Keep Your Hands Dirty

I often find that folks in an IT/CADD/BIM support role often find themselves a step or two away from some of the actual issues production folks might end up with.  It’s understandable, the economics of the situation forces us to spend time in crisis mode.  However, this shell can keep us from identifying hidden issues and truly understanding the scope of problems that our end users might find and bring to us.

With Revit, I’ve decided to attempt to keep myself a little more “in the game”.  Here and there, when I can sneak it in, I have been working on modelling our firm’s headquarters.  You have to drop it anytime someone comes in, or you get a phone call, so finding a groove is tricky, but it is definitely beneficial to discovering potential pitfalls and little gems hidden in the software.

I’ll post some of the gems and issues along the way.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

We are using stacked walls almost exclusively for our exterior walls.  It gives a nice organizational structure for the architects, and it lets the structural guys have their own “wall” at the bottom for foundations that they can control.

This lends itself to some issues that we are working through, ones that I’ll probably address more fully at a later date: clean-ups get odd, level association, etc.

With a particularly nasty clean-up, we found ourselves wanting to just “explode” the stacked wall into its sub wall components so we could change the type of one of the subwalls, but not lose any of the layout.  We figured we would have to go through a horrific process of deleting the wall and manually building the wall back up, one piece at a time.

Well, lo and behold if Revit hadn’t thought of it for us already.  We just had to find it.

While doing my usual stab at selecting and right-clicking, I saw an option in the menu called “Break Up”.  Normally, a command called “Break Up” would freak me out, assuming that something is going to be torn asunder into its core geometric components and leaving me with thousands of triangles to deal with.

Gulp!

So, with one hand on the mouse and the other firmly over CTRL-Z, I clicked.  Revit dumped the stacked wall out to its component walls, maintained the hosted elements, associated it with the original level and offset appropriately.  Then it was just a case of selecting the basic wall whose type I needed to change, and change it.

Simple, clean and elegant.  I love it when things work like I want them to.