Revit 2021 Line Style Naming Tweak

I saw Jason (@RVT) tweet about this yesterday and I thought this is right up the Dept. of Subtle alley.

I've been telling people for years that the brackets meant "these belong to the Revit system" but then there were several other rogue line styles that came along without brackets. I had to explain that any line style you couldn't delete is also a system line styles...

Consider the Dept. of Subtle tickled.

Autodesk Seek is Dead - Long Live BIMobject

I've been busy, experiencing angst or lazy, you pick. Then again dear reader you may not have noticed that I haven't been posting as much lately. Apparently some readers are still hoping to be able to rely on me to try to stay current with things. At least that's what a few emails asking about this semi-recent change suggests to me. I do apologize if my reticence to post more often is disappointing. I have been busy as well as going through another spell of "What's it all about Alfie?". Oh I've given it away...or have I? (imagine Craig Ferguson was speaking).

Get on with it Mr. OpEd... At the moment the only place other than Autodesk sites that I recall reading information about this change is the Revit Add-Ons post on the day it happened, so well done Tim.

Specifically, you may have been, or will be, greeted by a message when attempting to search Autodesk Seek via Revit's Insert ribbon? The message begins with something like (I didn't capture the screen the first time) ..."As of January 18, 2017 Autodesk Seek has been transferred to BIMobject. At least I think the naming is BIMobject. It could be bimobjects because that's also on the site. I digress...yet again.

They've provided a transfer FAQ you can read but it's not really responding to any questions I have, as a user...UNLESS you are then careful to click the small link for User FAQ on the left side (link next paragraph).

I see they've set up a hotline for Autodesk Seek transition so look for that information there (via separate FAQ sections for User and BPM) too, it's the same telephone number for either category, user or BPM (Building Product Manufacturer).

I know nothing about BIM Object yet. I can say after arriving at their site via Revit once that the UI presented to us is a sight better than Seek. My first impression is that their customers are product manufacturers, selling the service of creating and hosting content for manufacturers, the same as for Autodesk Seek.

Assuming the somewhat jaundiced view of a Revit user, the user is the product they are selling to their customers, like Facebook for example. However attempting to be fair, users need good quality content to make quality building models so if these guys do well we BIM users ought to be winning.

Regarding my overall experience with Autodesk Seek, prompted by a post at RFO, I wrote this reply there a couple days ago, responding to Philip...(a bit more of the Opinion part of OpEd)

My own experience with Autodesk Seek began with hmm promising, let's see how this goes and ended with what's the point. If you consider RevitCity's content quality is ravaged pretty consistently by fellow Revit users, as such lately I have had the same dread reaction to resorting to searching Autodesk Seek. I even went there a couple times to pull down bad examples of content to show people I was mentoring on the subject...not a good recommendation eh? Inspiration for blog posts is one upside? Okay, getting snarkastic sorry.

My feelings changed sharply a short while after the Family Style Guide was published related to Seek. A great idea and initial effort but it was a bit plain to see the market/revenue generating bias of it toward Seek. ...and it too has died on the vine.

Overall, very disappointing. Especially considering I've heard it was no small investment of time and money by companies to get their content hosted by Seek. But then that's the secret about content it takes time and both involve money even if we don't look.

Back to BIMobject, I'm going to keep an open mind, more open than my obviously skeptical comments above suggests is possible. Let's see how this goes. Oh, I'll answer the question that's probably on any user's mind for them (from their User FAQ):

Do I have to pay for the BIM objects I download?

bimobject.com is a free of charge web service for architects, engineers, specifiers and all other disciplines in the AEC and Infrastructure industries.

They offer a free Revit app to directly integrate their content search and access into Revit too.

Feel free to use comments to share your observations and experience with Autodesk Seek (in the past) or BIMobject if you've been a using their content already.

Revit 2016 - Licensing Access has Changed

Prior to Revit 2016 we could either take the Application menu > Licensing or the About Revit route to review our licensing information. Here's the first in 2015.

In 2016 they've removed the Application menu path leaving just the About Revit route.

Not a real hardship, just a big confusing if you were expecting to find it under the Application menu like in the past.

Thanks to Dave for the prompt!

Change a Level Association for a Room

I read a wish at AUGI asking to be able to change the associated level of a room via the Properties Palette. My initial reaction was, "Yeah I can see that".

As I thought about it a bit more I believe that the process has been limited to using Delete and then placing the room again or using Cut to Clipboard and then using Paste elsewhere because simply changing the level relationship in properties does not ensure that Revit or the room will find boundaries.

If there are no boundaries to be found Revit would generate a warning and the room would have a record against it in Review Warnings. To resolve that the room would either have to be re-positioned or walls would need to be created to provide the boundaries. If we compare that effort with deleting the room from a plan view and placing it again on a different level it doesn't seem like much difference to me.

In general I think it would be nice to have more flexibility to alter element properties via the properties palette. The context we often need to appreciate how they work in the model may not be represented by a list in the palette though. Changing the value might be easier but it might not be less work overall.

Autodesk WikiHelp is not a Wiki Anymore

For the last month or so the Autodesk Revit documentation team has been transitioning to a new system for help documentation. When you click the help icon (?) on the Info Bar in Revit you'll find a new format and different help web domain: help.autodesk.com.

You probably are well aware that a couple years ago they changed things to focus on a wiki based format that moved product help resources to a web based approach instead of the past Windows based .CHM help file format. This affords them an ongoing ability to deal with documentation. The results of their work appears online immediately and the very next time you click to access it. It's no longer tied only to software release cycles. It's certainly necessary to make documentation available as new releases become available but editing and additions no longer have to wait for the next release, nor do they have to consider issuing software updates just to distribute help documentation changes.

Wandering off on a tangent, people are often reticent to rely on help documentation or manuals, and not just for software. I'm sure there are plenty of reasons for that bad habit. Personally, many times the quality of the information is lacking so it's tempting to ignore what I don't find useful. Overall, I find that the quality of the documentation for Revit has been steadily improving. They revisit topics and that means ignoring the information means I miss those changes. That written, I still think the help documentation tends to explain things without useful context. For example, Levels have a parameter called Story Above.

This is the description for the Story Above parameter on the help site (with my snarky comments inline).

"From Revit Help"

Used in conjunction with the Building Story parameter, this parameter indicates the next building story for the level. (Implied by the name) By default, Story Above is the next highest level for which Building Story is enabled (NOT necessarily the relevant floor above). To access a list of all building stories above the current one, click in the field. (Ooh, I have to click on it??) The Story Above does not need to be the next higher level or building story. (Cool, anything else I should know?) If the selected level is deleted later or if Building Story is disabled, any levels with this level as their Story Above will revert to default behavior. (Still confused, why should I care again?)

That description does not really tell me why I should care about this parameter. It does tell us that it has something to do with this other parameter called Building Story. The first time I saw these I imagined that the stair tools might use them to guess more accurately what the base and top constraints should be. You may have noticed that Revit just assigns whatever the next higher level is to the top constraint. This means that if I've got an intermediate level for something like a stage platform that isn't really a building story on its own the stair tool thinks that's the next level instead of the next real building story.

If I happen to read further down in the topic I notice that there is a link for Exporting a Project to IFC. Fwiw, if I use search for Building Story the first result is also Exporting a Project to IFC. When I read about that I learn from this section:

"From Revit Help"

Split walls and columns by level allows you to divide multi-level walls and columns by level. When you use this option, Revit cuts the walls and columns by each level that is defined as a building story {my emphasis}. (See Level Instance Properties.) For elements whose base level is a non-building story level, Revit exports them using the next lower building story as their base level, with an appropriate offset. Revit only exports levels for which the Building Story parameter is enabled, unless no levels are defined as building stories. In that case, Revit exports all levels that are used as base levels for walls and columns.

It would be a LOT more "helpful" if the description for Story Above mentioned that our day to day work inside Revit won't be affected in the slightest by this parameter BUT if we export to IFC it becomes important. The same is true of the Building Story parameter. Features and additions like these that have very specific implementation but opaque intentions just add to the complexity of Revit. If I wrote the documentation I'd have started off with something like, "This is only relevant for Exporting to IFC", if in fact that is true. If it isn't then what else are they not telling us?

Back to the subject of the help format. So far so good. It looks pretty good. The search results provide a portion of the subject to help see if it is relevant enough to focus on. The speed is pretty good. I don't like it's preference for Internet Explorer which I only use when forced to. {Per Jeff's comment this is defined by the browser setting in the Revit.ini (there is one for default and one per user profile) and we can choose which browser we prefer.}

At the moment the lack of access to a unique URL for each topic is annoying. I've read that this is something they are working on so eventually it won't be an issue. For now we have to rely on the Share widget to access one of the social networking share options.

I find that Twitter and Delicious are the only two options the show the unique URL without having to log into the social site first.

This means a Twitter account isn't required to access the URL so I can share it with someone else. Just be careful not to include the "Reading:" portion of the URL information (see the image above). As a member of online Revit user groups like AUGI and RevitForum.org I often want to share a link to the help documentation with another user to answer their question. It's tedious to do it at the moment but eventually it won't be.

Then again it's this kind of subtle "miss" that make me wonder what goes through their minds as they prepare to unveil the next great help concept from Autodesk. Maybe they are jaded themselves about how much people actually rely on their work? I hope not. If unique URL's were another week away then perhaps holding off a week would have made for better first impressions? Sometimes I think Seth Godin's "Ship it" is misconstrued to to mean ship it regardless of fit and finish and readiness.

If you rely on Google searches to find help documentation it will take some time for Google to index their new help site. Once it is indexed we should be able to rely on Google searches too. I read that the documentation for older releases is being transitioned to the new site format now so if you are looking for 2012 help you'll be directed to 2014 information for now. The standard line is offered, "We apologize for any inconvenience".

Quick Tip - Move a View to a New Sheet

I've added this bit in front of the original post (09/03/2011) after getting a couple comments: This post assumes that "you" are already familiar with the concept of dragging a view onto a sheet from the project browser. Not everyone is aware that it is possible to reassign a view to a sheet by dragging within the Project Browser itself.

If you realize that you've put a view on the wrong sheet you can just select it and "delete" it. The view is removed from the sheet, no it isn't actually deleted (on the off chance you haven't done it before now). Probably already knew that much. Did you know that you can drag and drop it on another sheet instead? When you expand a sheet listing so you can see the views that are on it, listed under the sheet name, you can select a view and drag it to a new sheet. When you let go of the mouse button (ends the drag mode) Revit will open that sheet and let you place it.

Yet another way to manipulate stuff. In practice it becomes harder to use when you have a real project with lots of sheets. Often you can't get both sheets within your view of the browser and it's a little awkward to scroll up the Browser. Revit will do it, just have move your cursor toward the top or bottom of the frame to convince it you want to.

Added this too (09/03/2011): I also like to use the Right Click option > Add View because the list it offers is only eligible views. You have to scroll the list to find your view but at least you know you won't run the risk of dragging a view to a sheet that's already on a sheet.