Monday, March 14, 2005

Revit in Honolulu

Currently I find myself working in our Honolulu office (often pretty Late!) helping a couple teams (new to Revit) get started using Revit. Our Cadd Mgr Danny is getting pretty clever with Revit himself so I should be out of a job soon!

Not only is Danny trying to keep me from coming to Hawaii in the future but he also serves as my personal tour guide once a trip. Imagine my confusion? This time around he (and his lovely wife Kim, oh...their dog Taiko too) took me on a cool hike up into the hills of Manoa. Once I figure out how to put pictures in this blog I'll add some.

The office in Honolulu is lively, busy and very creative. It's a bit stressful at times dealing with those pesky deadlines, but they do know how to relax by having Pau Hana, which means an end of day party, at the end of a week from time to time.

Aloha!

Friday, March 04, 2005

What's Up With View Tags?

What’s different with view tags in Autodesk Revit 7.0?

What do I mean by view tags? Section, Callout and Elevation views all have view tags.

Well…you’ll find a new command lurking under the Settings menu. It is called VIEW TAGS. You now have a TYPE for each of these categories. You assign a HEAD and TAIL based on families that you have loaded or need to load in your project (best to set this up in your template). Elevations still use system families, meaning you can’t create your own stylized elevation symbols in families outside of the project or project template.

When you click the menu item SETTINGS VIEW TAGS you can choose one of these options: Callout Tags, Elevation Tags and Section Tags (in that order). Now you create types that use different combinations for head and tail families (sections and callouts). You can create slightly different versions of elevation tags as well.

How does this play out in a project? Well, each of these views has a type parameter called: Callout Tag, Section Tag and Reference Label. You select the TYPE you created earlier here. When you create a new view the TYPE you assigned is used automatically. When you reference this view you automatically get the Reference Label assigned too.

What’s the impact of this? Well you used to be able to create a view that referenced a detail and have SIM, OPP or TYP appear next to the bubble. Now you can’t create a detail view, assign a view tag TYPE that uses SIM and then reference the same detail later using OPP instead. You can only have one VIEW TAG TYPE assigned to a view.

Good or bad? You be the judge…personally I think it’s flawed slightly. This is kind of hard to grasp reading along, so trying a little experimenting and let me know if you need more info.