my Saturday morning cartoon cereal out of a bowl with upside-down S logos.  Revit was applying the material in one quick swipe over the entire bowl, starting at the outside and “draping” it over the whole thing.  I had upside-down “S’es”.  Or, “S’s”.  Um… The “S” was upside-down.

Luckily, the materials dialog box allows for rotation.  Obviously, if I were to simply rotate the material, then the outside would be upside-down, and that would be wrong as well.  I created another material and rotated the IMAGE FILE and FINISH BUMP.  I cheated a little and opened the in-place family and simply did a paint bucket of the material on the inside face of the bowl (the rest had been applied by and instance parameter).

The whole process took about 15 minutes.   I seriously think that it took me longer to write this post.

I’ve always like the render engine in Revit ’09.  It comes across with very nice results without much tweakage.  I definitely would put some more TLC into this thing if it were going to go in front of a client (we don’t have that many clients requesting comic book inspired table settings), but it’s nice to know that the basic steps for creating and modifying materials are not that difficult.  We have been trying to make sure all our default template materials have the corret rendering information assigned to them.  That way, the designers can click a few buttons and get a very reasonable rendering to make design decisions with.

I’ve always said that there is a voodoo artistry needed for an excellentrendering, and that is still completely true; lighting, materials, camera angles… these all need to be massaged and then massaged again until the final product.  But it’s nice to know that Revit makes it very easy for a good rendering to be done without much work