Showing posts with label Revit 2018. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Revit 2018. Show all posts

Monday, July 10, 2017

Revit 2018 - GEO Reference and Shared Coordinates

I replied to a thread at RFO that asked about Revit 2018 touting support for AutoCAD's GEO Reference feature.

On the surface, there is no obvious difference between how things worked in 2017 (or older versions) compared with 2018. Over the years you may have noticed that the Location Dialog, the one that allows you use a map to locate your project did not do anything at all related to the Shared Coordinate system. All that action did was provide a way for Revit to; originally calculate sun position (and therefore shadows) more believably and more recently to allow for energy analysis estimation to be done.

Now...in Revit 2018, assuming the source DWG file is using AutoCAD's GEO Referencing feature, it is possible for Revit to inherit this data to affect not only the Location (Sun and Energy Analysis) but also the coordinate location of the project (Shared Coordinates).

The thread at RFO also asks about the 20 mile threshold Revit has regarding model size and warning us about model accuracy. The following is a restatement of things I've written in the past. Specifically they asked if there was any change to this in 2018. There isn't that I know of. I included the following to superficially explain the reason it exists.

The 20 mile threshold is a math and computer science problem that Revit developers choose not to lie to us about. They want us to keep the model as close to the file's mathematical origin as possible. External files (and internal modelling) that have data whose extents are larger than 20 miles begin to influence the accuracy of the calculations required to generate and display the model faithfully.

More often than not a civil file is not really larger than 20 miles. It just has elements that are farther away from the origin than that. Revit doesn't mind that issue and it doesn't mind assigning very large coordinates values to the shared coordinate origin (Survey Point).

It only cares when there are elements that are beyond the threshold. For example a file that only has two short line segments that are 30 miles apart will cause a warning. A file with an entire set of contour lines 40 miles away from the origin won't cause an error IF all the contours themselves and other annotation don't cause the extent of elements to also be larger than the 20 mile threshold. Distance from the origin is one aspect and the total extent (X,Y AND Z) of the elements in the file is the other.

Ultimately, the error appears because they want us to know that this external data could negatively affect the accuracy of what we work with inside Revit.

I wrote THIS POST to discuss how I deal with survey files that violate the threshold. It starts out with one issue (transparent elevations/sections) that occurs when the threshold is crossed.

Tuesday, May 02, 2017

Revit 2018 - Insert Ribbon Search Field is Removed

When Autodesk Seek gave up on their mission and handed it over to BIM Object Revit 2017 started to redirect us to that site instead whenever we did a search. Prior to that it would take us to Autodesk Seek.


Notice anything missing from the 2018 Insert Ribbon image above? Well the post title gave it away but the search field has been stripped off. Remember this following image from way back when?


I realize it didn't make sense to leave references to Autodesk Seek in play. Now it's even less helpful to find external content. I guess it's more incentive to install BIM Object's Revit app? Probably what they intended.

No you're not imagining things, it's gone gone gone...

-- EDITED 5/2/2017 --

I installed the BIM Object Revit app.


Holy smokes that's a heck of a ribbon for the primary button I really want, Browse on the far left. Note if you launch any of the tools you can't do any work back in Revit until you finish interacting with their app. If you find that frustrating you could just open a separate browser.

It would be nice if there were some user settings to reduce the number of buttons to just those you're likely to use. I added the browse button to the QAT to get around accessing the ribbon tab each time.