Monday, May 02, 2016

Revit 2017 - Filters and Reference Planes

Filters have been expanded to see Reference Planes.


You're probably aware that Reference Planes don't have many parameters, just these three instance parameters: Scope Box, Name and Subcategory. They don't have any Type Parameters because they aren't defined by types like grids or levels for example. If we examine the Filters dialog and see how those three parameters play out as criteria we'll find they don't.


The More Parameters... or Browse button to its right are tempting but we still can't create parameters associated with Reference Planes.


This makes it rather difficult to actually use a Filter for Reference Planes, criteria based filters anyway. We can select them (Reference Planes) first and create a Filter based on selection but that's not really much different than using Visibility/Graphics to turn them off or override their appearance.

While it makes for an enticing item in the list of what's new it will only serve to frustrate you if you pursue it. It's a shame that we aren't offered at least the Name parameter to use in a filter. It looks like the critical path for this feature wandered into the weeds and got stuck in some quicksand.

I'm sure we'll take good advantage of being able to differentiate them from one another and control their visibility using Visibilty/Graphics and View Templates despite this situation.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Steve,

I struggled with understanding this at first.

The reason this is now available, is more so that someone can now create a filter to control Reference Planes, Levels, Grids, views all in a single filter. This makes it a handy quick switch that could be added to a view to turn these categories off with one switch.

Steve said...

If that makes sense to you then good.

It doesn't help me. I seldom want to turn off all of them. Besides there is nothing preventing me from doing that via existing V/G overrides. The whole point (which you know full well) of a Filter is to allow selective access. At this point the implementation is like a batter striking out leaving a man on third base (using a baseball metaphor on an Aussie).

Revit User said...

Steve,

Is there a way to filter items by link? For projects with multiple buildings and you want to turn off grids and levels from multipule revit links.

Steve said...

Sure, I wrote a post about it earlier.

http://revitoped.blogspot.com/2015/08/filter-linked-grids-and-levels.html

Unknown said...

You can filter the reference plane by workset