Linking Excel Data Into Navisworks – Intro

We all know Navisworks mainly as an amazing aggregator of various model formats, but you can also link in data straight to items within the Navisworks file. This might feel like you are editing the data, but you aren’t. It is still simply collecting that data and aligning it, some of that data just happens to be in the form of an Excel file or SQL database.

This is typically handled in some kind of round-trip: you export information from the Navisworks model, you edit or tweak it in Excel or compile into a database, then you link it back in. The reason for this is if you want to connect data to specific elements, you need a key or unique ID for both pieces of software to be able to see and often that key is only in that element. So, you can export data about those elements, including that key, so the external program knows what to match things up with.

We are going to spend a couple posts and focus on exporting some data from a Revit model (in Navisworks) to Excel, making some edits, and then linking it back in. All of this is to enhance the data in your Navisworks model, and any of these steps can be taken as a single activity or part of an overall workflow.

Part 1 will be about collecting the data in Navisworks.

Part 2 will dive into the exporting the information to a format that Excel likes.

Part 3 opens up the Excel file and adds some data and does some tweaks to make it easier for us later on.

Part 4 will cover linking that data back in so we can see it in our Navisworks model.

Part 5 is a wrap-up with some tips and extra resources.

Check back in a few days for Part 1!

Add-In File Locations

Has it been two months since I posted? Yikes.

Well, I had the need to track down a Revit add-in and I went to the usual spots to find it… but it wasn’t there!

I am used to finding my add-in reference files in one of two locations:

C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Revit\Addins for add-ins that can be accessed by any user and

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\Revit\Addins for add-ins that can be accessed only by the current user

Well, the .addin file I was looking for wasn’t in either of those two spots. It took me a bit, but I ended up finding it in a third location:

C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins

Yeah, weird right? It looks like add-ins that can be used by multiple pieces of Autodesk software go here. I had several in there.

So, accessing and messing with the .addin file is not needed that often, but now there’s another place you can go look for it!

Revit Add-in Order

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:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\Revit\Addins\<year>

C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Revit\Addins\<year>

So, if you need to move your buttons around, hopefully this little tweak will help you out.

Making COBie Sexy

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.

Quick Tip – Architectural Columns

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.

Character Map and Family Names

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.

Quick Tip – Local Files and Disk Space

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.

Not the right way to clean your hard drive

Make Your Model Look Like a Model

I saw a Tweet recently (I think it was a Tweet, I can’t find it again) that had an interesting workflow to make your Revit model render in a single material. The post had a rendering look like a hand made model fashioned out of wood. It was a neat idea, but it implied that the single material rendering inside Revit was not possible, mainly because you can’t override materials with View Filters. And while that last part is true, that doesn’t mean you can’t do it right inside of Revit. It takes a little cheating, but it’s cheating in a way that probably won’t hurt anything.

While View Filters don’t allow for material overrides, Phase Filters do. Taking a look at my Phases dialog box for the default Revit template, there is no default Phase Filter that has the New phase state set to overridden; and that makes sense because when do you want to override thew new work? You just want it to look like it normally does.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. I made a new Phase Filter called Single Material and set the New phase state to “Overridden”. Then for quick access, I went to the Graphic Overrides tab and opened the “Phase – New” material. My project didn’t have an appropriate material, but the installed asset browser got me a “good enough” chipboard material from the Autodesk material library. I didn’t bother making a new material, I simply replaced the asset for the “Phase – New” material. I did tweak the bump map, dialing the scale up to 40’x40′ since I was applying this to my whole model and I wanted it to look like it shrunk.

Sidenote – decades ago in architecture school, I was working on a model for a project up to the last minute (shocker) and I took a nice slice through the side of my thumb with a utility knife. I wrapped my thumb in those crappy brown paper towels you always had in school, and taped it up with masking tape. I did my charrette for that project with a hack job wrapped up bleeding thumb! Immediately after I presented I asked my professor if I could go to student health. She hastily agreed and I went and got stitches! You can still just make out the scar…

Back in 2016… In this specific case, my entire model was in the New Construction phase so it was pretty straightforward, but the same could be done to the other phase materials because honestly, when do you ever need to use those materials.

The results weren’t half bad:

Chipboard! I usually don’t say this, but it actually does look better full size, so click away!

Apply a touch of tilt frame effect…

Blurry chipboard!

I was pretty happy with the results considering the minuscule amount of time I spent on this thing. If I understood how exterior shadows worked, I could probably get those adjusted to look more appropriate. There are a ton of tweaks you could do if you wanted to apply this process to your own models, but you can easily start right in Revit for your rendering.

Quick Tip – TYPE v INSTANCE

From the Revit help file, a type is “a subdivision within a family of elements,” as opposed to an instance which is “an individual occurrence of an element.”

So, in your model you might have a window TYPE called “A”. When you place a window, you have created an INSTANCE of it. Each element is controlled by its type and instance parameters. Instance parameters will only impact that one specific individual element that you are looking at. Type parameters will impact all instances of that specific type.

When you are chaning the type parameters, be careful and be sure that you want to make that change to all the instances of that type. It can have major ramifications. Revit even tries to warn you before you do!

If you do need to make a type parameter change, but don’t want to change your current instances, duplicate that type first to make an entirely new one.

Tiny Windows and Graphics Cards

Recently saw a Tweet from Tom Whitehead concerning a teeny tiny window that showed up in his Revit. While it wasn’t EXACTLY like a problem that has been occurring over the last few years, it looked awful close to a problem that has come up with Revit and desktop management software like nView and Hyrdavision.

.@AutodeskHelp Any ideas on this? 2016 r2 UR12 pic.twitter.com/nwPbRKjDLR

— Crusty McFussypants (@swittersTX) February 9, 2016

I dropped Tom a quick note to test out my hunch, and it turns out that yes, nView was the culprit.

So what exactly is going on here? Honestly, I’m not really sure, and there hasn’t been an official fix from Autodesk; they have a page that outlines a less destructive fix than I do, but if I can take a hammer to something, I’m gonna take a hammer to it. But if you are using Hyrdavision or nView, you might see these random tiny windows. Traditionally, they have been the size of a postage stamp, with mainly just the X close button, and the tiny window is usually sitting in the middle of Revit.

Disabling nView or Hydravision seems to alleviate the tiny window syndrome (T.W.S. for short). When installing new graphics drivers, I will typically go the “custom” route and just not install either of those features and skip the hassle of having to disable them later on.

The earliest I have seen mention of this issue online is 2009, and that is probably close to when I first saw it as well. It’s stupid, and it’s annoying, but at least it’s easy to fix.