What Revit Wants
While familit do have a browser / content manager add-in, this is a paid product (if you are looking for free family browser, check out tools4revit). However, the family content itself at familit is free:
At the moment familit.com offers 18.000 free families in English, German and French language.
You don’t even need to register. Just go to the following link and start downloading:
familit – Revit Family Library
EDIT Current category guide post:
https://wrw.is/2013/09/new-crowdsourced-and-open-source.html
In Revit, some families have Cut Dominance, some are Cuttable, and some respect various View Range rules in various ways.
These behaviours may further be affected by the Family Template that they were created from, whether they are Hosted or non-Hosted, whether they are Shared or not Shared.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a document that went through each Family Category and described its unique properties! I have asked Autodesk for this before, but to no avail (SR# 1-9298685321 – The help file does not describe the unique properties of each Category).
Andy Milburn shares my feeling on this matter:
… I wish I know where to find a clear explanation of all these rules.
at
Shades of Grey: CUT ! CUT ! CUT !
What about the Families Guide?
I may not have all the answers, but I have posted many times about the differences between certain Family Categories. See some links below:
Cuttable vs Non-cuttable Family Category Properties
View Ranges (and TOLERANCES) Explained *REPOST*
Things like –
Walls shorter than 6 feet (approximately 1.83 meters) are not cut, even if they intersect the cut plane, and
There are a few categories for which an element located above the cut plane but partially below the top clip is shown in plan. These categories include windows, casework, and generic model. These objects are shown as viewed from above.
Project Family Category Type Instance
which Categories do not have Types, or which Category has Types but no Instances?
Making unhosted components like unhosted Doors and Windows
Create a Component Family with Category set to Walls (or other system family category)
Yes, it is possible.
Plan regions have no effect on Topography – workarounds
buildz: Wall Trimming Method
Cut Dominance in action
In ye olde AutoCAD days, there were a plethora of ways to mess with your fellow users. The sheer amount of obscure yet powerful system variables gave endless opportunities for frivolity.
In Revit, not so much. The system works. It seems Revit does not want you to prank your coworkers, right? Here is a little story …
We were having trouble finding a particular Revit link, or more specifically, the walls in a particular Revit link. So we drew a roof, and the view looked like this:
Ok, so the answer seems easy. Walls are overriden, right? Let’s have a look in the View Template:
According to the Visibility / Graphics of Model in the View Template, everything seems cool. Walls aren’t overridden. All of the cells look the same, in their default state.
Or are they?
Let’s select the Walls row:
A tiny, almost invisible sliver of white appears under the Project Lines column, while all of the other columns show Override (indicating they are not overridden).
So what exactly is happening? Let’s click on the Projection Lines override for Walls:
We get very little feedback from Revit as to what is happening until we select the actual row. Why? Because the override is set to white!
This is certainly a trap for new, or old, Revit players. If you read this blog, you are prepared.
If you don’t, you may be pranked by some White Line overrides in the very near future 🙂 Let the shenanigans begin…
Just head over to this link:
3D: Revit – HighTower
These videos are from the Youtube channel of David Beach, author of the Architect’s Digital Design Guide. There is almost 3 hours worth of video in the following embedded playlist:
I previously posted about Three Ways to go from Grasshopper to Revit. However, Vasari Talk 18 (uploaded by AutodeskBuilding) shows that there are at least 4.
Learn more by viewing the playlist embedded below:
Or you can choose individual parts to watch here:
Vasari Talk 18 video playlist
6:12 Vasari Talk 18: Grasshopper to Vasari- Introductions
5:23 Vasari Talk 18: Grasshopper to Vasari – Jon Mirtschin on Geometry Gym
9:41 Vasari Talk 18: Grasshopper to Vasari – Hiroshi Jacobs on Chameleon
10:23 Vasari Talk 18: Grasshopper to Vasari — Tim Meador on Hummingbird.mp4
12:00 Vasari Talk 18:Grasshopper to Vasari — Nathan Miller on OpenNURBS
18:25 Vasari Talk 18: Grasshopper to Vasari — Discussion.mp4 What are the 4 ways?
via
Session 18: Grasshopper to Vasari Panel Discussion – WikiHelp
A few words on 3D engines and InterOp from WorldCAD Access:
“For instance, InterOp now directly translates from competitor Parasolid, non-competitor SolidWorks (which uses Parasolid — it’s a complicated relationship), competitor Siemens NX, and non-competitor Catia V6; it reads and writes Dassault’s 3DXML with tesselation. It extracts graphical data from CAD programs like Solidworks, and then display it — although it is not clear to me what this last item means.
OK, now I get it. “Graphical data” means that the imported 3D model looks just like in the originating CAD system, completed with shading, rectangular boxes at the ends of leaders, arrowheads, and so on.”
Read more:
Live blogging from the 3D Insiders Summit – WorldCAD Access
| New Dassault logo via WorldCAD Access |
From Rob Snyder’s blog:
“Models are different from drawings in an essential way. A model represents an environmental totality. No locations are discarded and none can be discarded. Therefore authorship can no longer be confined to a finite number of directive visual statements representing a finite number of selected locations that are representative of a totality. In a model, totality is explicit instead of implicit. Explicit totality has profound effect on both authors and viewers, and we need to explore it. “
From the KarelCAD Resource Centre:
Architecture / Revit
BIM
Building Design Suite Workflows
Nice post over at revitstructureblog. A couple of highlights:
When working with Radial grids you will typically find a couple of problems. The first issue you will find is that the grids will not show on new levels. This is because the grids need to be elevated to cut through the levels and a grid is not shown unless a view is perpendicular to the grid as shown in the image below.
…
A new feature of Revit 2013 is the ability to create a continuous grid line with the same reference called a multi-segment grid. The grid is simply drawn with a series of lines and arcs and then when the sketch is finished the grid is created. It is worth noting that the grid cannot be controlled with a Scope Box (Covered Below).
Read more at:
Tutorial – Working with Grids and Levels | Autodesk Revit Structure
