Please RT.  Last year, I attended the Revit Technology Conference in Australia.  It was an absolutely awesome experience.  While the information was of a very high standard, I personally loved the opportunity I had to meet some of the top Revit users and professionals in the world.

This year, something new and exciting is happening.  Its called Visday (vizz-day).  It is the premier forum on advances in computer generated visualisation for the architecture, engineering and construction industries, and is collocated to the renowned RTC event. The powerful line-up of speakers includes Lon Grohs the Vice President of Chaos Group from Bulgaria, SHW group, HKS and VEO from the United States and local talent from Flood Slicer and Atomic 3D.

What Revit Wants is pleased to offer you the opportunity to win a free ticket to VisDay 2012 Australasia.  All you need to do is send an email to secretary@rtcevents.com in answer to the question in 25 words or less… What aspect of VisDay are you most interested in?”.  Be sure to include the fact that you are heard about this from What Revit Wants (see full rules below)

VisDay will be held on Wednesday 23 May at Novotel Wollongong Northbeach, NSW, Australia. Further details can be found on the website
 
Here are the full competition rules:

“We would like to offer your readers a single complimentary general admission ticket to VisDay, in exchange for feedback on attending VisDay. i.e.
Tell us in 25 words or less… What aspect of VisDay are you most interested in?

Prize includes registration to VisDay 2012 Australasia on Wednesday 23 May at Novotel Wollongong Northbeach. Complimentary scheduled transfers are available from Sydney city and Sydney Domestic Airport. Prize does not include other travel or accommodation.

All submissions are required by Monday 30 April, the winning entry will be decided by the VisDay Committee and will be notified on Wednesday 2 May.

Please email your submission to secretary@rtcevents.com noting the source blog. Please ensure you check back onto the blog after 2 May to see if you are a winner. Winning comments will be posted on the blog site along with the winners name.”

First off, a couple of links to Exporter add-ins for Revit 2013:
IFC Exporter on Sourceforge
Autodesk Exchange Apps – IFC Exporter for Revit

There have also been a few quite a few posts on other blogs about IFC recently.  Here is a selection:
Using two different versions
I alternate a bit between 2012 and Revit 2013 for optimal import results. Have not quite decided yet on what is best. 13 works faster, but I’ve seen a bug on windows which I love. Right now I use the 2012 imports, and so do I upgrade the file to 13 afterwards. 
Using ADT as a middle-man
If an item … Certainly will not be exported correctly, you can isolate it in a view, export view’et to 3D DWG for ADT and send it to the IFC from ADT. Boring… but it works. I’ve done this on an entire parking garage with a fall in all directions and had to realize that the correct 3D geometry, after all, it is very important.
via Google Translate of http://revitnorge.blogspot.com/2012/04/revit-2013-og-ifc.html

Improved ArchiCAD Connection Add-In for Revit ApplicationsFree Add-In developed for use by Autodesk Revit programs in the  Structure and MEP disciplines. This application is recommended for use  with IFC-based model exchange between GRAPHISOFT ArchiCAD and Revit  applications.  The Add-In for Revit  applications variously enables  direct import of ArchiCAD IFC models and IFC model export to ArchiCAD,  or serves to optimize Revit’s standard IFC import and export functions  used to exchange data with ArchiCAD.
http://www.graphisoft.com/support/archicad/downloads/interoperability/

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Revit Add-Ons: GRAPHISOFT Interoperability Downloads

DP stuff: IFC Export – Revit 2012 (describes various problems with 2012 IFC)
DP stuff: Update – IFC Export -Revit 2013 (issues improved in 2013)

All Things BIM: IFC Export from Revit: Reply
I’ve been monitoring the discussions in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) group on LinkedIn for some time now and recently saw a post criticizing IFC export from Revit 2012. I saw a few discrepancies in the methods described in the blog post, so I decided to run through the same tests myself. …

Geometry Gym – Revit import Grasshopper IFC addon
You can test for yourself.  Here‘s the grasshopper files used in the demonstration and some example IFC output..  You need to download the latest plugins from http://www.geometrygym.com/downloads

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http://geometrygym.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/geomgym-revit-addon-importing-ifc.html

There is one thing about Revit 2013 that I love above all the others – View Templates.

They are now truly powerful and useful, and they should improve our project management and documentation consistency.  And by ‘our’ I mean all Revit users.  If you haven’t picked up on it yet, there is a difference between ‘Assigning’ a View Template, and ‘Applying’ one:
Assigning – creates a link between the View and the View Template definition (when you change the Template, all views with that template assigned update to match the template)
Applying – is a one-off, drive-by application of the template settings to the view.  No link is created.

The key step in Assigning a View Template is clicking on the View Template property of the view (see image below)

You can read more at:
Assigning a View Template – WikiHelp

Even more powerful is the fact that you can create Types from all the different kinds of views – even Floor Plans can now have multiple Types.  You can watch a video on this at:
View Type Creation – WikiHelp

There is a bit of a bug in Revit 2013 at the moment when trying to apply the settings from one View to another – you can’t press OK to get out of the dialog!  I expect this will be fixed in an upcoming Web Update for Revit 2013.

Revit Knowz also loves View Templates:
Features I love:
– Hide at scales coarser than
– Re-align origin
– Propegate Extents
– Apply Default view template 

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Revit Knowz: Features I love

I just became aware of an issue that I wanted to pass on to you all right away.  Workset1 is special.  It should never be renamed, because it can lead to fairly serious problems down the track, including the This action has caused deletion of non-editable workset: issue.

So you should make it part of your Revit standard that no one can rename Workset1 – ever.

As usual, this is something that Steve already knew, and already told us.  Thanks Steve!

One other habit I have is to never rename Workset 1 because Revit won’t let us delete it. It’s the “original” workset and Revit just doesn’t let us delete it.
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Revit OpEd: Delete a Workset’s Contents?

An old discussion on AUGI also touches on the issue:

sweiser
2009-04-16, 12:27 PM
I just followed Shruti’s instructions and got the same error. For me it says I am deleting “non-editable Workset ‘Workset1’ ” Any other ideas?

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http://forums.augi.com/archive/index.php/t-84855.html

It is currently not possible to evaluate a text string in a conditional statement. You can have a conditional statement report a text string, but not check text and base a condition on it.
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RevitCity.com | Help with If then statement

For the very best resource on Revit Formulas, go to:
http://www.revitforum.org/tutorials-tips-tricks/1046-revit-formulas-everyday-usage.html

Good post over at Andekan on Revit Materials in 2013 – I have reposted three things I found particularly insightful below.

First of all – a slight correction.  The Andekan post states that:
You can’t open the asset browser unless you open a project material in the material editor.

This is actually not true.  You can open the Asset Editor and the Asset Browser without opening Materials.  Just set a Keyboard Shortcut to  Additional Settings:Material Assets.  This will open the Asset Editor.  Then click the ‘lines’ icon to open the Asset Browser.  Its kinda messed up, but you can do it.

Now, on to some good stuff from the post:

Entire Materials can live in .adsklib files:
you can take a whole material from inside your project (called “In Document” materials), including all of its different property sets (now called “Assets”), and add it to any number of external libraries that you create. You can also add materials from one library to another. Libraries that you create are stored as standalone .adsklib files, just like the “materials” libraries (read “appearance properties”) of prior versions, so they can be ported and shared between installations with ease.

.adsklibs can contain Assets AND Materials

Libraries
These are groups of materials and/or assets that exist outside of any particular project or family. They are saved as standalone .adsklib files, and it’s important to note that a single library can contain both materials and assets. This makes perfect sense: if materials are made up of different assets, then a “materials” library must somehow contain appearance, physical, and thermal assets as well.

How to update and maintain .adsklib Libraries 
5. You can only edit materials and assets that are inside of a project. In a library, you are limited to viewing the names of materials and assets, and to performing basic functions like Rename or Delete. If you want to edit a material or asset that’s in one of your libraries, you have to: 1) bring it into a project, 2) make your edits, then 3) add it back into the library to overwrite the original version, and finally 4) remove the copy that’s inside the project (if you don’t want it there).

Read more / via
Andekan � Blog

Let’s say you have a number of different Door families in your project, and you want to determine the percentage of the total number of Doors that are Family 1, Family 2 etc, and then you want to show this in your Door Schedule.  First, sort by Family and untick ‘Itemize every instance…’, then use the process shown below.

In this workaround, a Calculated Value is added to be used as a ‘constant’ (it doesn’t really matter what number is used here).  Then, another Percentage calculated value is created against that constant…

Count to grand total ratio in a schedule
Here is how you can do it.
1. Define a formula calculated value: Name – Workaround, Type – Number, Formula – 1.0; Hide the column showing this value
2. Define a percentage calculated value for Workaround.Leonid Raiz

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Count to grand total ratio in a schedule – AUGI