Category: Uncategorized

Tips for Good Revit model maintenance and better performance

Luke Johnson

Nice ‘checklist’ style post over at RevitKing.  Most things just come back to sensible modelling:
Revit.King’s BIM coordinator/ Revit Blog: Optimal performance for Revit!!!

One of the tips:
Create a family component instead of in-place families when possible, especially for repetitive components. Each in-place family has separate type attributes that Revit has to reference.

To implement this on an existing model, you could convert some of the in-place families to Component families using this method.

Free Autodesk Book – Imagine Design Create (not 446 mb)

Luke Johnson

If 446 MB is a bit steep for your Ipad, maybe an 18 MB PDF is more appropriate?
Download this .pdf version of the first Autodesk design book to view on your computer or tablet device.

Imagine Design Create (pdf – 17793Kb)

via
Autodesk – Book – Imagine Design Create

This is not exactly the same as the interactive Ipad app, but it seems much of the printed content is similar.  Here is a link to the free Ipad app:
Autodesk® Imagine, Design, Create
By Autodesk Inc. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/autodesk-imagine-design-create/id479894743?mt=8

Musings on Autodesk's Develop or Buy approach

Luke Johnson

It’s not quite ‘Live Free or Die’, but Autodesk needs to acknowledge the dichotomy that exists between these two aphorisms:

  • Develop innovative software
  • Buy someone else’s innovation and integrate it into your own homogenous ecosystem

I enjoyed the following paragraph from SARUG:

One thing is very clear, Autodesk needs to seek out, listen and respond, through product development, to the end users of their products in order to prioritize and target improvements to their software.  Without that tactical approach they run the risk of client migration to another more responsive solution, (can you say “AutoCAD to Revit (pre Autodesk) circa 2000”) and will be relegated to buying innovative solutions rather than developing them and then having to deal with the two way communication issue anyway.

via
SARUG End of Year Meeting 2011 � Southern Arizona Revit User Group

Re-syncing Level and Plan names

Luke Johnson

1. Pick the name you want the Views and Level to use. ie: Level 1
2. Rename both the Floor Plan and Ceiling Plan something different (not Level 1) and nothing already in use. This is a temporary name.
3. Rename the Level to be Level 1
4. Rename the Floor Plan and Ceiling Plan Level 1
5. Now try renaming either the Floor Plan, Ceiling Plan or Level and you will get the ‘renaming’ message again and you can say ‘Yes’

Nice tip on how to fix up the synchronization of Level objects and Plan view names via
REVIT Rocks !: REVIT Tip Cannot Rename Level Name Entered is in Use

How to re-organise tiled windows in Revit

Luke Johnson

A great post over at Revitdialog has unlocked this mystery for us.  Just a little addition to that post – I think it is important to tile your windows first, then do the ordering process.  In other words:

  1. View – Tile
  2. Here you have your currently ‘open’ views in Revit – now, use the Revitdialog tip to re-order them (clicking them in reverse order, finishing at the view you want in the top-left)
  3. Then hit View – Tile again.

 To get the right order you have to work backwards, so if you have 5 panes, you start with picking for the 5th position and work backwards – 4, 3, 2, then 1. However, Revit places the panes in ascending order – meaning the views get placed starting at 1 and goes to 5.

Read more and see the handy pictures at:
Solving the Tiling Mystery

AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT 2012 SP1 Ribbon Hotfix

Luke Johnson

This fixed some persistent crashes on my AutoCAD install – here is the link if you haven’t installed it yet.

It needs to be installed AFTER Service Pack 1.

Direct links copied below:

AutoCAD® 2012 Based Products

acad_2012sp1_x32_ribbonfix.zip (zip – 937Kb)
acad_2012sp1_x64_ribbonfix.zip (zip – 1011Kb)
Readme (htm – 45Kb)

AutoCAD® LT 2012

acad_lt_2012sp1_x32_ribbonfix.zip (zip – 937Kb)
acad_lt_2012sp1_x64_ribbonfix.zip (zip – 1012Kb)
Readme (htm – 45Kb)

via
Autodesk – AutoCAD Services & Support – AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT 2012 SP1 Ribbon Hotfix

Free Save and Restore Selection Add-in for Revit

Luke Johnson

In response to my post yesterday about using Selection IDs to save selections, Tom Pesman of tnux.net has created a free Revit add-in to automate the process.

At this stage, it only allows the you to save and restore one selection set.  However, it is very easy, very fast, and I’m sure some of you will find it useful:

DOWNLOAD PAGE for Revit Save Selection – Tom Pesman

Interestingly, his About box for this add-in states:
This is a very tiny add-in to demonstrate how usefull small add-ins can be. For more information visit my website (tnux.net).

I agree – I wish certain things were built-in to the program, but at times, these little add-ins can quickly and successfully satiate the common needs of users.

Here is Tom’s blog post on the subject:
Save Selection Add-in – Tom Pesman

Thanks Tom!

Exhaustive Review of DWG Export options (Russian)

Luke Johnson

In this article I will introduce the main features available to users when exporting Revit project in AutoCAD.

via

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Favisotskiy.blogspot.com%2F2011%2F11%2Frevit-autocad.html&hl=en&langpair=auto|en&tbb=1&ie=UTF-8

Original page:
http://avisotskiy.blogspot.com/2011/11/revit-autocad.html

From http://avisotskiy.blogspot.com