Post Echo - Units - Accuracy - Tolerance

I saw David Baldacchino's tweet yesterday sharing a link to a blog post for another software product called FME from Safe Software. The article goes into detail more related to their own product naturally but it does describe the math and computer problems that developers deal with. I found it quite interesting as well as confirming much of what I'd read and been told in the past.

Have a look! It's titled: "FME 2018 Infinity War: How Automatic Tolerance Defeats Infinite Precision without a Snap – but with Anchored Vertices!"

Conferences and Memory Lane - Revit View Reference

Reading tweets about RTC in Australia getting ready to open its doors I also read a thread about View Reference families. I wrote about a quirky move grip location issue four years ago to describe how they were misbehaving for me. Which reminded me about how I like to use them for a slide deck inside Revit.

I thought I'd echo that post here again in the spirit of the 2016 RTC season opening. To those attending RTCAUS, have a great conference in Hunter Valley. I hope to see you (some/many) at RTC this July in Scottsdale, AZ. Here's the post:

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Years ago I wrote about using Revit to help me coach my son's soccer team. Since I seem to have an unhealthy focus on using Revit for things that might not make any sense it should be no surprise that I'd find a way to avoid using Power Point. When Revit 2013 came out it expanded on what we could do with the View Reference tool (wrote about that before too).

Well since then, at the last few conferences I've been a presenter for, I've been using the view reference as a way to move forward or back through a "slide deck", a Revity slide projector. I did use Power Point to create the slides since that's what the templates were using already. I used a screen capture of each slide as an image inserted into drafting views.

Here's what my intro slide looks like for my session later today (four years ago) at Autodesk University 2012, it's called "Sharing Work with Worksharing Using Autodesk Revit".

See the little arrows on either side of the image? Those are my back and forward buttons, they are just referencing the previous and next drafting views (slides). Instead of showing the sheet reference information that it would normally show I just added the back and forward facing arrow graphics.

It's just the sort of Power Point that this Revit guy likes!

Revit 2016 - Space Naming Utility Still a Separate Application

The Dept. of Echoooo...

Yes, sadly the Space Naming Utility for Revit MEP 2016 is STILL a utility, as in a separate download AND installation from the Autodesk Exchange|Apps site.

It's still just wrong, wrong, wrong...it should have been incorporated into the Revit MEP toolset long ago. How hard could it be?

Opening Views

This is an echo of something I wrote in 2011.

If you are in a plan view, when you open a new floor plan view (any "plan" view) Revit will attempt to respect what you were just looking at in the previous view. For example, if you zoom in to look at a specific room or door family and then open a floor plan for another level, Revit will open the new view zoomed to the same area of the model (but on the other level).

As another example you might have two floor plans, one for furniture and one without. If you are looking at the furniture plan, zoomed in to see a single room and then open the other floor plan for the same floor you'll find Revit opens that new view focused on the same place.

The key is the view you open can't already be open, just in the background. I've posted a video to explain visually...

If you are in the habit of closing hidden windows then this can be quite effective as you transition from one plan to another.

Revit 2014 Update Release 1

An update for Revit 2014 became available recently. It has been blogged and tweeted many times already but I chose to echo it now because I've encountered questions about it a few times this week. This applies to all Revit versions, Architecture, Structure, MEP and Revit (aka "one-box"...all Revit disciplines in a single Revit install). These are update links for each version:

Revit Architecture 2014
Revit Structure 2014
Revit MEP 2014
Revit 2014 (one-box, only available as part of BDS)

Scaling Revit Families

Every now and then there seems to be a convergence in the "Revitverse". A series of events, themes and user attitudes and desires emerges. Lately it seems to be the notion of scaling families. Revit has not permitted the arbitrary "make this 2x bigger" unless we could provide all the constraints and parameters that allow that kind of input and result. For example we don't usually ask for a desk or chair to be twice as large. A chair becomes too big to use if so. I believe that this logic prevailed in their choice to be more restrictive about scaling things as arbitrarily as other software allows.

A common thread in scaling lately has been classical architecture and columns. These are defined by ratios and rules to some extent while the sculpting applied to them seems to have much more freedom. Reading other blogs and attending the Revit Technology Conferences and Autodesk University made me plan to write a post that provides some links to the various places that you can find intriguing information on this subject. With the many bloggers focused on Revit it really didnt come as a surprise that somebody beat me to it. That someone is Mark Cronin, who I chatted with in Auckland at RTC. He wrote a summary of resources that you'll find useful, techniques that capitalize on new features as well as one that recalls a longstanding feature that we've all managed to forget about.

Please let me encourage you to read Mark's post for the details since he took the time to compile it in the first place, you really should.

Thanks Mark!

Adaptive Point Family and Ramps

Luke (What Revit Wants - original URL to blog site was lost) wrote a post the other day that shows how to use the "scary" adaptive point family to tag a ramp's slope, since the slope tool doesn't work on ramps.

I used them to identify sloped "ramps" that are really floors for a client last summer. We used a three point family that allowed us to click on a corner of the start of the ramp, then at the midpoint of the end of the ramp and finally at the other corner at the start of the ramp. The resulting triangle is what they wanted to see. Using model lines allowed us to see them in many views without having to resort to placing many annotation families in all sorts of views.

Don't be afraid of the adaptive point family!

Keynoting Sheets and Worksets

Ryan wrote a post yesterday at The Revit Clinic describing a couple scenarios that result in borrowing sheet views while keynoting views. These affect versions 2012 and 2013 in particular. If you've encountered some quirkiness on your project using keynotes it is worth a read. A subtle point made at the end of the post reveals that 2014 has been tweaked to help resolve these issues. Ryan wrote:

For Revit 2014 keynote and revision functionality has been improved. Sheet view worksets are no longer borrowed during the same process, which should give larger project teams additional flexibility (especially during documentation-heavy project phases).

Btw, Ryan is also one of the author's of the Revit Essentials book I mentioned the other day.

BIM is Full of Holes

I took Seth Godin's recent blog post title and plugged BIM in instead. His post said "Life is Full of Holes". His perspective and observations are always welcome and happily sometimes (often) they plug right into my own life and work.

In particular these lines resonated with me and what a friend once essentially asked his company during their deliberations regarding "To do Revit or not to do Revit"...

Seth wrote: "I don't think the right question is, "is the path perfect?" It's probably, "Is this somewhere I'd like to go?"

In the context of Revit the question is, "Do we want to continue to work this way or that way". Do we want to keep doing what we already do or see where and how we can benefit from using Revit instead?

The Revit path isn't perfect, no "path" is... but do we need to keep waiting for it to be perfect, or even have that expectation? Keep in mind it never WILL be perfect...nothing is.

Stop prevaricating about the bush, make a decision!

Dominant Elements in Concrete Joins

This information is "ripped" from the WikiHelp topic...

Whenever elements that use concrete for their material interact with each other one element retains its geometry while the geometry of the other element sharing the join is cut to create the appearance of a single form. For example structural floors and walls possess dominant geometry characteristics and always maintain their geometry when sharing a join with other elements. Because of this, they will not automatically join with one another. These other concrete elements behave as follows.

These join behavior rules cannot be changed and it is not possible to disable the automatic joining of geometry. It is possible to manually change this condition using the UnJoin Geometry tool.

While were at it these are the valid combinations for concrete elements to join, in other words they may automatically join with one another.

• beam to beam
• beam to column
• isolated foundation to isolated foundation
• isolated foundation to wall foundation
• structural floor to beam
• structural floor to column
• structural floor to slab edge
• wall to beam
• wall to column

Remember that joined geometry may have an impact on project performance.

Model Elements on View Worksets

The gang in Autodesk Support and Development seem to have isolated at least one clear cut cause for this quirky situation where a model element is associated with a view workset. It shouldn't be possible ordinarily. Apparently this sequence can be blamed:

1) The user selects and enters an edit mode for an element on a view workset, for example this might include plan regions, detail groups, or filled regions.

2 )Instead of using ‘Finish Edit Mode’ or ‘Cancel Edit Mode’ the user instead clicks Undo to exit edit mode.

3) Now back in the project, the user starts adding model elements, such as walls. The walls are placed on the current View workset instead of the active User-Created workset (until the user opens the workset dialog or changes the active workset).

Ryan reports that 2014 has been worked on to help address this situation better, if a user takes the steps above Revit will reset the active workset properly now.

The fix for these poor elements has been (and remains) to use Cut to Clipboard and then Paste > Aligned to Same Place. Just make sure the correct workset is active.

You can read the original post at The Revit Clinic, thanks Ryan!

It also explains how to fix the issue in older versions of Revit.

New Stuff in Revit 2014 According to David

Up to his usual "What's New..." summary, read all about it at David Light's blog.

Concealing Your Workset Username

Luke recently wrote a post mentioning a technique that AUGI member Navid offered to help lock down certain worksets. We can use a special username like Super Admin to be the owner of a workset to prevent other users from randomly altering the elements assigned to it. The tip offered involves creating a username with a symbol only font which leaves us with a meaningless username that we can't read or pretend we are. In his instructions he takes the username into Microsoft Word and changes the font. He then pastes the newly "encrypted" username into the Revit username parameter (Application menu > Options Dialog).

I'm not sure it is necessary or even good idea if we felt it was necessary. Nevertheless it is possible and there might be a circumstance someday (maybe a troubleshooting issue) where it will come in handy. Filing this in the "someday, but hopefully not" folder. Somewhere Dick Dastardly's dog Mutley is swearing...

Who is the Owner

Melanie wrote a nice post earlier today. She asked:

Question: What does an owner want from BIM?
Answer: The same thing they wanted from CAD.

Which she says begs another question: Who is the Owner?

It isn't usually a simple answer like: "Let me introduce you to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. We'll be designing their house." They are the owner and you've got to please them, unless they give their kids any say. If so you know which rooms will be the biggest!

She lists a bunch of people that the software and design industry may overlook too often, or at least focus on others too often, in their quest to satisfy this "owner" person.

Nice job Melanie!

Electrical Panel Load Calculations

Another "inside" gem from Inside the System which offers deeper insight to how the numbers work. If you are a Revit MEP user and electrical is your game, then you'll want to read it. Thanks to Martin for taking the time to put it together.

Happy Birthday Revit

A bit belated, meant to write something but didn't. Revit's 10th anniversary of joining Autodesk was on April 1st. There were several mentions of it on Twitter and in other blog posts. The 12th anniversary of Revit as a product is this year and the 15th anniversary of it getting started from scratch is in October this year.

Too cool not to echo, the Inside the Factory blog shared a great photo of the people who both started working with Revit before joining Autodesk and are still part of the product team! I imagine it can be hard to get them all in the same room at times. Congrats on another birthday and may there be many more, for both software and the people involved!

How many can you name?

Visibility Pecking Order

Worth an echo. Ryan at The Revit Clinic wrote a post this morning that lists the order of power, the pecking order, the order in which visibility settings and override tools stack up...who wins when multiple things are applied. Good info, check it out! Here's the list...you need to read his post to get the graphics.

(10 is the lowest and 1 is the highest, using walls as an example)

1. Line Work Tool
2. Override Graphics in View > By Element > Halftone
3. Graphic Display Options – Silhouette Edges
4. Override Graphics in View > By Element
5. View Filters
6. View Depth – “Beyond” Line Style
7. Phasing Graphic Overrides
8. Visibility / Graphic Overrides > Override Host Layers > Cut Line Styles
9. Visibility / Graphic Overrides > Projection \ Cut Lines
10. Project Object Styles

Shared Parameter Article at AEC Bytes

Since I recently wrote a series of posts about them I thought I'd mention yet another source of information about them. Daniel Stine wrote an article recently for AECbytes. Check it out!

Nano Copters

I imagine this video is going viral to some degree by now. First thing I though of was how CGI and movies could harness these things to create even more realistic flight sequences like in Star Wars for example. I particularly like how the one copter can flip. I started imagining our own flying saucers one day. Or...one night, as a prank, these guys head for farm country, hook LED lights up and fly over Old MacDonald's farm and generate some UFO sightings? Cool and fun!

Revit History Lesson

If you are interested in a little history of Revit wander over to Jeremy's blog The Building Coder. Cool!