Quick Tip – Dangerous Duplicate Views

This is a nasty one.  We have a lot of users that will duplicate a view to save time.  We’ve actually been endorsing a course of action of NOT duplicating views.  We’ve found too many things that folks forget about tweaking on a new view (this of course, does not go for Duplicate as Dependent) that was duplicated from another view.  Categories turned off, elements hidden, etc.

But here’s the nastiest.

We had a batch of section tags that looked like they were being censored.  The detail number and sheet in the tag had lines through them.

That’s not good.  It looks like the world’s worst censor got their hands on our drawings.  And it just looks plain dumb.

Turns out what happened is that the view was duplicated, for one reason or another.  WHEN A VIEW IS DUPLICATED THE VIEW TAG IS DUPLICATED AS WELL.  The second view was never put on a sheet.  So we had two section tags on top of each other.  One that was on a sheet and one that wasn’t.

If you duplicate views, pay extra attention to the tag for the original view.  Scoot it out of the way to find the duplicated tag and hide it.

Before anyone speaks up, yes we could just not print unreferenced views, and we often do this, but the above is still sloppy, and we are always trying to keep our Revit model clean.  Because a clean model is a happy model.

Quick Tip – Smile for the Camera!

I am always surprised when I find a very experienced Revit user unaware of some feature or function in the software.  I shouldn’t be surprised, because I’m often finding new things and a piece of software like Revit is amazingly complex, and knowing every single facet has to be a Herculean effort.

In this light, I teach a class for our firm called “The Top 10 Things All Revit Users Should Know” where I spend a couple hours going over some tips and tricks that can get forgotten or overlooked.  Can you guess how many tips and tricks?  That’s right!  64!  Why that many?  Why not 10?  Because there are WAY more than 10 tips and tricks that I expect all our users to know.

I am going to drop a handful of those tips throughout some upcoming blog posts.  There’s a good chance you know the tip.  If you do, don’t roll your eyes and make rude noises, just let the rest of the folks out there go “huh, I didn’t realize that.”  Hopefully, everyone will learn something and we will (checking business-speak manual) “raise all the boats together.”

(Just shut up and get to the tip)

You place a camera view in your model.  It’s just slightly off kilter, maybe not looking far enough up, or maybe not looking enough to one side or another.  You could select the view, click SHOW CAMERA, go back to the plan view, spin it, change the properties to adjust the height, etc etc.  But it would be a lot easier if you could just pivot that camera on its tripod while you are in the view.  I’ll break the tension.  You can.

Here’s the trick.  To simply “pivot” and “rotate” the camera on its tripod, you need to select the CROP REGION BOUNDARY for the camera view (so it’s highlighted), then in the view, use your SHIFT-middle-button pan and rotate to simply look around.  If the crop region is NOT selected, then you will just be doing a typical rotate where you move around the model.  This will work for any 3D view, not just a camera view (it’s just more impressive in a camera view).  Give it a spin to see how it works.

Get it?  Give it a “spin”?

Sorry.  Next post I’ll try to be pun-free.

Haikus Galore… Sort of

Thanks everyone who posted an entry for the Avatech Utlities.  It was surprisingly tough picking out one of the haikus to be the winner, but sadly, only one could be picked.

Like a hawk grabbing
Its prey, each grid I touch is
Numbered in order

Congratulations, Joe!  Your words made my heart swell with pride, I could feel the air blowing through the noble bird’s wings!  I yearned to be outside in the cool mountain breezes… instead of sitting in front of this computer under these flourescent lights.

Again, thanks to everyone who entered and everyone who read the posts.  I hope you had as much fun with them as I did.

And be sure to check out the Avatech Utilities.  They have a batch of them free, and those are all quite useful.

Avatech Utilities for Revit 2011 – Come and Get It

If you read the Revit blogs, you’ll know this isn’t the first post like this, so you probably know the drill.  Avatech has been kind enough to let me give away some of their stuff!

Avatech offers up an assortment of utilities that fill in some pesky gaps with the basic Revit functionality.  We have been using them for years and I can attest that we would waste a lot of time without some of these tools.

They offer a free version, but it only has a handful of the tools, and let me tell you, the Door Mark Update tool is an absolute lifesaver.

Would you like a free copy?  Absolutely you would!  How can you get one?  Post a comment to this article and let the world know how you plan on saving time with the Avatech Utilities, how you have saved time with them, or what you plan on doing with all the time you’ll be saving.  If you don’t know about them, be sure to take a look at their page for some more info.

Here’s the catch:

It has to be a haiku.

Oh yeah, I’m serious.  Three lines, 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables (if you are a syllable over I’ll probably overlook it). 

Am I evil?  Maybe.  But I thought it would get those creative juices flowing, and frankly, make it easier for me to read.  If no one replies, then I’ll know it was a bad idea.

Feel free to enter as many comments as you like.  Be sure to have your name and correct email address when you post.  That’s the only way we can get in touch with the winner.

After the 30th, I’ll pick the one that made me smile the most (might get some help from some friends) and you’ll get a code good for a free copy of the utilities.

Good luck!

Our Mama Bear Size Revit 2011 Deployment

Heads up!  This post is kinda heavy on the IT end of things.  EDIT: Code snippets included at bottom… You’ve been warned.

Just this week I finally got around to pulling the trigger on our 2011 installation of Revit Architecture, MEP, and Structure.  This goes to about 120 PCs over six offices in the firm. 

We aren’t the big boys with 1,000 designers and a team of 20 people on our IT staff, one whose specific job is to figure out how to deploy software.  Neither are we the little guys with only five employees and you can carry a CD to each desk to install new software in the course of an afternoon.  We’re right in the middle.  We’re the warm porridge of firms, which offers some interesting “opportunities” when trying to deploy and manage software.  (You like that?  I pulled out my business speak thesaurus and got the word “opportunity” in place of the word I wanted to use!) 

The question then is, how to deploy software to over 100 desktops without having to walk/drive to each one.  That might take some time.  We’re going to walk through how we overcame some of these hurdles and hopefully you can learn from our mistakes or maybe pick up a tip or two. 

First up, simply make the deployment.  Using the deployment wizard, we tweaked the install and set file locations and other wonderful settings and saved it all to a central location (we call it our “Library” server).  This Library drive gets replicated over the WAN to each office every night.  This was a lot of data, so we made the deployment on a Friday to copy over the weekend.  Pushing three different installs of Revit to five remote offices wrapped up the following Thursday. 

Then it was onto a test.  We had a spare PC in the “lab” (this term is used loosely).  Remember all those file locations and other great settings tweaked in the wizard?  Turns out Revit decides to ignore a lot of them during the actual install.  Hooray!  This write-up on the AU Website gave us a hint to tweak an install, then copy the Revit.ini file around AFTER installation.  Good tip.  I also like how at the bottom he says that “Installing Revit is a three-part process”, then lists 5 steps.  But I digress.  And seriously, we got some good tips here.  Be sure to read it if you are prepping your own deployment.  EDIT: Matt Stachoni sent a note to let me know that there is another location for the above mentioned deployment article here.  This one is better and has not been edited.  And five does equal five. 

So.  We now will need to copy the Revit.ini file over to the PCs after the install, if we want to get the most customized bang for our buck – file locations, template locations, etc.  Great.  Let’s tackle that later. 

Aside from the ini file, the install goes fine.  How are we going to get it on everyone’s machine?  In the past, we tried to use the msi files, and push the deployment through Active Directory to the PCs.  We ended up with many failures due to some missing prerequisites.  Then trying to push the prerequisites before the install got difficult. 

At the completion of the creation of the deployment with the wizard, you get a nice shortcut that you run that points to the install executable with all the tweaks that Revit will try to ignore later.  This is the most solid way to get the deployment out there, because the install executable includes the prerequisites.  So we really just want to copy this process. 

However, we couldn’t just have people double-click the shortcut because
1) our users are not admins on their PCs
2) I still want to PUSH this out as much as I can, so everyone gets it.  If I ask folks to double-click on something, it won’t happen on probably 30% of the machines, then I’m back to what would be a manual install 

We looked at RUN AS batch scripts, but anyone could open a .bat file and see the login credentials of an admin user pretty easily.  We needed something that could build a RUN AS wrapper to allow us to assign a login script that would give users temporary admin rights to install the software. 

Enter one of my favorite tools, AutoIt. 

If you do any IT management or work, you should download this now and look through some examples.  It’s a scripting platform that can do many things and will compile a nice little .exe file when you’re done.  Oh, and it’s freeware. 

Writing an AutoIt solved all four problems – .exe file that we could assign as a login script, allow to run with different credentials, run the install exe and arguments exactly like the wizard shortcut, and at the end of it all we copy over the tweaked Revit.ini file. 

Using a script wrapper is how we are making the majority of our installs now, and we have a nice generic script that we just tweak for each one.  There are actually two scripts, one local and one network due to an odd issue with Vista and Windows 7 UAC, but it works.  The network file is run first, which copies the local file over to the PCs C: drive.  Then the network file runs the local file under admin credentials.  The local file actually runs the install exe.  When it’s all done, we write a little text file to a folder on the C: drive, this way the network file has something to check to see if the software has installed, otherwise it will just run every time the user logs in. 

That’s the basics of it.  We’re happy with what we’ve worked out and have had several successful deployments using the above method.  If there’s some interest, I’ll post the actual script files up here later (EDIT: I’ve posted them below in this article), just let me know via comments or email.  But right now, this post is getting pretty long, and I’m getting kinda tired.  That bed looks good.  No not that one, that one’s too hard.  No, that other one looks too soft.  I’m talking about the one in the middle there. 

Yeah, that one looks just right.

---

OK, so here’s the code I mentioned above, with some notes in there and the fie locations genericized.  Watch out for line-wrapping and weird HTML format crap if you copy and paste.  As always, this is provided as-is and I would strongly recommending testing before throwing into a production environment.

The first is the network script which is the actual file that gets assigned as a login script.

Local $TxtFileName
Local $TxtFileName2
Local $LauncherFilePath
Local $LauncherFileName
Local $LocPath
Local $LocLauncher 
Local $SoftPath

;create a temp folder to copy the local wrapper to – make sure that people have execute rights to it
DirCreate(“c:\temp_wrapper”)

;the next location is where we write/check for the text file to see if the script should run completely
$SoftPath = “C:\WINDOWS\OurSoft\”
$LauncherFilePath = “(network path of the local wrapper file, not including the filename, ending with a \)”
$LocPath = “c:\temp_wrapper”

$TxtFileName = “(name of text file to see if the wrappers have already run”
$LauncherFileName = “(name of local wrapper file)”
 
;checks to see if the text file exists and if it does, it does nothing – if it doesn’t it runs the else
If FileExists($SoftPath & $TxtFileName) Then
 
Else 
 $LocLauncher = $LocPath & “\” & $LauncherFileName
;copies the local wrapper from the network location to the location folder – needed to get around UAC issues with Vista and 7
 FileCopy($LauncherFilePath & $LauncherFileName, $LocLauncher)
;runs the local file as admin
 RunAsWait(“(admin login)”, “(domain)”, “(password”, 0, $LocLauncher)
EndIf

Next is the local file that gets copied over and run with the RunAsWait.  Some of these strings I just copied directly from the shortcut that gets created by the deployment wizard.

;UAC prompt
#RequireAdmin

;name of the text file to create when local wrapper has run
Local $TxtFileName
$TxtFileName = “C:\WINDOWS\OurSoft\(name of textfile from network wrapper)”

;belts and suspenders – warms up the network location before the install
DriveMapAdd(“”, \\server\share)

Local $ProgramFile, $argFile, $command
;location to the setup.exe file copied from the shortcut
;does NOT include arguments
;filename shortened to 8.3 filename
$ProgramFile = FileGetShortName(“\\server\share\path to install\AdminImage\Setup.exe”)
;location to the ini file from the shortcut
;does NOT include /qb /I etc, ONLY the ini file
;filename shortened to 8.3 filename
$argFile = FileGetShortName(“\\server\share\path to install\AdminImage\install.ini”)
;the following string rebuilds the link from the wizard created shortcut with all arugments
$command = $ProgramFile & ” /qb /I ” & $argFile
 
RunWait($command)

;checks for the revit.ini file to exist
;if not, loop until it is installed
;was necessary to wait until AFTER install was complete before copying final revit.ini file
While FileExists(“C:\Program Files\Autodesk\(Revit flavor)\Program\Revit.ini”) = 0
 Sleep(30000)
WEnd

;once revit.ini exists locally, copy our tweaked one over top of it
FileCopy(“\\server\share\tweaked-revit.ini”, “C:\Program Files\Autodesk\(Revit flavor)\Program\Revit.ini”, 1)

;creates and writes a note in the text file stating that the install is done 
FileOpen($TxtFileName, 1)
FileWriteLine($TxtFileName, “Revit 2011 installed.”)
FileClose($TxtFileName)

Hope this helps as a jumping off point for everyone.

Crazy Dimensions Strings

Dimensions, who needs them? 

Sadly, we all do, at least until the rainbows and unicorns of sharing the model comes to pass.  I know.  I hear all the sales guys tell me the same thing:  “Soon no one will be printing anything!  You’ll give a CD of the model to the contractor!  And donuts will rain down from the sky!”  I like to think I’m a pretty forward thinking guy, but we still have a long time until no one wants drawings.

In the meantime, we have to make due with creating a highly accurate model, and slapping dimensions all over it.

Revit does a couple “goofy” things with dimension strings and I thought I’d list a couple here, mainly so I don’t forget (that’s really all this blog is – a list of items that I KNOW I will forget about in a week or so).  I put “goofy” in “quotes” because once you understand what Revit wants to do, then it’s not “goofy” “at” “all”.

Revit has some nice features for dimension text.  One of these is the ability to add text above, below or as a prefix or suffix to the dimension text itself. 

So, you have placed a window in a masonry wall and you want to dimension the opening.  The dimension string snaps nicely to the window edges and you place your dimension.  Double-clicking on the text brings up the Dimension Text box where you will deflty type in “MO” to the field below the dimension. 

Except, you won’t.

What the heck is that?

The “Below” field is already taken by some other dimension!  How very rude!  What in the world is it?!  I won’t keep you in suspense anymore:  When you dimension to the edges of a window, the Below text is automatically filled in with the window’s height parameter.  You can’t change it, you can either tell your dimension type to show it or not:

What do you do?  Put in a piece of text?  Of course not.  You have to move your witness line.  It won’t actually move, but you drag the middle square grip to the wall edge and not the window edge. 

They’re the same line, aren’t they?  Pretty sneaky, sis.

While you are dragging, move your mouse over the edge.  It will highlight the line.  Check out your status bar and it will report the window element.  Slap your TAB key until the status bar is telling you that you are now selecting the wall.  Let go of your mouse.  You are now dimensiong the wall and not the window.  Congratulations!  You can now edit the Below text!  And as a note – yes, the Above text is also grayed out, but I have no idea why.  When we find the top secret Revit manual, I’ll let everyone know.

Another “fun” dimensioning oddity is a long dimension string that will either disappear, or chunks of it will disappear.  This one is actually much easier to understand.

You can dimension to pretty much anything in Revit.  Those dimensions are view specific.  If, for one reason or another, the element that you are dimensions no longer appears in that view, the portion of the dimension string that was touching it will hide too.  Why might an element no longer appear?

• The element was hidden
• The element’s category was hidden
• The view range changed
• The element was deleted
• The element was NOT in the original view, but in an Underlay (yes, you can absolutely dimension to elements in Underlay, then someone turns them off and your dimensions poof away, too!)

One of our biggest tips for dimensions has been to wait as long as you can during the documentation process to place them.  ABSOLUTELY build your model accurately (I shouldn’t even need to write that, but you know someone out there is shocked at it), but wait until the end to place your dimensions.  That way your views have had time to settle in, and certainly your model has baked nicely. 

Now where are those donuts?

Revit 2012 New Features – While They Last

This week, Autodesk dropped the latest version of Revit on the world – Revit 2011.  While much fanfare and excitement has been raised about its new features (and rightfully so), I am more excited about the super-duper sneak peak I got at the new features for Revit 2012, internally being called the “Apocalypse” edition.

Everyone knows that the world will end in 2012, and that gives us a whole year to use the exciting new features in Revit 2012, or until the impending planetary crisis and destruction allows the electric infrastructure to keep our PCs running!  I for one, plan on getting a nice big generator, to keep posting blogs and tweeting, because when we are faced with the end of humanity, who wouldn’t want to keep reading about design software!

To be honest, the “experts” can’t agree on precisely HOW the world will end.  Being a forward thinking company, Autodesk is thankfully working on new features that can help the survival minded work with many of these potential catastrophes:

New floor design type – The “Hull” floor building tool will allow designers to barrel-curve their floors to allow free-floating buildings, in case of global flooding.

Enhancements to walls – An additional wall function type has been added.  “Bunker” can be used to create exterior walls for structures that will be integrated into mountains or at least 100′ below ground.

Integrated building analysis tools for hermetic seal – Quickly analyze your Revit model to see if it’s airtight.  No one wants a pesky zombie and/or flesh eating virus sneaking in to your safe house.

Enhancement to phases – The current phase model in Revit allows designers to show conditions from previous work.  But what if the Large Hadron Collider, or some other combination of solar flare and electromagnetic pulses, creates spacetime distortions?  The new Minkowski Phase option allows you to see the ramifications of your design decisions pushed through a fluid four dimensions or other potential spacetime ripples.

Additions to solar tracking tool – The new sun tracking system is nice, but a smart designer needs to pay attention to all the planets and other heavenly bodies.  The “Extraplanetary Tracking Tool” includes orbit and tracking data for over 100 planets, comets and stars, so you can safely align your building along proper astrological lines of power.

Numerous new components:

• Over 200 new models of generators
• Stand-alone turret or tripod mounted defense weapons
• Baseball bat, chainsaw and other excellent zombie stopping devices
• Nuclear-blast grade doors

This is just a small sampling of the new features.  I’m sure that this is bittersweet for the software team.  After such a strong showing, you’d want to keep working on the next release!  However, they realize the futility in this, and how difficult it will be to work on Revit 2013 when the planet has been destroyed.

In the meantime, I’m certainly enjoying all the new goodness that is in Revit 2011, in between the time I spend building my bunker.

Curved Monolithic Stairs – Am I Doing Something Wrong?

One of my Revit Architecture users hit a snag the other day when making a curved set of stairs to get up to a stage in an elementary school.  They were going to be cast-in-place, so we opted for monolithic.

Now, I have never been a huge stair fan in Revit.  Most of the time, in fact, I hate them (I despise their close relative, the railing, who has become my nemesis).  So when something started going wonky, I wasn’t surprised.

Maybe we’re doing something wrong.  Maybe we have a parameter set incorrectly.  But let me tell you, I tried it on multiple projects, with multiple combinations of parameters, and different materials, and heights, etc etc.  Always had the same bizarre situation:

In plan, everything looked nice and played well together.  So we thought we were good. 

Looks great!

A section cut is where something told us things were angry.  Where are the stairs?!

Something is amiss

When in doubt, go to 3D.  A quick camera dropped in, or switching to your 3D view can answer many questions that other views cannot.  That’s why we model it!  Unfortunately, this was not the case.  Going to 3D just was more bizarre.

Where are my stairs?!

The only thing we can figure is that Revit is refusing to let the “section” of a monolithic stair go past its calculated point, so it just slices it.  What?  And this is only for stairs whose type is checked as “monolithic”.  Non-monolithic curve fine.

Non-mono looks goooood…

This is crazy.  We opted for an in-place family sweep, but even that doesn’t make me happy, because you cannot use the STAIR category for in-place families.  Another bizarre and severe limitation.

If you have seen this issue, and you know how to work past it, feel free to post a comment and let everyone know.  Otherwise, just be aware of the insanity, and cross your fingers that stairs (and their jerk cousin, railings) get an overhaul soon.

Gridline Gridlock

A question I find myself answering a fair amount is “Who put the cat in there?!”; more Revit related, I get asked “what the heck does that little ‘3D’ by my grid bubble mean?” a lot.

What the heck IS that?

The “3D/2D” button by gridline heads is often a source of confusion, partially, I think, because of the nomenclature they used for the system.  It’s a good system, but really has nothing to do with the traditional definition of 3D and 2D.  Semantics has often been an issue in Revit (looking at you, “Save to Central”) that often the team does a good job of fixing (looking at you, “Synchronize with Central”).  So far, the 3D/2D toggle is not one of them.

So, if you click a gridline, you will see a tiny “3D” up by the grid bubble.  The terminology is flawed.  Essentially, what the “3D” means is that this grid bubble position is shared throughout the project, and if you move it, you will move it in other views as well, and wherever you put it, that’s where it will show up in any view where that grid bubble is marked “3D”, or just outside the annotation region, depending on which is shorter. 

When you click it, it changes to “2D”.  This basically means “View Specific”.  So, if you move the grid end now, it won’t affect any other views.  This view is it.  You will see a ghost grip where the “3D” of the gridlines is.  Dragging the head back to this will reset it to “3D”. 

Now, let’s say you click the 2D on for some of your grid bubbles and you move them and you really like the positioning in this view, so you want to copy it to other views.  That’s where the “Propagate Extents” button comes in to play. 

Select the gridlines you want to copy and click “Propagate Extents”.  You will be prompted with a list of parallel views.  Select the views you want to copy to and then the gridlines position settings will be copied onto those views.  It’s a one-time thing for the “2D” gridlines, so if you were to tweak the position after propagating, you would need to re-propagate to get those new settings pushed over.

Do I have a solution for the 3D/2D terminology fiasco?  Not really.  The only better icon I could think of would be a little chain to replace the current “3D” and a broken chain or chain with a slash through for “2D”… for “linked” and “unlinked”, get it?  Is it better?  Who knows.  Will it ever change?  Who knows that either.  But hopefully the above clears it up.

Help Your Project Manager – Before He Kills you

To our chagrin, we have discovered that our number one hurdle with transitioning to Revit is not the software learning curve, it’s not the user’s need to shift to a new workflow mindset, it’s not even convincing PICs or the board that it’s time to buy new licenses.  It’s the Project Managers.

You need to be sure you fully educate your non-production PMs about how a Revit project will go.  Best bet is to have someone on the team who has already gone through a Revit project.  Someone who is willing to gently, or not so gently, let the PM know what is possible, what isn’t possible and most importantly what makes sense.

Your typical PM of this nature simply knows that they usually get plans at this week of the project, elevations here, and then sections here.  With Revit, the workflow and document production is shuffled all around, and that’s a good thing!

We have had more than one Revit models that were on the edge of failure because a PM demanded X, Y, and Z at very specific times.  Why?  Because it’s what he always had gotten before.  He didn’t want to hear about what made sense.  The team was too new to Revit to argue, so they built the model to support X, Y, and Z.  Unforunately, in Revit, they should have been focusing on A, B, and C at that time.  So the model suffered, and the team spent more time picking up pieces later on simply to accomodate this PM’s backward demands.

Every firm has at least one PM like this.  There is no easy way to deal with him or her.  Just keep a close eye on the model and work hard to make sure that there are no drastic flaws in the workflow that can bite you down the road.