Monday, January 16, 2012

Conduit from Face Gotcha!

The other day I made what I thought was a simple distribution box, the kind that is really a "junction" box that sits in a ceiling to provide some wire management access. A pull box with a nice door. No problem. To test it out I tried to run some conduit to it. I expected the surface to highlight when I put the cursor over the edge of the box. Nothing. I selected the box and saw the conduit connectors, right-click > choose Draw conduit from face...nothingness. A blank stare from Revit...me staring blankly at Revit. Huh?

Time for a break...

After some dinner I fired it all back up and some clarity returned. Ahh, I used visibility settings on the "box" and un-checked the Plan option.


I used Symbolic Lines to show the box in plan instead. That was the gotcha...if the solid form/face that is the conduit connectors host isn't visible in the plan view the Draw Conduit from Face tool says, "huh?!?". It's kind of like the Spot Elevation tool not finding a floor or ceiling when the view is using Wireframe. The tool can't "see" the connector even though Revit manages to display the connector fine. I just needed to restore that setting and rethink when I wanted things to show up...back on track.

1 comment:

Dave Baldacchino said...

Another surface connector gotcha: you can place one of these connectors on geometry in a nested family, but the right-click command to create conduit won't work. The geometry of the face you place these surface connectors on has to be in the same host family!