Quick Tip – Missing Sheets From Plots

Well, this was a weird one. We had a situation where a user was having very inconsistent results while plotting. He’d plot and maybe half the sheets would come out. He’d plot again and a totally different set of sheets would come out.

We tried the usual and expected troubleshooting steps: restart Revit, reboot the PC, reload the printer driver, etc. On a whim, we took a look at the video driver and found out it wasn’t the latest supported version. Autodesk maintains a database of supported drivers that you can search through based on video card manufacturer and software version.

The unsuspected culprit!

I wager you can see where this story is going, but in what seems like a disconnected solution, updating the video card driver cleared up the plotter issue. For the most part, Revit is pretty hardware agnostic, but it’s important to 1) make sure you are using a supported video card and 2) keep an eye on the supported driver list and make sure you are using the most recent supported driver, you don’t want to necessarily use the most recent driver on the hardware manufacturer’s site, pay attention to Autodesk’s own list.

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!

 

 

Quick Tip – The TEMP Folder

Revit acting a little funny? How long has it been since you rebooted? It might be time again.

Something else to check would be to clear out your TEMP folder. Make sure Revit is closed and click START and go to RUN (or press the Windows key + R). Type in %TEMP% and hit OK. That folder is your TEMP folder. Select all the files and delete them all. Windows will need to skip some, that’s OK.

We found that there are some ghosts that get cleaned up nicely when you periodically scrub your TEMP folder. Revit (and other Windows apps) is (are) supposed to keep this clean on their own, but like the typical teenager, sometimes they need help keeping their room clean.

Not sure, but I’d bet a teenager

Standards, Mud, and the Middle Ground

Over at the ever excellent Revit OpEd blog, Steve Stafford recently posted a response to a Quick Tip I, uh, recently posted. His post does a great job of thoroughly explaining the issue I hinted at (and frankly, makes me a little ashamed that I didn’t go into much detail.)

My initial response was, “Holy crap! Steve Stafford reads my blog!” After that, my brain, in its never ending quest to not let me fall asleep at night, went down a rabbit hole of standards, procedures, and users.

Steve lays out a procedure to follow that filters all content loading on a project through a single user to help avoid issue like this. And while this is a great ideal solution to aim for, I tend to offer my tips and advice in more of a triage functionality. I do love standards and aiming for the ideal, but I also have seen many projects and many users panic at the eleventh hour and simply need to get the job out the door. I want to make sure their panicked clicking does as little damage to the model as possible. Sometimes this leads to conversations with owners, sometimes it leads to more education for users, sometimes it leads to tweaking of content and procedures to help users from shooting themselves in the foot.

This roundabout finally gets me to the point on this post: standards and procedures and users.

Right off the bat, I don’t have a great answer here, but this is a discussion that has been going on for decades and will continue to go on for decades more. Your firm is going to have standards, and the industry and technology has best practices that everyone should aim for. As a BIM (or even IT) manager, your job is to push people in the direction of best practices, but you also need to balance that push with the culture and specific needs of your company. Somewhere in the middle are your standards.

You working on your standards

I’ve always said that standards are set in mud; they need to be solid enough so everyone can see them and follow them, but malleable enough to update as needs arise. One set of standards and procedures is not going to be ideal for two different firms, there is a delicate balancing act that support staff needs to maintain, and knowing the users and how they work is critical to that. The users may not be advanced enough for a tricky technical procedure, the staffing levels might not be high enough to support having a dedicated model manager, the owner of the company might REALLY LOVE that font that is a pain to make work in the annotation families. As a support person, you need to know where to draw the line, and where that line needs to get erased from time to time.

Just try to make that line a Detail Line and not a Model Line. That Model Line shows up in everybody’s views.

 

Quick Tip – Clean Up After Yourself

After you import a view from another model, clean it up. There is a chance that it brought in some new annotation styles, or detail items. Change them all to corresponding elements already existing in your model, and then delete the newly unused ones that just came in.

One of our most notorious examples is the infamous Break Line. Each drafting view we imported had a copy of the break line family. By the time anyone noticed, the project model had “Break Line (1)” through “Break Line (22)”. We have since updated our details to avoid detail components and be exclusively linework, but something always seems to slip by.

A clean model is a happy model!

My Wishlist – Parameter Concatenation

“Concatenation”… That is a really long word, and full disclosure, I had to Google how to spell it.

The opening of the Revit API has done a great job of filling in gaps in Revit with some fantastic solutions. I am all for letting some features be done by third party developers; often they are closer to the problem and have a very unique approach to a solution that is clean and effective. Unfortunately, there are some fundamental things that Revit cannot do properly that an add-in only halfway solves.

Combining of different parameter values into a single parameter is one of those things that there have been some great solutions for with macros or Dynamo or add-ins, but they are all just stop gaps; they need to be run periodically to properly fill in that final parameter. They are not “automagic” and won’t keep an active eye on the parameters that they are combining.

It is past time for Revit to be able to do this natively and actively and consistently. I would imagine the easiest would be to have a calculated value, but that of course would not be ideal with the limitations around lack of tagging, etc. Some syntax for a shared or project parameter that allowed combining other parameters and they would stay up to date all the time, that would be the ideal solution.

This is a huge addition that I would love to see in a future release, and I am confident I am not alone. Until that time, unfortunately, we will have to keep rolling with band-aid solutions.

Autodesk University 2015 Grab Bag Wrap-Up Part 4: What I Can Use Right Now

You’re still with me? Nice, thanks. Fist bump. It’s time to get our feet back on the ground and find out…

What I Can Use Right Now

I feel like I might be late to this party, but there was one word that was on every Revit user’s lips out in Vegas:

Dynamo is billed as a visual programming platform. Here’s the deal. Programming in the Revit API needs a pretty high level nerd. It’s programming. It’s code. It’s not pretty.

Dynamo is there to be the go between the API and the user. The nerd level is still a little high, but nowhere near as high as it is in the API.

Dynamo programming – kind of cute

To top it off, one of the classes I took was taught by Marcello Sgambelluri who was hands down the best instructor I have had at AU. He had a genuine enthusiasm and knowledge of the material that was contagious. Well, the knowledge wasn’t contagious.  That would have been amazing. But you know what I mean.

Originally Dynamo was being sold as a generative design application, so I think it got overlooked. Luckily, some smart people realized it could be used to grab and manipulate many levels of data inside the model, and create more practical geometries within Revit. The most basic example I saw was a method that capitalized all the text in your model. A more advanced, but just as useful Dynamo script showed how to lay out actual linework on a topo element. Basically, things that Revit users have been looking for for years, now easy and magical thanks to Dynamo.

I know I called this “What I Can Use Right Now” and I don’t like false advertising. The Sunday after AU (after the Saturday that I spent sleeping) I cracked open Revit and Dynamo and spent some time throwing together my own scripts to see how simple it could be.

The first script I worked on was prompted from a Revit class I taught a few weeks ago. A student asked if you could see column grids in 3D. Well, sadly, of course you couldn’t. It would be lovely if Revit gave you some functionality for this, but not yet.

Dynamo to the rescue.

After about an hour of copy/paste, editing, and some online research, I ended up with a Dynamo script that got it done. It needs some clean-up, but now I have a function that I can migrate from one project to another with the same results.

Secondly, I tackled a task that you see many add-in solutions for, but I wanted to see how simple Dynamo could make it: check a door’s “To-Room” parameter, and overwrite the door’s Mark with the room number. Turned out, it was pretty easy. Again, needs some clean-up, but now I have this little piece of code that is easy to follow, easy to manipulate if needed, and easy to use in multiple projects.

Dynamo isn’t perfect (it crashed Revit four times when I was working on it) and it’s very early in its development life, but it has a TON of potential, and as long as you are deliberate and save your file before usinig it, you should get some great time savers.

Check out the official Dynamo site here, and Marcello’s blog here.

Tomorrow – final thoughts and final day of the week. Thanks for sticking with me.

 

Autodesk University 2015 Grab Bag Wrap-up Part 1: It’s About Time

I recently had the privilege to present an AU wrap up at both Revit DC and Revit RVA user groups. I thought I would massage what I shared with them and slap it up here. Overall, I had a great time at AU this year. I hadn’t been in several years and I forgot what a great combination of design and technology it is. I also forgot how much sleep you need when it’s all over. I am not sure that I got out of bed on Saturday. Sorry, what was I talking about?

Oh yeah. AU.

These are the things that I picked up either through classes, on the exhibition hall floor, through conversations, or just through gut feelings. These were the things that I was thinking about after I left the conference, for one reason or another. I tended to ramble in this article, so I am breaking it up into 4 parts.

It’s About Time

These are the things that I feel we have been hearing about and promised for years, and it’s finally time.

The Model Is King

Ever since the emergence of Revit and BIM on the industry, there has been a push to get everyone to work in the model, make your model important, collect your data in the model. If you’re reading this, I am probably preaching to the choir about how important the model is, but I think it has been a tough sell for many of us. At the end of the day, we just need to print paper… that’s the usual excuse. And frankly, a lot of the promises of what the model could do for us or how easy it would just didn’t hold up. I think we have finally turned a corner. There were vendors on the hall floor that were so confident in how easy it was for their technology to be able to get the proper data out of a model, they invited visitors to simply walk up with their Revit file on a flash drive and they would make the magic happen. There were so many classes and vendors on working with the model and sharing data from the model, and you didn’t get the sense that people were rolling their eyes at it anymore. The idea of interoperability was huge, and that’s not interoperability with a DWG file, it’s foundation is the Revit model file.

The Cloud

Are you tired of hearing about the cloud? I am. But, if you looked at either running applications from the cloud or hosting documents a couple years ago, it’s definitely time to take another look. There are probably other solutions out there, but I spent some time running Revit through a virtual machine via Amazon Web Services. I was amazed at how the performance was. Last time I looked at running Revit through the web, there was a lag that made it completely unbearable. The setup I used had completely done away with this lag. This is totally a viable solution now.

I was also really impressed with how effective FormIt 360 is, even moreso that it is a cloud based app. First and foremost, it is Autodesk’s attempt to replace Sketchup. I sat in on a lab with the head of the FormIt team, and it is absolutely ready to replace Sketchup in the design workflow. It feels like it has some way to go for those of you who use Sketchup for presentation work, but it is already a superior tool for design. The modeling is just as easy as Sketchup, and it integrates into a Revit workflow with far greater ease.

Last in the cloud is hosting documents. BIM 360 Docs was officially launched at AU, and it looks sharp. There is a waiting list to get rolling on it, but the team took the time to fill a lot of needs for sharing and marking up docs online. It’s mainly in the construction end, but it is definitely a solution I am going to keep an eye on.

Virtual Reality

Everyone who saw The Lawnmower Man was excited over the potential of VR. So, maybe five of us. Luckily, Virtual Reality became more prominent over the years, and not only through amazingly horrible sci-fi movies. We saw promise after promise of it being integrated in the AEC world, and while we saw some neat applications, they were all at the experimental end, or just for the firms with the really big wallets. That’s not the case anymore. Oculus Rift had a strong presence at the conference, and they were really fun to play with. There were multiple visualization offerings that could work with VR for people to choose from. If you don’t want to pay whatever for a Rift, you can fork over just a couple bucks and get a Google Cardboard or something akin to it. Combine that with Stingray or Max and your Revit model, and you have a high quality and inexpensive VR solution. There isn’t much of an excuse anymore.

That’s it for the first part of my wrap-up. To recap: all of these have been talked about for years, and frankly, were either too expensive or really didn’t work effectively before. It’s definitely worth your time to reevaluate.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll be covering the tech that just isn’t quite there yet.

 

New Revit Tools Website Launched

 

As one of my tasks here at my new job, I have had the pleasure of hopping onto the development of a group of great Revit utilities. Granted, I hopped on at the 11th hour, but it’s still some really cool stuff, and I am so stoked to be part of it.

The Model Checker, Model Checker Configurator, COBie Extension, and Classification Manager are all potentially critical tools for your Revit workflow, and I have some exciting news: they’re all free!

It used to be a little tricky to track them all down, so we’ve launched a new website to house all the downloads, the help files, samples, how to’s, etc. Hop on over to http://www.biminteroperabilitytools.com to check everything out.

We have some webinars coming up over the next few weeks to go over some info on the tools, and we are working hard on 2.0 of the COBie Extension and Classification Manager, with some much requested additions. I’ll drop some tips and pointers on the blog as we get closer to launch.

So, go grab the utilities and let us know what you think!

 

Quick Tip – Family Names

When you are naming a family whether in your model or elsewhere, you need to avoid any “wacky” characters, especially \ / ” ‘ ; etc. Your best bet is to just use letters, numbers, spaces, underscores “_” and dashes “-“.

Since your family can be saved as a completely separate file, the naming needs to follow Windows name rules. If it finds a wacky character when you go to edit it, you might end up with a totally different file opening up.