Use a Section Box to quickly find Warning Elements

Luke Johnson

You have a project with heaps of Warnings / Errors, but you are struggling to find the associated elements.  Here is a quick way:

  1. The first problem is that not all of us can remember 6 random digits easily, but we also can’t copy the element ID direct from the Warnings box (yet).  So… I use Notepad++ (you could easily use Firefox or IE – all of these programs all you to Reload the source error report HTML file when you re-export it).  
  2. Export your Error Report to some neutral location like C:TEMP  
  3. Open the Error Report in Notepad++ / Firefox / IE (you could also use this method if you prefer)
  4. Now you can simply copy the element ID to the Clipboard (Ctrl+C)
  5. Go to a 3D view in which the element will be visible (use the 33 reasons if you need to)
  6. Use Select by ID (tear it off the Ribbon if you like by holding Ctrl)
  7. Paste the Element ID (Ctrl+V)
  8. Use COINS Auto Section Box
  9. Your Warning / Error element will be visible and highlighted

Color Fill Schemes and View Templates

Luke Johnson

I have run into an issue when using a Key Schedule, Area Plan and View Template.  My Area Plan uses a Color Fill Scheme which uses a Key Schedule as its basis for the different colors of shading. If I change an entry in the Key Schedule, it seems to ‘break’ the Color Scheme on the Area Plan.

To correct this issue:

  1. Un-apply the View Template (set view to
  2. Open the View Template Properties
  3. Open the Color Scheme dialog for the affected View Template
  4. Set the Schemes to (none), then
  5. Reapply the original Color Scheme by clicking its name.
  6. Press OK a few times

The Color shading for the scheme should now re-appear.

Rendering without Shadows

Luke Johnson

Borissofff strikes again – many of you may already be aware of this, but you can get an interesting exterior rendering effect in Revit if you set the time to somewhere near or during the night, and then adjust the Exposure to a suitably pleasing level.

Translated:
But what if you set in the Preferences of the sun, while at the hour of the night (or so), we obtain precisely the situation where there is no source of direct light, the sky!

If you turn Reneder, we completely black picture!

But! Adjusting the exposure, especially of its magnitude, reducing it to about 3-4 units (you can see the other values), you can get the desired renderer without harsh shadows!
via
Google translate
of
http://borissofff.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/revit_13.html

Modelling Roof Tiles as a Pattern-Based Curtain Panel

Luke Johnson

I love to see Revit tools used in somewhat unintended ways.  In this case, Jay Holland divides an In-Place Mass Face and applies a Pattern Based Roof Tile to the divided surface – cool!

His sample files (click the download link or the little maximize arrow):

Read more at:
BIM Aficionado: Pattern-Based Curtain Panel Roof Tile

Image from BIM Aficionado

Are you sick of annoying BIM software fights?

Luke Johnson

I am.

Ostensibly, they start along the lines of “my firm is implementing new systems, what software should we choose…”  Then, very quickly they become a mud-flinging game of mirrors, misdirected passion and other more general angst (Why does Program X hate me?)  They are littered with sarcasm, attempted yet misunderstood humour, and a few genuine users who take the time to relate their personal experience.

A great example is this ArchiCAD vs Revit discussion.  Please note that it is in the ArchiCAD group (meaning your submissions may be moderated by a pro-ArchiCAD discussion manager).

http://lnkd.in/rVDxpg

Another similar discussion:
http://lnkd.in/VtP6GX

Dividing a Blogger or WordPress feed by Label

Luke Johnson

Blogger:
For example, I wanted a feed for AIA East Bay that only included posts with the label ‘Revit’.  Here is what the split feed looks like:
http://www.aiaeastbay.blogspot.com.au/feeds/posts/default/-/Revit

Easy way to do it:
To convert that search label into a Blogger RSS feed, replace the string /search/label/ with /feeds/posts/default/-/ so the new feed URL for that search label has the following syntax:
via
Offer RSS Feeds for Blogger Search Labels Similar to WordPress Category Feeds

Another example – all of the What Revit Wants posts that include the label ‘pdf’ can be found as a feed at:
https://wrw.is/feeds/posts/default/-/pdf

Also see:
http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=97933

Create a WordPress feed for a particular label:
It is even easier.  To subscribe to a particular category feed of a WordPress blog, all you have to do is add /feed after the category url (link).

eg. http://cadspeed.wordpress.com/tag/revit/feed/

How many shells does Revit want?

Luke Johnson

RevitPythonShell has some competition!  Its called RevitRubyShell.

RevitRubyShell on Github – installer

What is Ruby?  Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features…Ruby supports multiple programming paradigms, including functional, object oriented, imperative and reflective.

Thanks to Håkon Clausen, Ruby is now friends with Revit.

Quote from The Building Coder:
Last week, I provided a short description of the interactive real-time Revit programming environment RevitRubyShell provided by Håkon Clausen and mentioned how impressed I was by its minimalistic single-click installer. 
 via
The Building Coder: RevitRubyShell Implementation and Installer

Are you suffering from Revit information overload?

Luke Johnson

I hoard information.  And I like Revit.

How do I keep up with the Revit world?

I have a couple of Twitter searches set up, including #revit.  This gets forwarded by RSS into my huge Revit blog reading list, shared at this link.  Then, I get this reading list sent by email to a portable Thunderbird profile.  Finally, I have setup an auto-pdf creation process, which turns all of those blogs and tweets into daily PDFs.  I have basically created an archive of pretty much every Revit blog post over the past few years.

Currently, my RSS folder has 5795 files and is over 2.6 GB

My Revit Training folder on the NAS at our office is well over 54 GB – I use various tools to download Youtube, Autodesk and Vimeo videos so that I have an offline copy.

There is one slight problem – there is sometimes simply too much information to take in.  I have had a couple of weeks off, so now my Revit blog ‘unread’ list is over 1000 posts 🙁 

Time to do some skimming … once you get Google Reader going at a nice quick scrolling pace, you can get through a lot of information quickly 😉

Image at http://steve.files.wordpress.com/