Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Eccentricity of Wall Footing

I replied to a thread at AUGI regarding the Eccentricity parameter of a Wall Footing. They observed that Revit seemed to ignore their input and didn't understand what it was meant to do. In this case the width of the footing was less than the value they entered.

The parameter is intended to shift the footing over, from interior to the exterior face of the wall. The footing starts out centered on the wall above.

The maximum eccentricity is equal to (Footing Width/2)-(Wall Thickness/2).

The interior wall surface can be aligned (flush) with the interior face of the footing but not further, creating any overhang of the wall, which seems logical to me. A picture might help?

Monday, June 17, 2019

Reference Planes without Names

It is a common practice to add a name to the reference planes we create. If it isn't common where you work then it ought to be. The name helps give a hint to anyone that works in the model that this reference plane is more important than those without a name. It can also help understand what it is for, why it was made.

There are some who make the effort to clear out reference planes that are not named periodically, just another of any number of model/housekeeping chores. I've even seen Dynamo scripts intended for this task.

If you're using Ideate's Explorer you'll find it easy to see a summary of all the reference planes in the model. In the following image I've created two reference planes, one with a name and another without a name.


Notice that there are five (5) reference planes listed though. As it happens, when the Edit Profile concept is used on a wall four reference planes are created and internally applied against the sketch of the wall. They are only visible to us while editing the wall's profile sketch. We can't see these reference planes in the regular user interface, it only becomes very apparent with their Explorer tool.

It is also possible for us to create reference planes while creating any sketch based element, like a floor or stair for example. These reference planes are only visible to us while editing their related sketch.

The reference planes associated with a wall's edited profile can't be deleted via IDEATE Explorer. It can delete them when we've created our own within a wall's profile and other sketch based elements.

Attempting to clean up these unnamed reference planes might also be an issue if you're writing your own code or Dynamo script to delete them. We can/could add names to these internal reference planes (wall profile) but I don't think that's a task that worth the effort.

Something to keep in mind.