Do U Revit?

AUGI | AEC EDGE

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:21:00 +0000

AUGI has done it again! Thanks to the efforts of its members, a new digital publication targeted to the AEC industry is now available for your viewing pleasure. It is so hot off the “press” that a link hasn’t even made it yet to the Publications section of the AUGI website ;)

Click the image above to view the in-browser digital edition, or if you prefer a copy for offline viewing, click here for further options. Thanks to all the volunteers and contributors that made this a reality, especially to esteemed Editor, Steve Stafford. Here’s what you’ll find in this inaugural edition, focused on Revit:

Revit Cross Discipline Articles:

How Can the Introduction of Business & Software Systems Affect your Business?
How To "BIM-Enable IPD"
A Little Help From My Friends Collaboration Between Consultants
Extending BIM Design Value Using The Revit API
A Trainer’s Perspective: Key Requirements For A Successful BIM Implementation
A General Contractor’s Venture Into BIM And VDC

Revit Architecture

Revit In A Large Firm: A Tale Of Implementing Revit
Getting Oriented With Revit’s Coordinate System
Make Room For Revit: Key Requirements For A Successful BIM Implementation
A Tutorial For Line Based Families
Revit In High School: Meet Two Progressive Teachers And Their Program

Revit Structure

Growing Revit Structure
Integrating Analysis Programs With Revit Structure
Revit Ready: Looking Back

Revit MEP

How To Play Nice: Sharing Revit Models Between Disciplines
Five Steps To Success With Revit MEP: The Reality
Putting The ‘I’ In Your BIM Content: Revit MEP Families That Capture Design Intent
Revit MEP Implementation At CTA Group: A Struggle With Promise

Departments

Contributed White Paper: Conceptual Design Modeling In Autodesk Revit Architecture 2010
Autodesk Insiders: Revit: An Autodesk Design/Build Project
AUGI Local Chapter Focus: South Coast Revit User Group (SCRUG)
Attorney At Large: Achieving IPD In 3D
Inside Track: The Latest Autodesk AEC Related Information!
Head's Up: Recent Known Issues And Problems Documented By Autodesk And AUGI Members

Streamlining Local File Creation – update (x64) v4

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:39:00 +0000

Hi all, please accept my apologies for not posting much lately. I’m currently on an “expedition” in Eastern Europe and spend most of my free time blogging about that instead of Revit! I’m sure you’re smart enough to find it if you want to know more ;) I’ll hopefully be able to return to the usual weekly schedule in July/August.

Anyway, I’ve completed the update of the Local File Creation script a month ago and forgot to post about it here. So this will be an easy post for me! With the new functionality built into Revit 2010, there’s less need for such a script. However we still intend to keep on using it as we have other functionality built-in which doesn’t exist in the Autodesk solution. So this is tailored specifically to our needs.

In the future I will be making changes to this script to include a GUI option and have the application make desktop shortcuts automatically. The application will also be centralized (either on a network or local drive…your choice). This means that you won’t need to keep placing a copy of the exe file in each project folder like you do now. This will make updating the app much easier. But that will be released later and most of the functionality will be very similar to the current version. These are the main updates:

Compatible with 2010 (32 & 64 bit) and works all the way to 2009 (32 & 64 bit) and 2008.
Adjusted some of the logic so now when creating a Detached copy, the Central is not copied to the C drive. You can also create a detached copy of a project while a local file for the same project is still running. This wasn't possible before.
The script ends properly and the splashscreen should not persist after it finishes. Please see the Known Issues section in the Readme.txt file for one case where you might still notice this problem.

Note that for both 32 and 64 bit versions, the installation folder is assumed to be C:\Program Files\ and that you’ll have a 32 bit version of Revit on a 32 bit OS and vice versa for 64 bit. As always, you can download the zip containing the documentation, AHK script, the compiled executable and icon from this AUGI thread (first post with version history). Enjoy!

Autodesk Announcement

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Mon, 18 May 2009 13:11:00 +0000

Here’s a little nudge about something that you might consider as value-adding to your professional career in these tough times.

Autodesk Professional Certification

Take the 2010 Beta Exam and Upgrade your Certification

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Autodesk Professional Certification program is pleased to announce the release of the 2010 beta exams. The release of the final 2010 exams depends on your support! We need Revit Architecture 2010 test takers.

Take advantage of these benefits by participating in Beta testing

Exams are FREE for Autodesk Authorized Certification Center staff
Low cost exams for customers - $25 per test by using the consumer shopping cart
Gain a competitive edge by getting Certified on the latest releases

We encourage you to take advantage of this period so that you can update any existing certification or earn your first certification at no or a low cost. Don’t delay!

How can you participate?

1. Schedule your test before May 22. (Call your local Authorized Certification Center.)

2. Check out the preparation material available.

3. Make sure that they are delivered and completed by the end dates of the betas, May 22 (to be valid for 2010 certification status.)

Note: To gain Certified Associate status you only need to pass the Associate exam. To become A Certified professional you must pass both exams.

Why do we beta test our exams?

Whenever a new exam is created, the exam items need to be calibrated and tried out within a testing situation. In order to do this, exams are made available in a Beta format. After the items are tested within the Beta setting, each item is analyzed statistically and reanalyzed for technical accuracy, appropriateness, and readability.

What you should expect when participating in Beta testing?

The exam may contain small errors (this beta is to catch and correct these any errors.)
Exam questions may or may not be the same ones that appear on the final exam (this is why your feedback is important.)
Scoring may not be immediate, but will most often take place 6 weeks after taking the exam (score reports will only be delivered directly to the test takers.)
You will be asked to provide feedback on a short survey at the end of the test (thank you in advance.)
Test takers will be notified via email when their score is ready so valid email addresses are important.
The exams are free to your staff and very low cost to your customers.
You have the chance to provide feedback via a survey at the end of the test to help influence a better test.

If you have any questions about the Beta testing program, contact us at certification@autodesk.com.

Best regards,

Autodesk Learning Team

Some thoughts about Revit files

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Fri, 15 May 2009 03:49:00 +0000

So now with the new feature built into Revit that recognizes the “DNA” of a central file and automatically checks the option to create a local file with the appended username, adding the word “central” at the end could actually cause confusion when your local file is named myproject_Central_dbaldacchino.rvt. This is why we’re probably going to stick with a script for creating local files like in the past, so we can control the naming conventions, besides some other benefits. Hopefully we’ll have an even better user-friendly version, which is still in the works.

That brings me to the purpose of this post: Why don’t the developers implement a file extension system that identifies what type of file we’re dealing with? Perhaps .rvc for Central files, .rvl for Local files and leave the .rvt for non-workset enabled files. This would make it totally clear what you’re dealing with, eliminating the need for arcane naming conventions. A unique, easily identifiable icon for each file type would also be a very welcome addition.

Illegal Immigrants

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Mon, 11 May 2009 03:48:00 +0000

No, this post won’t discuss such political issues. We’ll leave that to Lou Dobbs on CNN.

A lot of users enter symbols in Revit or any other application, by typing Alt + a series of digits. For example Alt+0178 results in ². In Revit 2010, this will work for the first character you type after using this technique for the first time since installing the application. After that, your screen will be taken over by foreign characters with each subsequent try.

It seems to keep changing with each try, even though you use the same digit combinations. I hope this gets fixed soon! In the meantime the workaround is to go to the Character map and copy & paste the symbol from there.

No Ribbon cutting at AU2009

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Fri, 08 May 2009 03:20:00 +0000

I was hoping we would celebrate the return to Phil’s outstanding classes this year at AU after his absence last year. But that doesn’t seem likely.

If you’ve ever been to AU and attended Revit classes, you HAVE to know what I’m talking about. I remember my first AU in 2005 and he made a huge impression on me. He inspires positivity in his approach to solving problems/shortfalls/perceived limitations and his classes were the ones that every power user yearned for.

I don’t believe anyone at Autodesk marketing knows about Seth Godin. Their marketing department is redundant and a colossal waste of money. They’re useless. You want to cut costs? There, I just solved one of your major problems; fire the whole department and turn the office space into a game room or something. Let’s make it even clearer: your users are your marketing machine. Sadly, you don’t seem to get it. Too bad.

I don’t necessarily agree with Phil’s views on the Ribbon UI, however I listen to him with big, wide-open ears as I don’t pretend to even measure up against his knowledge and insight. Personally I thought he was a bit aggressive and surprisingly “negative” perhaps in his criticism of the UI. But that’s the beauty of the world we live in: we can speak our mind and agree to disagree. I’m not working in production right now so I cannot express judgment of the new UI based on working experience with the product; I’ve only tested since January and agree on most of the issues outlined with tool placement, etc. If one factors in the increased amount of clicks, then I’d say there’s potential for decreased productivity. But one cannot infer that the productivity hit is linearly related, because we’re not interacting with the tools 100% of the time.

Anyway, I don’t want to delve on this because that’s not why I posted. I just wanted to express my utmost dismay at how this matter was handled. Sure, let someone else handle the Power Track. But reject perfectly legitimate class proposals? That’s as childish, unprofessional and immature of behavior as it gets. How sad.

Sites worth noting

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:44:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write about these for a while so here we go:

revitstore

Ian Howard is the main force behind this site. I didn’t know, but Ian used to work for Revit Technologies before Autodesk’s acquisition. This is a great website hosting good quality Family Content from UK Content Autodesk Consultant/Content Developer. It also contains lots of Tips and Tricks that are gradually being added, time permitting.

buildz

Zach Kron from Autodesk has started a great blog. Zach is a wizard with the new curtain panels in the new massing environment (those that Beta tested Revit know this!). I highly recommend subscribing.

As usual, keep an eye on my blog’s sidebar for the latest links to various resources of interest, as I don’t write about every link I add ;)

Help me please!

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:42:00 +0000

This is the feeling every new user experiences when getting into Revit (or any other app. for that matter). Revit comes with a decent set of datasets and tutorials which have been improving over the years. However when we open the Tutorials section from the Help menu/button, we are presented with a page that tells us how we download the content. It’s not very helpful if you’re asked to do a bunch of stuff before you get help now, is it?

Your office might have taken care of this for you by downloading the content on the network, fixing your Training Files paths, etc. How nice of them! But that’s not always the case with everyone or you might be the BIM Manager taking care of this. It’s relatively easy to download and unzip everything to the correct folder. However in Vista 64 (this could also apply to Vista 32, not sure), the tutorial chm files might not work correctly unless you click a hidden button. This is what I got when I installed mine for the first time:

So with AUGI to the rescue in this post, William explains how to fix the issue by right-clicking the chm file and clicking the Unblock button. Sweet!

Training content for Revit Architecture can be downloaded from here. And for the benefit of our Engineering colleagues, here are the links for Revit Structure and Revit MEP.

Revit 64 bit? Don’t use IE8!

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:59:00 +0000

I’ve been experiencing crashing events with both Revit 2009 and 2010. I finally narrowed it down to Internet Explorer 8. The funny thing is that these problems started with the released version of IE8 and not the Beta! This was filed this with Autodesk Support and turns out to be a known issue. Their response perfectly describes the symptoms I was experiencing. You have now been served!

“Thank you for choosing Autodesk Support.

Internet Explorer 8 is not recommended to be installed when used with Revit 2009 64 bit. There is a known issue with the recent files screen. The Recent Files menu is an HTML based window and uses Internet Explorer and has not been designed to be used with IE8.

IE8 is also not recommended to be used with Revit 2010 as it has not been designed or tested with it. The same problem does not exist with the recent files screen in the same way but it is apparent that if you have the recent files window up and TAB+CTRL between your windows while using 64 bit and IE8, it will crash. You can use IE8 if you do not have the recent files window open.”

Conditional formatting

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:52:00 +0000

So Steve stole the thunder this week and you already know how to do conditional formatting in Revit schedules. That Steve is one quick guy but after all, his readership eclipses my little corner here! Jokes apart, we were talking about how I stumbled across this hidden tool when trying to activate the Manage tab with shortcuts in Revit 2010. Now I just hope Autodesk doesn’t close the loop-hole. And guys, if you’re listening, please just add a button as we can use this tool in Architecture!

The main shortfall I noticed is the fact that you cannot do conditional formats based on other parameters. That would be high on my list of enhancements for this tool. To get around this bump, one has to leverage the power of calculated parameters in schedules to perform the number crunching. A simple Yes/No parameter could be used to raise a flag and your condition would just look for the value and format the cell accordingly.

We can actually add multiple conditions to test for, but it is very limiting because it assumes an “AND” operator between them. What if I want an “OR” (which is what one needs when testing to see if a parameter falls between certain values and criteria….they can’t all apply at the same time! An “AND” operator expects all conditions to be satisfied and would thus force the overall condition to fail). It also took me a while to figure out how to add or remove conditions from the list. By the way, why does this dialog use the label “Field” when referring to a parameter? Seems to lack consistency with Revit’s terminology.

So I’ll stop rambling now and discuss how I plan on using this new find. The first two things that spring to mind are to check for human errors (egress calculations) and for room area comparisons between actual and target area.

Checking Occupancy

Unfortunately Revit cannot do calculated parameters in tags (my jaws are hurting repeating this one!) and so we have to resort to a “stone age” method: use a calculated parameter in the schedule and then manually type a copy of the result into a shared parameter that is added to both the schedule and the room tag so you can display the information in plan. PS: You cannot use the built-in Occupancy parameter because it is Text….DUH!

Yes, yes I know, the API can be used to copy values for you probably, but WHY do I need to resort to this for something that is a required task on every job by every firm? I’m getting side-tracked again….

So at least now we can use conditional formatting to help us identify values that don’t match the calculated values, which would happen when room sizes change. Here’s an example calculated parameter:

In the schedule Formatting tab, select the parameter you want to add the condition to and type Alt+N to reveal the hidden gem:

Here’s an example of what the schedule would look like when values don’t match up.

Note: You can check the option Hidden field in the Formatting tab to hide the calculated parameter used for the condition and it will still work just fine.

Some observations: Null values are ignored in calculated parameters (see the yellow cells above) and in conditional formatting. My condition “Flag = No” is not being met because the value is null, yet Revit is not coloring my cells. This needs fixed!

Room Area

For this scenario, I want to ensure that Actual Area:

Is never below the Target Area
Is never more than 5% of the Target Area
Never varies by more than 100 SF from the Target Area

So the formula for parameter Flag would be something like this:

or(not(abs(Area - Program Area) < 100 SF), % Area Variance < 0, not(% Area Variance < 0.05))

where Area is the Actual Area, Program Area is the Target Area, & % Area Variance is (Area - Program Area) / Program Area.

Here’s what the resulting schedule would look like:

In the above example I added a conditional format (in orange) to highlight cases when the % Area Variance was below 5%, but the area difference was 100 SF or more.

Some observations: It would be really valuable if we could specify the boolean between multiple conditions instead of having Revit assume an “AND” operator. And we should be able to specify different colors for the various conditions instead of just one!

If that were the case, one would be able to highlight rooms with areas above the target with one color, and others below the target with another color. Finally, I also noticed that for Yes/No parameters, the Conditional Formatting dialog would let me change the value of my parameter Flag to “Yes”, but it would revert it back to “No” when I clicked out of the dialog or clicked on something else. Not sure why.

All in all this tool is of great value and I’m sure lots of you will find various ways to use it. Let me know how you intend to implement it!

Houston RUG

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:46:00 +0000

When: Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Where: This month's meeting will be hosted by SHW, 6:00pm - 7:30pm

1st Floor Koch Building Classroom

20 East Greenway Plaza

Houston, TX 77046

Click here for map and parking instructions

This Month's Topic : What's new in Revit 2010.

Please RSVP to hrug@gensler.com no later than NOON on Tuesday, April 21st, if you plan to attend.

TotalCAD will be providing pizza and refreshments.

Open Discussion
Bring your questions, answers and solutions to the table to discuss and resolve or forward relevant topics for future meetings to hrug@gensler.com

The Houston Revit User Group will meet on the fourth Wednesday of each month. In order to make this a success this will need to be a group effort. All topics, presentations, and discussions will be generated by the group, so come ready to discuss!

We welcome change of scenery! If you would like to host a future meeting or have a topic of discussion, please send an email to hrug@gensler.com

BIM Workshop organized by TSA

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:01:00 +0000

Last Friday, 3rd April, the Texas Society of Architect’s BIM Task Force hosted the first in a series of BIM Workshops at the University of Houston. The intent is for these workshops to be held around the state, so if you’re in Texas, make sure to check the TSA website for upcoming events. It was a beautiful day outside and even though this workshop was open to students, not a single soul showed up.

Most of the attendees were still trying to wrap their heads around BIM, but there was a good representation of firms and individuals that were already in the implementation and maturity stages. This workshop is perfect for a big-picture overview of BIM and I encourage PM and Management/Ownership level staff to attend. I was disappointed that I was only able to go with my usual “choir” (the ones that already know the song and are ready to move to the next stage), as no one in our office other than Architectural production was able to make it. This was the perfect opportunity to have Designers, Structural, MEP and PM staff to all hear the same song from external sources, which they might deem more “official” and “believable”. You know, if your dad tells you to do something, you’re prone to ignore it, but if you hear it from someone else, then it’s a law of nature ;)

If there was any doubt that Revit was the most popular BIM solution, after the presentation those doubts would have cleared up. The presentations were kept as vendor-neutral as possible and the presenters did not engage in marketing talk, which was great. However the screenshots shown as part of the case-studies were unmistakable. At the workshop, three software vendors were available (Graphisoft, Nemetschek and Autodesk) to discuss their products and services.

For those that have never seen the now infamous graphs of productivity declines in our industry, together with the “saw-tooth” diagrams of data loss in the delivery process (can’t find a link to this on the web; please paste one in a comment if you have it!), and how we should shift our focus to the early stages of a project in a BIM environment (link to attachment on AUGI forums; page 8), you probably formed a perfect mental picture now and are able to sketch them in your sleep!

One topic of discussion that came up was how to use Interns in an office practicing BIM, given the fact that BIM requires a higher understanding of construction and we typically don’t need as much drafting help such as “picking up red-lines”, which is very prevalent in the traditional CAD process. The solution is to simply not look at interns as “cheap labor” and make CAD monkeys out of them, but to mentor them into becoming the designers, architects and engineers of the future. Sadly, I see very little mentorship going on from experienced people (especially partners) in the firm. Granted that their time is billed at higher rates and all, but how do we expect to nurture the next generation of professionals if we keep our young ones doing casework plans, toilet layouts and parking schemes for an entire year?

There were a couple of really good presentations that dealt with the people side of the implementation process and offered some tips about how to select pilot projects, debunked some myths about “which project should be in BIM vs CAD”, and offered some great advice on how to manage teams to help them succeed. Overall it was a great workshop and if you’re in Texas, make sure to send your non-believers to the next event, which will be held in another city.

Revit 2010 to ship with Classic UI

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:00:00 +0000

I’ll probably get in trouble for divulging this information, but I’m very excited about some last minute changes to Revit 2010. The new Ribbon interface will come with the option to change it to Classic Mode and we will have a couple of additional tabs and buttons.

But the Factory didn’t stop there: they gave use new revamped text tools that will be the envy of all text editing features out there. I’m finding it hard to contain my excitement! We should be getting Revit 2010 soon and I can’t wait to take advantage of these great features. Here’s a sneak peak:

Volume Frenzy

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:14:00 +0000

In my last post I made mention to some behavior I ran across when scheduling volumes. The reported figures varied when scheduling Volume or Material: Volume, so I set out to study Revit’s logic. Note that Material: Volume is available in a Material Take-Off schedule, which is the schedule type used for these tests.

To understand the behavior, I ran 3 scenarios by creating a simple family made up of a 1’x1’x10’ solid and then scheduled it. Here are the first set of findings based on the solid’s LOD (Level of Detail):

Next I added a 1’x1’x1’ “control” solid to further understand how these two volume parameters look at solids in families. This control solid was set to Fine only for now (in the same family).

Lastly, I set the control solid to both Coarse and Fine.

As you can see, these values vary depending on the LOD of solids within your families. So you have to be very careful how you build them if you intend to use them for quantity take-offs. I guess you can now understand why I used the word “Frenzy” in the post title ;)

I personally think this logic is a little crazy, but I’ll be eager to read your comments. At least now you have an in-depth study of Revit’s “logic”. Now on to a summary in words:

For an object to schedule in a Material Takeoff Schedule, there HAS to be a solid set to Fine detail. A regular schedule doesn’t have this requirement.
Material: Volume reads the Total of Fine solids.
Volume reads the Total of Fine solids if no Coarse and or/Medium solids exist. Otherwise, it first reports the Total of Coarse solids and if there are none, it reports the Total of Medium solids.
There's no clear cut winner of which is the most reliable parameter. My suggestion? If you want to schedule the volume of particular solids, make sure to set their LOD to Fine and then use Material: Volume. Why? Because it has less obtuse rules!

So I ask myself: instead of these “fuzzy” rules, why not have parameters built into each family template which we would use to control what and how volume is scheduled?

PS: Thanks to Daniel for the extensive brainstorming ;)

Scheduling the Unschedulable

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:26:00 +0000

The more we venture into BIM (taking real advantage of our Revit models), the more this subject is starting to tick me off. You’ve been warned!

Let’s take a look at what caused this “rant”.

Here you can see the family parameter “Structural Material Type”. I want to use this really bad because I’m doing quantity take-off schedules for all elements, which include structural framing elements residing in a linked file. So I want to create a framing schedule for steel and another for concrete. The reason is that I want to find the total weight of each material in the job and as you know, concrete and steel have different densities.

So to calculate this, one can create a calculated parameter in the schedule and voila. I would prefer to expose the density used in the schedule (so everyone can see it. I don’t like to bury assumed values in formulas if possible). However since the families reside in a linked file, you cannot add this information to your project via a project parameter, so you can only have one formula with a fixed value (one density value). So the only way to do this is to create schedules for framing members with different densities. I know, I can get into the linked file, but that’s beside the point.

Unfortunately, you cannot schedule the above highlighted parameter, which would typically raise the question, then why the %^&**&?!!@? do we have it? How can I filter views/schedules of my insanely intelligent model? I cannot even filter by family name or type either!

This is only one little thing I came across and is very irritating. I found more issues when calculating volumes, but that will be another very lengthy post, so stay tuned.

Schedule Discrimination

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:45:00 +0000

Here’s what I’m trying to do:

I have multiple “Parts” built as shared families (Specialty Equipment);
Then I’m building multiple Assemblies (also Specialty Equipment) made up of nested families from (1);
I want to create a schedule for Assemblies and another for Parts.

There’s no direct way to do this. So I decided to add a Yes/No shared parameter to the Assembly families and filter the schedules for it. You don’t even need to worry about the value and just filter for it’s existence. Now I can easily build the Assembly schedule by filtering for parameter exists.

Notice how every filter option has an opposite (equals, does not equal, etc.), with the exception of parameter exists. Because of that, I cannot really filter for it’s non existence, which is forcing me to care about the value of the parameter instead. I deem that as discrimination!

So the solution is to check the parameter in the Assembly families and filter for equals “Yes” instead. The schedule will then grab all Assembly families. For the Parts schedule, set the filter to does not equal “Yes” (no need to add the parameter to the parts families).

Houston Revit User Group

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:44:00 +0000

This Month's Topic : Construction Administration and Revit.

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

6:00pm - 7:30pm

This month's meeting will be held at the Gensler office at 711 Louisiana St, 4th Floor.

Please RSVP no later than NOON on Tuesday, March 24, if you plan to attend, so we can put your name on the security list for the building.

Entry into Pennzoil Place is available off Louisiana St after 6:00pm, but your name must be on the security list to gain entry into the building. Several downtown garages are available for parking.

We welcome change of scenery! If you would like to host a future meeting, please send an email to hrug@gensler.com

Rooms

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:49:00 +0000

In Architecture, one of the most important parts of the whole process is to decide what to build. In the US, we call it “Programming”. In Europe, we call it “Briefing”. And I’m sure in some other region around the world it’s called something else!

Essentially this is a process by which we ask questions about the spaces we’re designing for. Questions such as, “what size”, “what finishes”, “what height”, “what equipment”…once we have this information, then and only then can we design something. We can later assess and gauge whether we did a good job by ensuring that at least we met these agreed upon requirements.

Arguably, the most important “what” question is about size: the “Program Area” or “Target Area” of a room. Why isn’t this a built-in parameter in Revit rooms? This is becoming increasingly frustrating as we start looking at API tools to enhance our workflow. For example in the SDK, there is a handy “Room Schedule” tool (thanks for pointing this out Guy!) and the example Excel file has a column for “Room Area”. This example is “flawed” if you ask me, because that column should be called “Target Area”. It’s not “Room Area” until the room is placed in an enclosure This API tool can create Revit Rooms from an Excel workbook and can also update the workbook from the Revit Room data.

Assuming the column was called “Target Area”, the only way to really populate that parameter in a project is to add it beforehand to your project/template file as a Project or a Shared parameter and customize your code to write to it. But WHY NOT have it already built-in? The act of programming is central to Architecture, and the information collected during this process should be easy to record in our B I M. It should not require additional custom parameters. Because of this, we cannot exploit the full potential of this SDK tool as it needs further customization to have it copy the “Target Area” column to our version of “Program Area” in a project.

Another example where we have to deal with this same issue is when using Trelligence Affinity with Revit. Even in this case we have to customize our installs to map to the correct Program Area parameter. These are totally unnecessary pains that both 3rd party software developers and us working in this field have to endure. We’d all rather direct our energy to more important parts of our respective projects instead!

Text Notes

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 06:26:00 +0000

So in Jumpy Text, we looked at a technique that we can employ to alleviate the well known deficiencies of text in Revit. Now you know how to use Key Schedules for this purpose, but I wanted to take this a little step further after a great tip I learned from a discussion with my good friend Daniel Hurtubise of RevitIt.

I mentioned the problem of the schedule title being the same as the name of the key schedule in the Project Browser (PB). So if you prefix the names to group them nicely in the PB, you’ll have a problem with your title. To get around this, we can disable the title and group the headings. Then we can type in our new “title” in this new space, independently of the name!

The problem though is that for notes on documents, we don’t need the headings, so this solution wouldn’t be very clean as we don’t want to see the parameter names and if we turn them off, so does the new group “title”. However Revit lets us edit these names and to my surprise (and here comes my little contribution), it lets us make them blank! So by unchecking the option Blank row before data, we can still end up with a separate title, a blank row and our text notes indented with a number for each paragraph, as you can see below (click to see larger animation). This is without a doubt a better solution than typing text for the title. Enjoy!

New blog worth noting

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:06:00 +0000

The number of Revit and BIM blogs out there keeps proliferating. I don’t announce every new one I come across, but I think this one is worth noting.

Inside the Factory is a new blog by “factory workers” Tom Vollaro, Lilli Smith and Erik Egbertson. It should give us an inside look at how the entire Revit user experience is designed, implemented and documented. I look forward to following it as it promises to be interesting!

Make sure to keep an eye on my Revit & BIM Reading Essentials blog roll on the sidebar and the list of links below it, which I keep religiously updated :)

Jumpy Text

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:10:00 +0000

This is one of the most annoying behaviors in Revit. I can’t believe that we’ll have to deal with it for at least another year. Pretty sad.

We need text, don’t we? Unfortunately creating project notes in Revit is a frustrating endeavor. Text re-formats itself depending on the zoom factor, which is totally insane if you ask me. Take a look at this animated gif.

So how do we deal with this issue? You could link in a dwg that contains your text, but this can potentially result in more headaches as mtext boxes are sometimes ignored by Revit. And honestly, I want to stop using DWG files altogether. Another huge limitation is the inability to indent text so you can number each paragraph and be able to adjust the column width of your text without resulting in a formatting do-over.

Back at AU2007, I learned a tip which I’ll be employing from now on. I feel really dirty using it, but there’s no other solution I can think of. I’m not sure where it originated but I learned about it through a hallway chat with the “Rock-n-Roll Architect”, aka Steven Shell. If you know who contributed it, please post a comment. Here it goes…

Create a Key Schedule for a category that you never use. No, the Roads category is not available ;) In this example I chose the Sprinklers category but you’re free to pick anything you want.

Notice the Name field. That’s the name of your key schedule in the project browser, and will also be your Title when you drag this onto a sheet. It’s not necessary to change it in this dialog since you can rename it later in the Project Browser. I named my example “GENERAL NOTES”. Next, type in a Key name and click OK, which leads us to the Fields tab.

Add a new parameter to house your text notes; I used “MyText”. In the Sorting/Grouping tab, sorting will be set by default to the Key Name, which is exactly what we want. This will contain the numbering of each paragraph. To finish up, set your appearance preferences. In my case, I wanted a wide outline and turned off the option to Show Headers as we don’t really need them. Once you click OK, you’ll be in schedule editing mode which will just show the title (If you choose to not have a title, you’ll get a blank page). The next step is to add rows to your key schedule. Let’s use Revit’s new interface to illustrate (click animated gif for larger view).

Now you just drag this onto a sheet and make final adjustments there. This should eliminate the problem of Jumpy Text. A couple of issues that you’ll face are the fact that you don’t have Project Browser sorting/grouping capabilities and that you cannot use the same schedule name twice, so you’ll have to get creative. One option is to have these key schedules named with a prefix so they’ll be grouped together in the Project Browser and separate from “real” key schedules (ex: txt_Roof General Notes). Then you would turn off the Title and just type in text directly on your sheet as seen below.

PS: Autodesk, PLEASE, this needs fixed. Seriously.

Shortcuts for custom tools

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:48:00 +0000

Many of you probably already know this, but I only bothered researching this recently. If you installed any extra tools, remember that you can add keyboard shortcuts to call these tools, which would be located in the Tools pull-down, under ”External Applications”. Examples of such tools would be the Worksharing monitor, the Filter tool, etc.

Here’s an example of what I added to access the custom filter tool:

The KeyboardShortcuts.txt file is located in your Revit installation directory under the Program folder.

Streamlining Local File Creation – update (x64)

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:51:00 +0000

The script has been updated to work with the following combinations:

32 bit Revit on a 32 bit OS
64 bit Revit on a 64 bit OS

It will look for an installation in the folder Program Files, so if you changed the install location, it won’t work. The previous script was a bit more flexible and automatically retrieved the custom folder that you might have used as your program installation folder. However on a 64 bit OS, the parameter is retrieving the Program Files (x86) folder, which is not the correct location for the 64 bit install. Because of this, I just hard-coded the folder into the script in lieu of the parameter.

You can download the zip containing the documentation, AHK script, the compiled executable and icon from this AUGI thread (first post with version history). Enjoy!

Detailing issues after Rotating Project North

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:00:00 +0000

A couple of very useful tools were officially introduced in the 2009 versions of Revit that users had been begging for for quite some time. One was the Mirror Project tool and the other was the Rotate Project North tool.

How many times have you started drawing/modeling a building only to find out it doesn't fit nicely on sheets? As a "standard", we always try to orient Project North as close as possible to True North. But at times we find out too late that it would have been better to orient Project North differently.

With this new tool, we can rotate our project, associated views, tags, etc. at the same time. This is a huge time saver but comes at a price. It's a tool that has problems, so don't expect to come out unscathed. You might have to do some touch-up work to correct some things that don't rotate properly. As we shall see, some issues are currently not correctable, but it helps to know what can happen and be aware of potential workarounds. Note also that the Mirror Project tool has similar issues, but once again, it can save a lot of time when designs change and we want to flip the building when we're already far into documentation!

I came across a problem recently and thought that some elevation views had gotten corrupted. When the user tried to draw a view-specific element, such as a detail line or a filled/masking region, Revit returned an error because "the Work Plane is at a very sharp angle". Now we know that these elements are not drawn on a typical work plane like other elements, such as model lines, so this error is a little bit out of place.

I sent the file to Support (pays to be a subscriber!) and it was pointed out that the Project North might have been changed on this project and could be causing the problem. We confirmed that the team did use the tool, and unfortunately there is currently no solution to correct this, except to re-create the elevations in this case. It was interesting to see that elevation callouts created from these "defective" views worked just fine.

Once I became aware of the repercussions, I took it a bit further and tested Section views. Turns out that these are affected in the same way as Elevation views. So make sure to rotate Project North early in the process and don't wait too long!

Workarounds

Short of deleting existing vertical views and re-creating them, there is something you could do. If you create a callout view in your "defective" elevations/sections, you can add the view-specific detail elements in the new callouts. Then copy them and paste-aligned to the original view. These will appear as expected but they cannot be edited easily (no grips). You can also create detail groups of these view specific elements, which will allow you to edit them in other views, even Drafting views. If you don't need the callouts, you can delete them and re-create as necessary when needing to edit your detail items perhaps.

As you can see, it can get a bit convoluted! If you're early in the process, I'd suggest re-creating the views. But if you're further along and have invested a lot of hours in those views already, you might consider these techniques until this known issue is resolved.

Metric and Imperial Areas in Schedules

d.baldacchino@sbcglobal.net — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 03:54:00 +0000

Here's a quick tip on how to create a schedule to show the same information but use different units of measure. I've been pondering whether this was too "simple" to post, but it did have me scratching my head for a while yesterday! After all I'm allowed to post newbie tips too ;) At first I thought I might have to place two schedules side by side, but as we shall see, it's not necessary.

Start by creating a room schedule and add the fields you want. Let's say you added Area and you left the units to use project settings, which are typically Imperial for us in the US (it's about time we move to metric!). Now what if I want another column to list the Area once again but in different units? Once we move the Area field from the "Available" column to the "Scheduled" column, we cannot add it again. So how do we get around this?

The answer is simple: create a calculated value. Don't get stuck thinking that this is just used for complex formulas. This can be as simple as being equal to another parameter. So simply type in "Area" as the formula, give it a name (such as Area_M) and you're set. Now go to the Formatting tab, select the newly created calculated value and change the units by clicking the Field Format button. This technique can also be used for length parameters or anything else that can be reported with different units.