Revit 2017 - Reference Plane Subcategories

As I shared in the What's New post the other day, we can create our own Reference Plane subcategories; in both projects AND Families.

It is my opinion that Families should NOT bring Object Style subcategories for Reference Planes into Projects when they are loaded.

I realize that this is carry on baggage because Object Styles are loaded from a family into a project, that's how it works. However, it would be much better if something we can't even see or actually use in the context of the project doesn't get added to its database.

If people really like this enhancement and start using in all of their content then it could get really messy. The only people that won't incur the wrath of this are those that manage their content library aggressively. I really hope we don't end up with this...

I sure hope this is something the folks at the Building Content Summit will consider discussing to get out in front of it some.

Family Critique - Overhead Storage Bin

In a past post I was critical of how it was made and described what could be done to fix it. With that in mind, let's examine another family and see how very minor changes will improve the user experience.

First a little background noise, I've been participating in a program that Autodesk started called Revit Mentors. It is focused on people that are using the trial version of Revit, trying it on for size before buying. They been running the same thing for AutoCAD for much longer and recently decided to do the same for Revit. The mentoring takes place in the form of a chat window and this family was the subject of one such session.

The family in my sights today belongs to the Furniture System category and is called Overhead Storage Module.rfa (see image).

You can see two instances are highlighted in red in the above image. What's wrong with the family?

1. When we try to place the family Revit does not recognize its sides so it is difficult to place it accurately on the first try.
2. It also isn't visible during placement unless we have already assigned the Underlay parameter to the same level the view is associated with.
3. It remains invisible after placement and that means we have to resort to tricks to make it visible in the view too.

The reference planes are the cause of our first issue. They are assigned to an IsReference value of Weak. This means Revit doesn't pay attention to them during placement. They need to be Strong or one of the preset named IsReference settings. This is what they look like now.

In the image below we can see (no highlighting visible) that Revit doesn't acknowledge the edge of the family so it can't snap into the correct position easily. When I'm confronted with this issue I usually place such families wrong and then use Align to fix them. Then I copy them around instead of placing them. If I was really smart I'd edit the family and fix the problem.

This is what the family looks like after I've fixed the IsReference parameters. I've also named the Reference Planes using the same words.

Now placing the family is easy because Revit sees the Strong Reference Planes. The nice IsReference names like Front, Back, Left and Right are Strong too.

The second issue is that the geometry of the family is entirely above the cut-plane of the family and most project views. To fix this we can use the Old Invisible Line Trick. I've placed a Symbolic Line using the invisible lines linestyle. It spans from the Reference Level up to the top of the cabinet. I've locked the end points to the top and bottom references so it tracks with the cabinet if its parameters are changed later. It looks like this now. I've also named and assigned the IsReference parameters using Top and Bottom.

The third issue is resolved by editing the Masking Region that has been used in the family. I changed the front linestyle to Hidden Lines so that it will use that linestyle in the project too.

Now the cabinets are visible immediately and without worrying about using the view's Underlay parameter at all.

If I want to make it obvious that there is a difference between hidden items below and above then I'd use (and create if necessary) a different linestyle for each such situation. The Project templates that Autodesk provides have a linestyle called Overhead. I'd just need to add this to my family and assign it to the masking region boundary segment instead.

The presence of these subtle issues demonstrate to me that nobody really tries to use these families in a meaningful way when they are created. In this case the family is quite old. It has probably just been upgraded every year for at least a decade. There are a lot of existing families. It would be nice if someone was routinely taking a closer look at all this content. With our wishlist getting longer and louder every year I'm not going to hold my breath.

It is subtle stuff like this that helps make each user's experience just a little bit better!

Three Laws - Family Content

This is repost of a post that I wrote in September 2008. I thought of it as I was working through some content tasks.

Not to be confused with Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics", I first heard of the so called "three laws or rules" of software development from my father who spent many years working at IBM. These so called laws simply represented a philosophy about how to get something accomplished as efficiently as possible for the least cost (not always in terms of cash either). When I read Code Complete by Steve McConnell he mentioned the "Buy-vs-Build Decision" that developers should consider as they design/develop an application. It might seem radical to buy a solution when you are focused on making something yourself.

I've personally kept these in mind when thinking about content for Revit and even AutoCAD/ADT/Microstation before that.

Law One - Borrow
Law Two - Buy
Law Three - Build

Law One - Borrow
I can hear the cynic saying, "you mean steal". I'm sure that has happened too often. However the idea of borrowing what has been shared made the early adopters of Revit very special to me. Their willingness to make something that took them several, many hours in some cases, and make it available to others was and remains refreshing, altruistic. Guys like Chris Yearick (Yman), Scott Brown (sbrown) and Chris Zoog (czoog) to name just a few, their AUGI usernames in ().

Have you used the "All Windows" families found at Revit City? Chris Yearick (Living Places part of The Pilari Group) made those many years ago now and posted them freely at RUGIE (no longer in existence) and they found their way into the Revit City content as well as AUGI's Exchange and other places I'm sure.

Scott Brown (now with Beck Group) shared his office template as well as many standard office/product detail components and views which short circuited the time someone need to spend on their office template substantially.

Chris Zoog (now with HOK) started Zoogdesign and created a vibrant community resource for Revit discussion. It eventually merged into the Revit community forum at AUGI.

More recently an AUGI member known as CadKiller has made an ftp site available to share templates in the same spirit.

Law Two - Buy
There is something to be said for the education of making something yourself but if you can't perform billable work during that time it may not make economic sense to do it yourself. It may not make sense to have anyone in your employ do it either for the same reason. Worse yet all too often I find that a firm's different offices have made the same content themselves without realizing that someone in their own organization already made it or bought it. So communicating what is available is pretty important too...and another topic entirely.

Law Three - Make it yourself
Like I wrote above there is nothing quite like making something yourself for both satisfaction and reaching a fuller understanding of the Family Editor. At times this is the best solution or perhaps the only "affordable" way to get precisely what you want. Just be prepared to apply these same "laws" to how you acquire any knowledge you lack, maybe in a different order?

Here's to being "Law" Abiding!

Edit: Realized that the people mentioned are with new firms now, revised.

BlueBryk and Content

I recently spoke with Bruce Madsen. I had the pleasure of sharing a dinner table with him and his wife at RTC in Auckland. One of the things he's struggled with (we've all struggled with) in his work at HOK is finding and keeping up with all the places that we can find content. He's been quietly compiling his own lists and keeping track of this stuff and finally decided it was time to do this in a more formal way, organized and in a way that allows for broader participation.

This is where BlueBryk comes in.

I should take a quick step back and explain that until now Bruce has been working quietly in what he called a private beta. I asked him if he was worried about word leaking out... Since I'm the leak, he's really hoping to get more feedback about what he's built so far, to see how well it fits and meets our needs. I really need to remember to ask him about the inspiration for the name but I'll ignore that for later.

The site is not a place to find and examine a specific cabinet or pipe fitting, at least not at the moment. It is a place to find recommended places to find content. It is a compilation of all the places that he's documented as providing content, not the specific content that is available.

If you visit the BlueBryk site you'll find a clean organized place (a bit of expected blue here and there too). At the very top is a button called "Why Register". That was my first question too, with a cynic's mindset, "Why do I care?". The first reason offered is access to advance searching criteria, which is certainly valid. I think the biggest reason is to give me access to voting on content providers. After all if I really want to make the site work we all need to give feedback into the quality of the content we find. Autodesk's Seek, the more or less obvious "competing" resource, doesn't really deliver on real user rating systems (we can submit feedback), at least not in a "social" way.

After submitting the info as shown above the results are organized alphabetically and the BlueBryk rating appears on the far right.

Links provide access to the websites for each provider, which belong to any one of these categories: Content Exchange, Consolidator, Content Building, Content Store or Manufacturer. In this way the site is a much more elegant delivery of the kind of information my own Revit Inside blog has been doing for companies that use Revit.

The goal of the site is to do a great job of keeping this information current, relevant and reliable...useful. At the moment Bruce reports over 1200 resources are to be found within BlueBryk. If I'm hunting for the perfect supply grill for Revit MEP there are a lot of manufacturers, the question is who provides Revit content? Ideally BlueBryk will make it easier to see which companies or sites provide a matching range of content AND see which ones are highly rated by BlueBryk AND us.

Now that I've mentioned his site, Bruce hopes you'll check it out and help him make it a very valuable resource for all of the Revit (and the broader BIM) community. Have a look for yourself and click the Contact Us button to offer up your thoughts. He's incorporated a blog into the site too so he can provide timely information. Look for him to write posts that help explain what his vision is and where he hopes we will help him take BlueBryk.

Fwiw, another product called Unifi also takes on this problem with at least one big difference, its integration into Revit as an application. BlueBryk is solely a web resource. I don't know if that is a negative or a positive for either but my gut instinct is that not being an app makes it a bit simpler to use it as intended, as a resource, instead of adding yet another thing to manage during deployment for Revit.

Family Naming - Don't Worry

Jose Fandos of Andekan posted again in his continuing theme of content related posts. He suggests that worrying about a family naming standard, an all-encompassing one at least, isn't our biggest priority. I agree, I've always preached consistency instead of specifics. Every firm I've met over the years has their own position about file and folder naming for every kind of software they use.

He (Jose) predicts that how we find content in and out of Revit will only get better as we move forward so the actual name of a Revit family may become less important as a means to find one. For example, the add-in Family Browser allows us to organize content logically and the name isn't really the focus (while it, a standard, does help organize the folder the content is in perhaps).

If by some chance everybody could agree on a standard strategy it wouldn't hurt us. I don't think it is a fundamental or major priority over actually having content created. If it gets made with a "bad" name, I can always rename it when it hits "my" library anyway. ;)

Revit Content Standards - ANZRS

The Australia New Zealand Revit Standards (ANZRS) has been formally released. In March this year I wrote that they were drawing close to releasing it and that they hoped to do so at the Revit Technology Conference in Goldcoast. They did hold a meeting there but held off on the formal release a bit longer.

They made their first digital public version available for download. You need to register with modest information before you'll be able to download it. It is delivered in a PDF package that is comprised of these sections:

• L1 Introduction
• L2 How to use the pack
• L3 Generic vs Specific
• L4 Glossary of Terms
• C1-C8 Compliance
• R1-R2 Advanced Features and Best Practices
• Full Pack for printing including shared parameter txt files

Revit Family Standards Australian-New Zealand

Attendees at the Revit Technology Conference 2008 (held in Melbourne, Australia) sparked a lively debate about content quality and standards (or the lack-there-of). Several people expressed an interest in developing a standard for their market, chief among them Michelle Van Kolck.

Michelle wrote tonight about the latest update to their progress on her blog BIM BOOM BAM. She's got some cool art on her blog banner, linked below:

Michelle and this group worked on this steadily despite having regular day jobs and lives and review their progress at the last RTC conference in Sydney. They also created a wiki site where people could review and contribute. The wiki site is now offline and they've started a new site with the title:

AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND REVIT STANDARDS (ANZRS).

There is only the front page introduction and a little background for now. Michelle wrote this in her post:

...snip
Because the new ANZRS document set is at the Peer Review stage I can’t share them, just yet. We will run this set through this 6 week Peer Review process, respond to all feedback and then formally launch our proposed solution at the next Australian Revit Technology Conference this year, on 21 May 2011. I would expect that the documents will then also be available shortly thereafter to all of our industry at the following WEBSITE.
...snip

Looking forward to seeing their work in May at Jupiters Gold Coast, Australia!

There have been various attempts in the USA to do something similar. The members at AUGI have started threads, the members at RevitForum are having one now and Autodesk's Seek has the Revit Family Style Guide which is chiefly intended to help them organize content on the seek site. The collateral opportunity is to provide a consistent framework for content.

The success of these efforts remains somewhat elusive since "we" are all different people with varying agendas and needs. The effort is noble and deserves our attention, I'm sure the various groups wrestling with this conversation would welcome help!