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:
There is a big difference between a Revit user, and someone who has really mastered the software. The more you learn, the faster you get, the more you can learn! In this blog series, we will cover topics like:
Productivity Improvement through User interface tips and Keyboard shortcuts
View filters and View templates
Free addins
Some Dynamo
And More…
There are plenty of ways to do things in Revit… but we are looking for the fastest and best way. We want to maximise productivity and quality.
Targeting ‘Expert’ users so we will move quickly in general.
A lot of productivity gains come from user interface and shortcuts. Save 2 seconds every time, it all adds up quickly.
Try to take a few things away with you from this series that will save you time each and every day.
We will separate our tips and workflows into these major categories:
Productivity – faster ways of doing things
Workflows – better or alternative ways of doing things
Management – ways to better manage the Revit model
These tips were put together for a recent lab session using Revit 2018, and they are basically in note form along with steps to take in Revit.
The first post in this series is focused on setting up the Revit UI.
Setting Up Revit UI for Maximum Productivity
Note:
Please open Revit, and open the rac_advanced_sample_project.rvt
Please download and import the supplied KeyboardShortcuts.xml
Sometimes you will want to duplicate a Revizto project, perhaps for archive or testing purposes, or to re-share it with a new team. This post shows you how to do it quickly and properly.
Here’s how:
Start Revizto
Load Full Cache by clicking Edit, then the yellow hamburger:
Double-click to Open the Project
Click Project and Save As
Give it a new name
If you want it to be a cloud project, you now need to Sync it to the cloud now. Currently it is just stored on your machine and the issue ids will not have populated. Just press Share, and then hit the Upload button at the bottom of that screen
That’s it, you now have a full copy of all 2D, 3D and issue information from the original Revizto project. You will have to invite new users to this project if you want them to be able to collaborate. Your existing project and users will be unaffected.
Way back in 2008, I was super excited about all things Revit and started What Revit Wants. I’m still super excited about Revit and BIM, and this is just a quick note to say thank you for all of your recent and ongoing support (like your replies here and here). What Revit Wants is not going away! We have had an interesting couple of weeks but we are back with more features than ever on a new web hosting platform.
Over on the previous host, What Revit Wants had received over 6.7 million page views! I’m really motivated to continue sharing with such a huge audience. I look forward to engaging with you on social media and via your comments too.
A little bit of housekeeping…
The main URL for What Revit Wants is now https://wrw.is/ If you have your own blog or site and you have linked to What Revit Wants, please update those links to the new site. Thank you so much!
While the Feedburner feed is currently still alive, if you do use RSS I recommend that you update your subscription to the official feed at https://wrw.is/feed/
What if, even after all of the usual steps, you still have the ‘extents’ problem? And what if you can’t find the problem in a plan or top view in AutoCAD? That means that you have large Z extents. And you can even have large Z extents from some wayward Text objects with a Z value of like 35000 metres, which will trigger the same message in Revit.
How do we fix these? We need to directly edit the Text Alignment Z in AutoCAD. Here’s how:
Select All Text with Quick Select tool
Then change the ‘Text alignment Z’ value to 0. This also sets the Position Z to zero.
Then either Save As or use the EXPORTTOAUTOCAD command to remove the proxy objects
Now the DWG should Link to Revit without error. Hope this helps some of you 🙂
If you want to Move Text to the Elevation corresponding with the text value, such as for a Civil elevation, you can use this command. With a Civil or other vertical product, start the special command:
_AECCMOVETEXTTOELEVATION
At the ‘Select text objects’ prompt, type All and hit Enter
An interesting but sometimes blunt process that happens in firms is ‘ranking’ their Revit users by proficiency. There are various reasons to do this, and some of them make sense. In an ideal world, all of your Revit users are simply awesome and you have no skills problems. But yeah, real life ain’t that way is it?
So how do you go about it? And do you use those ratings primarily?
Personally, I think the success of Revit in your firm is likely more affected by culture and attitude. Are people being forced to implement something they don’t like or understand? That could be an uphill battle…
Under-slab insulation (fitted or fixed below a concrete slab) is a legitimate coordination item. Typically it is installed first on site, so other trades and services must fit in around it.
This means it needs to be modelled by someone, which can be a headache in Revit. The slab soffit (underside of slab) often moves up and with concrete beams and pads. If you have access to editing the structural model, you may look for a way to incorporate slab insulation into the floor items themselves. However, this still does not work well for the vertical faces of a slab setdown.
To solve these, I created two families:
A line-based, face-based Generic Model family that can be simply placed and stretched
A 4-point adaptive component for irregular shapes. After placement, the four corners can be selected and moved into place.
Archvision have a new beta 3D RPC creator service available. You can upload a 3D file and the service will generate a 3D RPC. Place this in the correct location, and you can use that RPC directly in Revit.
There are a few more steps from here, but I will refer you to this page that will give you more details.
Basically, you will need to consider the detail and quality of your content, as well as its purpose. Do I have highly detailed content that I want to render? The above will likely be quicker than modelling in vanilla Revit family geometry, and the result will be lightweight. However, aside from overall size it will be more difficult to handle any kind of parametric modification of the content.
BIM documents andfiles are often linked into each other, such as consultant links in a contractor Revit model, or plain NWCs appended to a master NWF Federated coordination file. In each case, the BIM application will try to find and open the linked files when opening the host model.
However, this only works if the pathing is predictable (ie. ‘the file is on C drive in folder MODELS’), and the typical situation is that you are running a corporate LAN that gives secure access to one or more mapped network drives (J drive or H drive or L drive). The problem is that your corporate LAN isn’t typically accessible via the cloud. A number of products exist to try and solve that problem, such as Citrix ShareFile.
But what about Box? It has a reliable, proven infrastructure and apps for all of your main devices. Its scalable and essentially secure. But… What about the mapped drive problem?
As part of our work at Virtual Built, we come across problems and provide solutions for this kind of issue all the time.
Here is how you can shareBIM via the Box cloud andretain file pathing:
The first thing you will need is a common drive letter that can be applied to all of your computers and workstations. Sometimes, you may already have a secondary drive installed, perhaps with a drive letter of E. What we are going to do is point the BoxSync app at a subfolder of E drive, and then all the members of the team will use E:\BOX\BoxSync\ as the ‘root’ for all shared documents and models.
First problem: what if we don’t have an E drive (secondary hard drive or partition)? Well you can trick your system into thinking that you do…
On C drive, make a root folder called C:\E_DRIVE
Right click this folder in Windows Explorer and enable Sharing
After sharing is enabled, you can ‘map’ the local folder as a drive. When mapping, use the local computer name with two backslashes, followed by the folder name.
Shared
Mapped drive to local folder
Now, we install BoxSync 4. After install, you will have one opportunity at first run to set the storage location. We choose to use E:\BOXas the folder…
That is basically it! Now, BoxSync will sync your models and projects from the cloud. When you set up your models inside that root folder (E:\BOX\BoxSync\), then the Revit linksand Navisworks NWCs will all be able to ‘resolve’ properly on each system that you set up in this way. Then, when you save changes in that location they will then be synced back up to the cloud and down to your team, all automatically.
Important Note! There are a few big things to consider:
This does not give simultaneous modification access, such as for a Revit central file. If you and someone else modify the same file, Box will probably save two versions with your username appended.
You may be essentially opening up Local PC Access to the data in your Box folder (because it is no longer in a Windows-controlled appdata location). So be aware of the implications of this…
Box tip: You may also want to check your Logs folder for some big files:
Originally publish Mar 02, 2016 at 19:37 by Luke Johnson
