Month: June 2017

Content Management Webinar Tomorrow including Batch Management and Multi-Format

Luke Johnson

Good Revit Content management does not come immediately or without forethought. Unifi are giving you another chance to review some best-practice content management principles at an upcoming webinar. It should be very interesting to hear about some of the productivity and functionality improvements that are becoming available to allow you to manage your BIM content more effectively.

Update:

Register at this link

Here are some of the things that will be discussed:

  • Hidden power of saved searches
  • Batch tag editing
  • Batch Inserting
  • Schedule / Details / System families support
  • “Clone” wars – Cloning or copying content from 3rd parties
  • Multi-format support sneak peek!
  • Customize your UNIFI experience
  • Stump the pros – trying to do something unique with UNIFI? ask away and they will answer your questions live…

You can send in a suggestion at support@unifilabs.com

More about Unifi at this link

Creating Flat Surfaces in Revit to Make 3D Grids or Datums

Luke Johnson

The form creation engine in Revit does not really know about flat vertical zero thickness surfaces. However, with DirectShape, we can make almost any type of mesh geometry. One interesting idea coming out of the RTC ANZ event this year was creating these flat surfaces to display grids in 3D. This lets us do things like dimension easily in Navisworks or Revizto. I wanted to use them to add some flat datum lines to a construction setout point family.

Here is the Dynamo Script that I used (Download Make Flat DirectShape From Line):

Basically, you select a Detail (Symbolic) Line and run the script. In action:

Playing around with the lines a bit, I built this geometry for use in the project:

Color Fill Legend in a 3D View and See Rooms in 3D in Revit

Luke Johnson

Wow.

This is one of the best workarounds I have seen for years in Revit! Did you know that you can rotate a Revit Floor Plan view in 3 dimensions?

Try it now:

  1. Go to a Floor Plan view and make sure the Crop Region is turned on
  2. Now open a Section or Elevation View
  3. Tile the windows in Revit so you can see both views
  4. Select the Crop Region in the Floor Plan view
  5. Switch to the Section or Elevation view (the Crop Region is still selected)
  6. Start the Rotate command in the Section or Elevation view
  7. Rotate the Floor Plan away from the horizontal plane. Try 20 degrees.
  8. Experiment with the above process until you have created a sort of forced orthographic view… but Revit thinks it is a Floor Plan! You may have to switch between some sections running perpendicular to each other and keep rotating the Floor Plan crop region until you capture the view you want.

This means you can have Rooms showing. Which means you can have a Room Color Scheme showing up in a ‘kind of’ 3D view in Revit. This is awesome!

It is also a nice way to see how View Range works. As you experiment with the View Range of this special Floor Plan, you will see more or less of the elements (a bit like a 3D section box).

Not sure of the limitations or problems yet, but I had to share 🙂

Thanks to pepar for sharing on slack, and cadconsulting for making the video.

Instance of link needs Coordination Review, Now What?

Luke Johnson

If you have used Copy / Monitor to copy some elements from a Revit Link file, and those elements change, you will get a “Instance of link needs Coordination Review” message. How do you adopt or ignore those changes?

In the example below, grids were copied from a Revit control file. The control file has been updated, and one grid has moved. Revit detects this change, and using the process below, you can update your elements to match the changed element. Here is how…

Upon opening your Revit file you will get this message:

Go to a view where you can see the Link that needs to be reviewed:

Then, start the Coordination Review process:

After picking the link, you will get a list of items and the potential actions:

Choose Modify if you want the element in your model to be modified to match the Link. Then press Apply.

 

You should now see a clear dialog box. Your Coordination Review is complete: