I’m that guy who has a lot of apps on my phone. “Oh, that might be neat,” I say to myself and I download an app. And then I don’t use it but I don’t uninstall it because I might use it. But then I don’t. But I still don’t uninstall it.
I’m not as bad with my Revit Add-ins, but I do have a lot. This is what my add-in bar looks like.
A lot of the get scrunched up at the end. Now, I look at these and there are a lot that I have only used once and will probably never use again, but I just can’t part with them (I’m looking a you, Revit DB Link).
To top it off, I do a lot of presentations and webinars now on the BIM Interoperability Tools and I really would love those to be front and center in my bar and not the fly-out when I have to talk about them. Luckily there is an easy fix to tell Revit how to get these reshuffled.
I took a look at one of the locations where my add-ins get installed, C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Revit\Addins\2017 and saw if I could find a correlation between the add-ins and how they showed up in my bar. After one quick glance it looked like Revit just goes through the add-ins alphabetically and loads them up.
Well, figured I’d give it a shot. I did some renaming to move what I wanted first up the list and what I rarely used down the list. It ended up looking like this:
But would it work? I fired up Revit, and yup. My add-ins were reordered the way I wanted them to show up. A really easy work around to get my interface to be the way I wanted it to.
A couple notes: is this a hack? No. It’s a simple renaming of files, but it’s probably not officially supported. It shouldn’t mess anything up, except when I go to uninstall any of those add-ins, it might not be able to find the .addin file until I rename it back. Also remember that there are a couple places that Revit can put your .addin file, so you might need to do a little alphabetical juggling when you rename your .addin file. The two primary locations are:
It’s been a bit longer than I like since I’ve made a post here. In truth, I’ve been putting a lot of my posting effort over on blog.caddcommunity.com, beefing up the technical posts on that site. It’s been fun, but I have missed dropping a note or two over here.
I figured there’s not much need to offer up Revit tips, but there are certainly tech and industry related things I’d like to write about, things that don’t fit in over at the other site.
I’ve been doing a lot of webinars lately, and for the presenter it is an odd way to present. It took a couple runs, but I finally don’t feel TOO weird talking to an empty room, and pretending there are people there. It also took me a couple runs to finally get a setup that makes me feel confident in presenting online. I had to steal a neighbor’s monitor, but he hasn’t noticed that it’s missing yet.
Above is what I see when I present. The left most monitor, the laptop, is the actual screen that is being presented. I found that some programs can throw me some graphics glitches when GoToWhatever is running and the program is not on the primary monitor. So anything on that screen gets shown. I typically also dial down my resolution a bit when I present.
Working our way right, the first stand alone monitor I have split: the left half shows me the PowerPoint presenter view with my notes, upcoming slide, etc. But even if I am mainly doing a software demo, I keep that running because it has a big clock on it. Next to that is OneNote that has the outline of the presentation I am doing, to make sure I hit all the key points.
On the table next to that monitor is my Cthulhu mug… Always good to have an Elder One keeping an eye on you.
The landscape oriented monitor has a couple of functions. I keep most of the GoTo windows open there including the chat window, the questions window, the audience view window, and then the main menu so I can click the record button, or make sure my audio is going through. If I have multiple programs to demo, I will also keep them open and cascaded on top of each other so I can just drag and drop them onto the presentation monitor when I need them. I prefer that over Alt-Tab or Windows-Tab. I always seem to miss the program I want when I Tab through. This gives me a lot more control. THen typically I just close the program when I am done with it.
So that’s my layout. If you need to do online presentations, maybe you can grab something from this. Does it justify me having three monitors? Probably not. But it does make it easier for me to keep an eye on everything I need to when I’m in my room talking to nobody.
I’ve had the pleasure of being part of the team responsible for the Autodesk Revit Interoperabiity Tools, and it’s been a treat helping to figure out how to make the best tool and continue to refine them. They have been in development and available in one form or another for a couple years now, but our website www.biminteroperabilitytools.com has only been live a few months and we’ve gotten a tremendous response. Couple the with the recent UK BIM Mandate, and the need to get our Revit models to work with other applications has never been greater.
I was only loosely familiar with COBie before I got involved with the tools, so working on the Autodesk COBie Extension for Revit has been a great way for me to learn more about it. Put simply, COBie is a standard format for sharing data between applications, in this case from Revit to… whatever application you need it to go to. COBie is not software specific, and that’s is strength and why it’s being adopted by so many government and public entities.
I had to give an presentation recently on all the tools, and I wanted to quickly sum up what impressed me about the COBie Extension. To be frank, COBie by itself is kind of lackluster. I mean, it shouldn’t be exciting, it’s about data exchange and it needs to be fast and efficient. But a little glitz goes a long way in selling a concept.
That’s what the COBie Extension does, it makes COBie for Revit users sexy. The utility is a Revit add-on that does the best job of any COBie tool in collecting and creating applicable COBie data. I say “applicable” because the extension will generate as much data directly from the Revit model as it can, but a lot of the information is simply impossible to get from the model; you don’t track that kind of stuff in Revit.
Where possible, the tool has added some great features to enhance the model and keep track of things that COBie cares about, but Revit doesn’t understand (see the awesome Zone Manager feature).
The big thing for a lot of folks I imagine, as it was huge for me, is simply integrating the creation and collection of that data into a Revit interface and relating it backs to the model. As a Revit user this was HUGE in helping me understand what COBie wanted and what it didn’t.
“Sexy” may be too strong a word, but the COBie Extension certainly make COBie more accessible and easier to use for Revit users.
The nature of deployments means that they will most likely end up on a network server somewhere. But for one reason or another, you might not want to just dive in and create those deployments right on the server: you could be running out of space, you might be testing out a new configuration, or it’s often just a good idea to test these things out first anyway.
Two assumptions with this trick. First, you are using the Autodesk Deployment tools with your software. Secondly, you are going to be deploying from a mapped drive (that has its own potential issues, but it’s a very common practice).
I like to be able to have my cake and eat it too. In this case, that means creating a test deployment in a sandbox, but being able to use it for my final deployment if it works. Let’s say we want to make our deployments on the network L: drive. Being good software folks, we don’t want to create our deployments on that drive directly. It’s easy to disconnect the drive, but how do you convince your local PC that it has that L: drive?
Time to crack open the Command Line! Good old DOS. The command subst allows you to set a local folder as a new drive letter, spoofing it so Windows sees a new drive.
I’ve used this all the time to build deployments. I have to make sure my folder tree matches the real network drive… so if my network deployments live under L:\Autodesk, I make a folder on my C: drive called Deploy, then I use subst to make my computer think that C:\Deploy is L: and then I just need to create an Autodesk folder under C:\Deploy.
So I create my Autodesk deployments, say the administrative image path is L:\Autodesk\<<whatever>>, and I am creating test deployments on my hard drive, that I can then just move up to the network location if they work. All the paths will align properly and users can then run the install from that L:\Autodesk path.
How long has it been since you saw rows and rows of giant rolls of 30×42 sheets bound up in butcher paper, waiting for the Fed Ex guy to come and pick them up (and try to not break his back)? Every time a job was put out to bid, I remember the admin staff filling up half their office with drawings. Now? Doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t think it’s a shock that the amount of large format printing has dropped drastically over the years. You will still see physical drawings on a job site, but even the amount of those has dropped as well.
With faster data speeds, local governments accepting digital signatures, and better review tools out there like BlueBeam, everyone is just using PDFs. It’s faster, cheaper, and way easier on your back.
So why do we insist on limiting the amount and clarity of information we put into our drawings because of an issue that might not really be an issue anymore? Ask anyone why we still do black and white CDs, and the answer will most likely be “color is so expensive”. Color is definitely more expensive than black and white plotting. But there are two factors here to consider: 1) as discussed above, we just aren’t printing as much as we used to so printing budgets should be dropping anyway and 2) the cost difference between a black and white versus a color line drawing has been dropping as well. Part of this depends on the hardware your repro firm has, but many of them are starting to purchase exclusively color hardware. It might just be time for a real conversation with them about what the actual costs are.
It probably seems odd that I am writing about this. I’m 100% in with Revit. I love the software, I love its potential, and I love the benefit that the industry is going to gain by embracing the model. But I also like to solve problems, and this is a big one that I have seen in the industry for years.
What is the first thing many contractors do when they look at an RCP? They highlight every light fixture. How much time could be saved if this is what they already looked like? And now we know one hasn’t been missed.
Find all the lightsNOW find all the lights
I’m sure everyone’s seen those photos of construction issues floating around the web, the ones where they cut the concrete to match the call-out tag or the renovation cloud. It would be much easier to distinguish between tags and work if all the annotation was in a single color, say blue.
And how about demo drawings? Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish what is being demo’ed and what stays around. Let’s make all demo in red, and all existing in green.
Piping folks have been distinguishing things in color for years. Some local authorities are requiring their permit drawings in color, making fire rating very easy to tell apart. It should be obvious how much easier to read CDs would be if we just added a tiny amount of color.
There are some issues to work past. We need to get some consistency, we need to take into account people who experience color deficiencies, and we need to figure out why Revit won’t let us set some categories projection patterns (I’m looking at you, ducts) but these seem like easy things to get past, and I think the benefits we will see from this are huge.
Does the material in your Architectural Columns look strange? Chances are, they automatically JOINED to a wall.
Architectural Column families will adopt the material of the wall that they are joined to. If you don’t want that material, you can just UNJOIN the column from the wall and it will revert back to the material you gave it when you created it.
If you can plan ahead, you can edit it and uncheck the AUTOMATICALLY JOINS GEOMETRY TO WALLS parameter in the Family Category and Parameters before you place it.
A very astute coworker dropped me an email the other day, referring to an old post I did about naming your families so they won’t mess up Windows naming conventions. He mentioned that one of his favorite trick is to use the Window Character Map to get fractions into your family names without having to break the Windows naming rules, plus it keeps your Project Browser nice and tidy.
Me, being the know-it-all I am, thought “Well, I had looked into that before, but the fractions in Character Map only include halves and quarters. What happens when you need to name a wall family and you need that 5/8? You don’t want half your families named one way and the other half another way.”
So, I opened up Character Map… just in case… and you can easily see the halves and quarters, no eighths. I’m so smart.
And then I scrolled down.
Yup, as you probably guessed or already knew, you can easily use the Character Map in Windows to generate single character text for a whole slew of fractions, up to (down to?) eighths. Architecturally, that’s probably as far as you need to go. Keeps things nice and clean and helps save space when looking at your Type Selector.
Scroll down for more fraction fun!
Need a hand with Character Map? Check out this link.
For those of you using the “automatic” feature of getting a local file, you need to take a look at your default location where Revit dumps the local files. Like my two boys, Revit does a poor job of cleaning up after itself. Over time it can start to fill up your hard drive, which can lead to bad-ness.
Just by taking a look you should be able to figure out what file is what. Be sure to delete old unused local files, as well as their corresponding BACKUP folders. You will most likely need to scroll “up” to find the BACKUP folder, but they are huge too. They will start with the exact same name of the local file, so be sure to clear out the right ones.
You can find your file location by going to Revit Options and checking out the File Locations section. The “Default path for user files:” is where Revit sticks all those local files and backup folders.
I see it all over the place, and you might have it happening at your firm. Need to do some Revit training? Let’s have a Lunch and Learn! It’s great. Everyone brings their own food, and someone sits down with a laptop and projector and goes over some good tidbits about Revit. What could go wrong?
I obviously have a beef with this training format. I 100% believe that consistent in person training one way or another is critical for continued success with BIM projects and Revit specifically. For some reason, Revit (and other software) training gets relegated to happen over lunch time. This has to stop.
Sticking a training session during lunch tells the attendees two things: first that what you are about to learn isn’t important enough for a firm to spend time on it, and the second is that if you have to miss it, go ahead and miss it.
It is not uncommon for a production person to spend 5 or more hours a day in Revit. Having an hour long “come together” session once a month, or even every other week should not be too much to expect. The time invested in training is important, and learning how to use Revit effectively is crucial. Having to try to learn in between bites of sandwiches and growling stomachs lessens the perceived importance of what is being taught. The time necessary for two hours a month for training is negligible and tells the users that this is important enough to have a “real” meeting for it.
Beyond that, the lunch hour is the typical time (for U.S. folks anyway) to run errands and take care of personal business and to just get away from the desks and recharge. Lunch and Learn sessions take away from this potential personal time, and the sessions will usually lose out to an essential errand that just has to get done.
Pick a time during the workday, and put it on everyone’s calendar. Use that time to go over new procedures, changes in the template, or just cover an issue that a lot of people have come to you with recently. Make it a “real” meeting and that makes it important and a proper place to focus on what is an important task: learning to be more effective and productive in Revit.
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