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.

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.

It’s All in the Details

For many new Revit users and folks putting documents together in general, the idea of letting go of certain detail work in larger scale is tough to get.  So tough, in fact, that they sometimes just don’t.  Not ideal, and not very BIM-y, but totally understandable

So you have a wall section, and you have a detail callout of where it joins the roof.  You go into the detail and use some detail lines and detail components and flesh it out and it looks really nice.  Then you look at the wall section again and it looks… empty… and someone above you is angry and wants them to look the same.

This sort of falls in the last 10%.  It’s not exactly Revit not being able to do what we want it to do, it is working just as you would expect it to work – detail work is view specific.  So you would need to duplicate all that detail work in the wall section.  Then if you update one, you need to update the other.  That’s a lot of work and big potential for errors.

There is almost a way around it, though.

Wherever you drew your detail work – select the lines, the detail components, the text, the symbols, everything except model work and dimensions and datum annotation.  Group it.  Give it an appropriate name.  It will become a Detail Group (you see where I’m going with this?)

Once you have your newly created group, select it and copy it.  Then change to the other view.  Simply pasting it will get Revit to want to force it to the same location, or you can do a Paste Aligned – Same Place to drop it where it was.

So, now you have a group, in both places.  Voila!  Need to update the information, just open the group and go for it.  The detail line work will stay up to date in both spots.

Not ideal, but not a bad work around.  It will NOT take Edit Cut Profiles nor will it take dimensions, so avoid those.  Other than that, try it out and hopefully it can save you some time and discrepancies.

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.

When I’m 64

Just a quick post.  Last week we had our monthly local Revit user group meeting and the discussion came up about 64-bit PCs.

I won’t go into the crazy geeky technical aspects of 32 vs 64, but the question was whether or not it was worth the investment using Revit on a 64-bit machine.

Unquestionably, yes.

If you are using Revit to do residential work, or something under, say 5,000 sf (I just pulled that number out of my… um… void) then you probably won’t see any gain from the different architecture.  With the size of projects we are working on (medium to big) my users who were lucky enough to be in the 64-bit pilot project group would cause me bodily harm if I took their machines away from them.

Less waiting and fewer hiccups with workshared models is the key.  The group with the 64-bit PCs reported zero out of memory type issues when trying to save to central or other memory intensive processes.  The poor 32-bit users… well, we had to gently nudge Revit to save sometimes.

I don’t have hard numbers about am0unt of time saved, but frankly I think that’s not important.  The users felt better about it and a happier model maker is a more productive model maker.

We don’t do much rendering, but doing our renderings on the 64-bit PCs is insanely faster than the others.  Not a huge selling point for us, but it might be for you.

Any new workstations we buy are 64-bit.  Now we just have to get out of this recession so I can buy some more workstations…

Mysteries of the Unknown!

I have a running list of “REVIT MYSTERIES’ on my desk (I’ve already discussed one of those mysteries).  One day, I would like to take this list with me into a room of the developers and ask “why”.

Until then, I shall whine about it here and maybe someone out there has a good explanation.  Today’s case: The Mystery of the Vanishing Strucutral Column!

Something is happening wiht drawing order and how things are cut.  I cannot find much other folks with this issue, but I can consistently get something weird to happen.  At least I think it’s weird.

Let’s say I place a wall.  Let’s say I place some components (structural columns) in that wall.  Now I do a callout of the area.

If I do a callout and set the type to FLOOR PLAN, things seem to come in how I expect.

If I do a callout and set the type to DETAIL VIEW, then I get some odd results.  Hatches and lines overlap.  Things don’t seem to cut clean.

Why is this?  Is Revit making assumptions about what I want to do with DETAIL VIEWS?  That I plan on slapping detail components everywhere?  How presumptive of Revit.

Detail Views have some very different settings than a “standard” floor plan callout view.  The help file does not explain this graphic difference, however.

I would really love to hear an explanation.  Right now, we just kind of avoid Detail Views, and if someone took the time to make them function differently, I would love to know why.

Where Is My Constraint Lock?

Just a quickie, and looks like it is not a Revit 2010 thing.  Might seem like a no brainer, but is one of those things that you can spin your wheels on and waste time with.

Let’s say you’ve just aligned something in Revit (say it with me – “destination, traveller”).  You want to click the handy padlock to constrain it, but… oh no!  No constraint lock!  What the deuce is going on?!

It’s there, don’t worry.  Check out your Visibility Graphics (VG).  Look under the Annotation Categories tab for “Constrants”.  Make sure that is checked.  POOF!  There they are!

Like I said, this seems to be OK in 2010.  The constraint lock will show up after you align something even if you have the Constraints category hidden.  What won’t show up are any locks on already constrained objects when you select them.

Revit, Links and Phases – Part 1

When working in Revit, I often find myself quoting Spider-man.  Don’t look at me that way.

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

SO true.  And very true in the world of phasing.  Phasing itself can be quite confusing.  It takes some time to get your head around it.  The best way that I find to explain it to folks (who have a basic understanding of 80’s classic cinema) is that you are getting into a DeLorean and speeding up to 88 miles per hour.  Whatever phase you set for your view, you have travelled through time to get to that spot and that’s where you are.

Then you get to deal with Phase Filters.  That adds another level of fun to the conversation, but the key to remember about the filter is that they are changing the appearance of the model BASED UPON WHERE IN TIME THAT DELOREAN DROPPED YOU.

How stuff is labeled seems to be one of the banes of Revit (How many releases did we wait through until they finally renamed it “Synchronize with Central”?) and the phases vs. phase filters are no different.  The out of the box template has a phase called “New Construction”.  There are also phase filters called “Show Demo + New”, “Show New” and “Show Previous + New”.  When introduced to the concept, most folks make the assumption that the word “New” in the phase filter relates to the “New Construction” phase, and it’s hard to blame them because they are the same word!

You have to keep in mind that the phase filter is in relation to the phase your view is in.  So even though it says “New” in the filter, if you have gone back in time to the existing phase, you will not see new construction stuff.  You will see what was new during the existing phase year.

We have even gone so far to rename the Phase Filters in our template.  Wherever the word “New” was we have replaced it with “Current”.  Not the best word necessarily, but it makes it harder for the brain to connect the phase and the filter incorrectly.

I’ve rambled a lot to get us on the same page with phases here.  In Part 2, I’ll discuss a little bit about the fun when you link another Revit file in and have to deal with someone else’s phases.

Poor Interior Designers

I don’t mean the title of this post sarcastically, I do mean it in relation to good old Revit.

I recently had the pleasure to sit down with our Interior Designers group for an Autodesk webinar titled “Revit Architecture and Interior Design”.  Well, it was a pleasure to sit with them, not so much the presentation.

It wasn’t the presenter, it was completely the material, or lack thereof.  We have been working hard to fully integrate our designers with the rest of the project team on our Revit models.  Unfortunately, it is only halfway (quarterway?) there.  We wanted to see the tools for easy floor pattern design!  We wanted to see the commitment from manufacturer’s to get consistent and proper families into Revit!  We wanted to see better integration of room object finish information and the actual model!

We didn’t see these things.  They don’t exist yet.

We saw rendering (nice!), Autodesk Seek (spotty) and integration with Inventor (what?!)

I have a feeling that the Interior Designer is not on the marketshare target for Autodesk yet.  The in house solutions we are putting together are piecemeal at best.  We get frustrated that they cannot fully take advantage of the parametric engine that is Revit’s bread and butter.  We cross our fingers that this will be remedied in future releases.

2010 Halftone Control

One of our Revit “last 10%” complaints was always about the obtuse “halftone” toggle for visibility graphics and appearance settings.  We pretty much assumed that it is literally 50% of whatever the original color is.

The thing is, even when we “ghosted” linework in AutoCrap and called it “halftone”, it was really about 65%, not 50%.  50% is just too darn light.

Apparently, the Revit guys, when they weren’t working on shiny new plastic-like icons, decided to add something practical to 2010.  We can now control the halftone setting on a project basis.

If you go to MANAGE – SETTINGS you will see the new HALFTONE/UNDERLAY control. 

This will bring up a beautiful little slider that lets you control exactly what the “half” in “halftone” means.

Slide up or slide down, whichever way you want to slide now, Revit lets you.