Equal Spacing Trick

No, not THAT equal spacing trick. Well, it is that one, but it’s a tweak on it. It’s not ONLY that one.

Recently, I was having a nice chill Q&A session on Revit families and we, of course, starting talking about things other than families. A user had an issue where she wanted her windows equally spaced. Yeah, we all know the EQ trick on the dimensions. You dimension a bunch of items, click the EQ toggle and Revit magically does math and spaces them all the same distance.

It’s Magic!!!

But she didn’t actually want that. She wanted the space BETWEEN the windows to be equal. And no math.

Luckily, we came up with a solution. We had to start with a reference plane the width of the windows past the end of the wall. And then, instead of dimensioning to the center of the windows, we dimensioned to the edge, and included the reference plane. The plane was kind of like a phantom window, so when we hit EQ, it all lined up!

Booyah!

Not the traditional way, but way easier than doing a bunch of math!

 

 

What’s in a Name?

Objects in Revit have parameters.  Everyone knows this.  Some have many many parameters.  I absolutely think it’s impractical and time wasting to fill in every single one.  However, there are many that get overlooked that actually can help us out.

Case in point – the name of reference planes.

Usually, you slap down a reference plane and ignore it.  Well, you don’t ignore it, but it is rare that I see someone checking out the properties of a plane.  It is what it is.  Immensely useful for creating content, in-place families, slicing, dicing and in general making our lives a little easier.

If you check out the parameters for a plane, you have Scope Box and Name.  Not gonna worry about Scope Box now, but absolutely name your plane.  Named planes can be far easier when selecting the working plane, and it’s a good habit to get into to organize things.

The only trick is to plan out your naming early.  If I were making a desk component I might want to name some of my planes the following:

• Desk front
• Desk back
• Desk right
• Desk left
• Legs back
• Legs front
• etc…

As opposed to “Front of desk” and “Back of desk” which might be my first idea.  While a little grammatically awkward, it helps to group the planes in a more category based system when you hit that pulldown to select one.

So a quick two second task can help organize your planes and make it easier to select them in a pinch.