Workset and Copy/Monitor Glitch

Yes, yes, I know everyone is excited about the release of Revit 2012, but I have a little 2011 issue that I thought I would share with everyone.  And in all honesty, I don’t even know if this is a problem in 2012, but I figured we’d still be using 2011 for some time so here goes.

We have started getting our folks to create a Copy Monitor workset in workshared files.  On this workset, we are asking them to put anything in the model that they have Copy/Monitored.  This allows the original model to not load in that workset when the second model is linked back in.  This helps avoid having elements on top of themselves which, according to TimeCop, would cause some sort of space time continuum mess.

The issue is when an element is Copy/Monitored, it DOESN’T GO IN ON THE CURRENT ACTIVE WORKSET.  It goes on the first workset that was created, usually the cleverly named “Workset 1”.  Everything else seems to play nice with worksets.  Copy/Monitor elements don’t like to play nice.  Our (dumb) workaround?  In blank files that we are activating worksharing, we make the first workset “Copy Monitor”.

We have verified with Autodesk that this is an issue, and that the developers are “working on it”.  Like I said, I need to see if it still happens in 2012, and considering past experience, I have a feelign that we will never see a fix for it in 2011.  So heads up on that.

Don’t Forget! LOW WALLS! Watch your…feet…

This is a “hiccup” that I forget.  So I’m writing it down here in the hopes that it will force me to remember (hint: it won’t!)

You remember way back when, we talked about how floors don’t exactly follow the View Range rules?  Walls are kind of the same.  Except a lot more confusing.

This is hard to understand, so I’ll point you here and here (I especially like how that last one calls it a “feature”) for some different ways of explaining it.

Here are the criteria for this insanity:

1. You have a wall
2. The top is UNCONSTRAINED and not attached to anything
3. Your View Range cuts through the wall
4. The top of your wall is less than 6′ from the Bottom of the View Range

If your walls meet all these criteria, your wall will NOT show with the CUT style.  It will show PROJECTION.  Yes, even though you are cutting through it.

If you set the top of your wall to constrain to a level, any level, and then offset it, it will then show as CUT.  Or if you drop the bottom of your view range down so the top of the wall is at least 6′ from the bottom of the view range, it will show as CUT.

Seriously, there has to be a secret manual somewhere.  Indiana Jones and I will try to track it down soon.

Curved Monolithic Stairs – Am I Doing Something Wrong?

One of my Revit Architecture users hit a snag the other day when making a curved set of stairs to get up to a stage in an elementary school.  They were going to be cast-in-place, so we opted for monolithic.

Now, I have never been a huge stair fan in Revit.  Most of the time, in fact, I hate them (I despise their close relative, the railing, who has become my nemesis).  So when something started going wonky, I wasn’t surprised.

Maybe we’re doing something wrong.  Maybe we have a parameter set incorrectly.  But let me tell you, I tried it on multiple projects, with multiple combinations of parameters, and different materials, and heights, etc etc.  Always had the same bizarre situation:

In plan, everything looked nice and played well together.  So we thought we were good. 

Looks great!

A section cut is where something told us things were angry.  Where are the stairs?!

Something is amiss

When in doubt, go to 3D.  A quick camera dropped in, or switching to your 3D view can answer many questions that other views cannot.  That’s why we model it!  Unfortunately, this was not the case.  Going to 3D just was more bizarre.

Where are my stairs?!

The only thing we can figure is that Revit is refusing to let the “section” of a monolithic stair go past its calculated point, so it just slices it.  What?  And this is only for stairs whose type is checked as “monolithic”.  Non-monolithic curve fine.

Non-mono looks goooood…

This is crazy.  We opted for an in-place family sweep, but even that doesn’t make me happy, because you cannot use the STAIR category for in-place families.  Another bizarre and severe limitation.

If you have seen this issue, and you know how to work past it, feel free to post a comment and let everyone know.  Otherwise, just be aware of the insanity, and cross your fingers that stairs (and their jerk cousin, railings) get an overhaul soon.

Plan Region Oddities

We had a hiccup with our Plan Regions today that I thought I would throw out here so others can enjoy our twenty minutes of panic and confusion.

For a little background so we’re all on the same page… let’s say our cut plane is about 4′-6″ on a typical floor plan.  Actually, let’s say it’s precisely 4′-6″.  That gets us through most doors and windows and walls.  Things that we like to slice through (through which we like to slice).

But, alas, this one little roof shed has a louver that’s up around 8′-0″.  It would be absolutley silly to make another plan simply to show this louver.  What is one to do?

Luckily, Revit has a solution for us.  Looking under VIEW you will see the PLAN REGION tool.  This is a pretty nifty thing.  A plan region allows you to define an area on the plan that follows different view range settings.  Which will allow us to move the cut plane around the lovers to 8′-2″.

Clicking PLAN REGION will take you into the ubiquitous sketch mode where you will sketch out the perimeter of your new plan region.  While still in sketch mode, you can click the Plan Region Properties button and in there you’ll see the View Range button.  Click that, and you get the same view range settings that you would see on any view.  Tweak them to what you need, click OK, finish your sketch and voila! that small sketched area now has a different view range.  End background.

The oddity came in when a user had opened a view with a Plan Region and all of the walls in that region were missing!  First reaction, of course, was that someone had deleted the walls.  Who shall we kill?!  After some quick investigation, turns out the walls were there.  So what was up with them not showing through the Plan Region?

To test, all we did was create a new Plan Region with the same view range.  Yup.  It all showed up.  Walls, tags, everything.  But that original Plan Region was mad.

To fix it?  Selected the region and clicked its EDIT button.  Got back into sketch mode.  Made no changes, and simply finished the sketch again.

Poof.  Everything showed back up.  It just needed a kick in the pants, apparently.

We love our Plan Regions.  I just hope they start behaving better.  Panic attacks are not a good thing when you’re one week to go on a project.

Issues With Ceilings and DGNs

This is really bad.  As in the real definition of “bad”.  Try this out…

Create a room with a ceiling (or not even the room) in Revit.

Export the RCP view to a Microstation file.

Open the file in Microstation.

Notice the difference?  And I’m not talking about the black background or other colors.

Yeah.  The GRID IS WRONG.  I’m certainly not the first online to post about this, but it is so annoying and frankly so amazingly dangerous that I wanted to put something up.  I haven’t tested with other model patterns, but I bet they would be screwed up as well.

I have categorize this as a “Gripe” but I feel like I need to make an entirely new category for it.  This is beyond insane.  As designers trying to work with consultants, the basic foundation is that the lines we see will be in the same place when we export that file.  I can deal with fonts, I can manage colors, I can tolerate layers.  But wrong lines?  That opens me up to liability issues. 

That’s actionable.

That’s so bad.

And it needs to be fixed now.

Rotated Views

Sometimes you are going to find yourself in a situation where, darn it, you want that plan rotated.  Maybe you are working on an area of your design where the walls are not orthogonal to the project cardinal points. 

Actually, that’s probably about the only reason for a sane person to rotate a view.

This is not Project North vs. True North.  You can very easily tell a plan view to change orientation to True North in Revit.

That’s easy.  But let’s say my view is set to Project North, and my plan is looking like this…

Please don't check for code

I want to do a callout plan, but I want that view to be “parallel” to the walls.  There are two ways to do this.  First off, I need to drop my callout box on the view.

Not parallel

From here you can select the border of the callout, and simply use the ROTATE tool to rotate it to the angle you want.  And as we know, in Revit the border of the callout is exactly what the border of the called out view will be.

After rotate

That’s a piece of cake.  Nice, intuitive, what you see is what you get kind of thing.  But let’s say the view you want to rotate is NOT in a callout.  This is where the second method comes in. 

The first thing is to make sure your CROP REGION is visible in the view you need to rotate.

Tiny yellow light-bulb? Check

Then, select the crop region border, and use the rotate tool on it.

Now your entire view will be rotated, and you can work “orthogonally” based on the new orientation.

Please note some things:

• This will NOT change your Project North or True North.
• As far as I can tell there is no way to determine if a view has been “rotated” thusly.
• For good model management, including the bullet above, it is recommended that you duplicate any view and rename prior to rotating.  Put a suffix on it like ” – ROTATED”.
• It’s probably my brain, but I always seem to want to rotate the wrong way, when using the rotate crop boundary method.  Have your hand over the CTRL-Z for a quick undo!
• The rotate callout will work with any view type (plan, elevation, section).  The rotate boundary will work on plans and sections, not elevations.  Although you get some WEIRD results when rotating sections.

So, spin away!