View Reference Origin Location

I observed this the other day which remind me that it bothered me in the past but failed to bring it up before. The View Reference family that we can use in conjunction with Matchlines and now with Revit 2013 to create more general reference to views on sheets has an unpleasant effect on views that they are in.

They are assigned to the View Reference category but fundamentally began as a generic annotation family. When you create one from scratch or just edit the one the comes with Revit templates you'll find something like this.

The Move icon ends up very far away from the symbol itself when it is in view that are using finer scales. In a view that is assigned to something like 1/8"=1'-0" it is closer to the symbol. The downer about this offset is that it increases the "size" of the viewport when the view is added to a sheet. It just creates some unnecessary busy work to adjust views when this happens. If you find a viewport becoming "larger" than it should it might be related to this kind of situation.

Revit Technology Conference AUS 2012 is Underway!

This post is playing time traveler, dropping back in time to Monday (May 22). I was on a United 747-400 heading to Sydney when Monday happened at home in the USA. A curious side effect of travel west to Australia is you lose a day. Sydney is 17 hours ahead of the west coast of the USA. So when I boarded my flight on Sunday night at 9:45 PM it was already 2:45 PM in Sydney, but tomorrow (Monday). By the time I landed in Sydney Monday already turned into Tuesday morning. This means I lost Monday, missed my son Jake's birthday and didn't post anything here. I could have set something up to post while I was traveling but that would mean I was better prepared, I wasn't. I digress...

It's that time of year again, RTC is here. First up is the conference in Wollongong (aka The Gong and 90 minutes SE of Sydney). VisDay is a new event focused on visualization technology. The Chairman is Dan Jurgens and he's worked hard to assemble a quality group of presentations. The RTC conference begins on Thursday May 24th and VisDay is the "warm up" act, to use a concert metaphor. VisDay gathers (gathered) on Wednesday May 23rd. Writing about what will happen when it just happened is a bit odd...

Tonight I'm polishing my presentation about What's New in Revit Architecture 2013. Each year I feel like there isn't enough new stuff to make me happy. Then I write up this presentation and I find it takes a lot of effort to scratch the surface in a modest way. This year is no different. There are some big ticket items that attract attention but there a numerous other and more subtle features that contribute to a fairly long list of things to speak about. That will happen just after lunch on Thursday May 24th (tomorrow as I write this).

The event in Australia is upon us. You can still attend technically, assuming you can (a) get here, (b) make the time and (c) act fast!! Join the 400 or so others revving up for three days of Revit and BIM technical sessions and discussions.

There is just over a month until the RTCUSA starts in Stone Mountain, GA on June 28-30, 2012. Don't miss it!

Revit 2013 - Double Click a View Reference

I wrote about the enhancements to the existing View Reference feature in March when the software first was released.

I didn't mention this other little goody, for people working inside Revit. If you double click on the view reference family Revit will open the view! If you export to DWF and export all the sheets to the same file you'll find they behave just like other annotation for views, CTRL + Click will open the other sheet/view.

Selecting Multiple Saved Selection Sets

Sibilance! I used to work for Syracuse Scenery & Stage Lighting, Co. in Syracuse, NY. It was fun when I had to introduce myself formally starting with, "Hi, I'm Steve Stafford with...". The title of this post reminded me of that, sorry! I was going to lead into it with Dept. of Subtle but that was too many "sssss"... it is really subtle though. Okay I'll get to it then.

Revit 2013 added Saved Selection Sets, a feature that was part of an extension for Revit Structure originally.

The concept is simple, select elements and click a button to save (top button in the image above) them as a set that can be called on later, to do something with or to them again. If that seems likely then it will come in handy. The Save button wakes up when there is something selected. The Load button wakes up after something has been saved as a selection set.

The subtle part of this is that when there are several selection sets to choose from, what if we want to do something to more than one at a time? The dialog doesn't let us select multiple saved sets. Guess we're sunk.

[Edited 5/18/2012 - Gabe pointed out in a comment that CTRL isn't necessary, just running the tool again by clicking Load will allow us to add another selection set, cool! Thanks Gabe! - Disregard the following section]

It doesn't look like it will work but using the CTRL key does work, just not inside the dialog. The trick to this is selecting one and clicking OK to leave the dialog. Then press CTRL and click the Load button again (middle button in the first image), select another saved set, click OK.

Now we've got two saved selection sets selected again. It's easy when you know how!

Apply View Template to all Views

I don't recall when this first showed up but I noticed it first in Revit 2012. Here's what it looks like with a right-click in Revit 2013.

My first reaction was cool! Then I wondered, "When or why would I use it?". Pondered it for a bit and decided that it might be cool if I have a sheet full of details that needed some cleanup. Create a view template and then apply it right quick. Then again I could just select multiple views in the project browser and apply them. With Revit 2013 my view templates will adjust all those details as soon as I change the template, or at least they can if I set it up that way. I suppose this feature might be handy if I forgot to do it and they were all on sheets at this point.

A subtle refinement to process that probably just goes unnoticed? I wonder how many of my readers use it, know about it, care?