Revit Arch 2010 Advantage Pack and 2009 UI Issue

I haven’t been able to extensively test, but it looks like the aforementioned 2009 UI “hack” that you can do in 2010 gets confused a wee bit with the Advantage Pack on Revit Architecture 2010.  I plan on spending some time in an upcoming post discussing the Advantage Pack (I know – you can’t wait), but wanted to get this out there now since I haven’t seen it in the Intertubes yet.

We always knew the 2009 UI tweak wasn’t fully supported, but it looks like the Advantage Pack has set it a couple more steps out of alignment.  First up, the newly introduced (and much loved) Structural Ribbon loses the Truss tool in the non-ribbon interface.  Just can’t find it anywhere.

The “Tools” toolbar is… weird.  The tools seems to have been shuffled.

In order from left to right, I have listed what the icon is, and what the command acutally is:

What it looks like	What it really does
Show Work Plane	Work Plane
Linework	Work Plan Visibility
Spell Check	Spell Check
Join Roof	Find Replace
Some kind of mini Work Plane button	Tape Measure
Measure	Match Type
Show Hidden Lines	Linework
Hide Hiden Lines	Show Hidden Lines
Paint	Remove Hidden Lines
Split Face	Paint
Edit Cut Profile	Split Face
The Hammer from Demolish	Edit Cut Profile
Join Geometry icon next to the word “Demolish”	Demolish

So, that looks like one tool (Spell Check) that does what it looks like it’s supposed to do.

Align, Split, Trim and Offset all seemed to be saved from this madness, but the next batch of tools fared worse.

What it looks like	What it really does
Unjoin Geometry	Join Geometry
Cut Geometry	Unjoin Geometry
Don’t Cut Geometry	Cut Geometry
Copy/Monitor	Don’t Cut Geometry
Edit Wall Joins	Edit Wall Joins
CENSORED	Edit Beam Joins
Match Type	Join/Unjoin Roof

Again, we have one tool that matches its icon.  Weird.  Mousing over any of these will tell you what it’s going to do, you just have to ignore the picture.

A couple other items:

• If you have installed the Model Review, that just throws a nice error on bootup and won’t even load.
• The DB Link tool seems to be MIA
• The wonderful Convert Lines tool is also not to be found in the 2009 interface.
• I have not installed the Framing Tool, so cannot comment on its availability

That’s all that really jumped out at me.  I imagine I am missing some.  I also was not able to test/verify if keyboard shortcuts to these missing commands will work.  Also, I cannot verify if the other Revit flavors will have these same hiccups.

I’m not too surprised by this.  There was no reason for Autodesk to maintain support for a tweak that was completely unsupported.  The moral is just to pay attention if you are using the 2009 UI and have or plan on installing the Advantage Pack, you may be forced to hop in the Ribbon to see the full benefits of it.

Mansard Roof Madness

We have found ourselves needing to create far more mansard roofs in our Revit model than I think is healthy.  The economic downturn has led a lot of our clients to go down the addition and renovation road more than we are used to.  So we find ourselves in the “happy” position of having to model a lot of existing work of questionable architectural value.

But I am not here to argue the validity of aesthetics from decades ago!  I am confident that sometime in the nearish future some future blogger will be looking back at our work and make the same slightly disgusted face.

We tried really hard to use the built in roof tool in Revit to get a mansard roof, but the extent of the slope is just too extreme in most cases.  We now utilize the create roof by face.

We create a mass that consists of a blend sweep, which very easily lets you create the shape of the roof overall.  Then we create roof by face.  This is done face by face.  So, don’t select all the faces then try to finish.  Sometimes Revit gets mad at this and tells you “no”.  But you can definitely go in and change each face one at a time, then join the geometry when you’re done.

The biggest hurdle is learning the massing tools, but once this is overcome, this is a very easy and effective way of getting these roofs done.

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.

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.

Time for Teaching

Tomorrow I’m starting three days of training for some of our architects and architectural staff on Revit Architecture.  I’ll be teaching, as I’m doing once a month now.  It’s surprising how exhausted you can get of just standing/sitting and talking for the whole day.  I am pretty much wiped when 5:00 comes around at the end of teaching day.  I know, I know.  Your heart breaks for me.

We are lining folks up to get trained and will start their first project in Revit within two weeks of training.  Most of these folks are coming from CADD, some from Sketchup (ahhh… my anger toward Sketchup in a firm’s design and documentation process will be laid out in a later post).  The shift is so drastic, that we want to make sure they are trained and then POW! jump into a Revit project.  We give plenty of support as they start working, but we have absolutely found that Revit (or our other CADD platforms for that matter) is not like riding a bike.  We will have spent significant resources getting these people trained and if they don’t use the software, they forget it.  And these are smart people.  The process is just so different from what they are used to, you need to nurture the part of their brain that it gets plugged into.

I enjoy getting the feedback and the conversations and ideas from the class.  What I don’t like is halfway through the third day when their eyes are all glazing over and they don’t answer any questions.  I don’t blame them.  I would go groggy too, if I had to sit and listen to me speak for 8 hours straight.

I also enjoy seeing the light-bulb click on for some of them.  Working in a BIM production cycle is a drastic change.  I give most of the folks three weeks of using the software before the light bulb goes on and the realization that “hey, this is cool.”  A few of the folks have the switch thrown during the class.  They’ll be peering into their monitors and a smile will slowly cross their face.

“Welcome to the party,” I think.  “We’re glad to have you along.”

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.