Tag: details

How To Allow Duplicate Detail Numbers on a Revit Sheet (and yes it is #BadRevit)

Luke Johnson

Revit Wants you to have a unique Detail Number for each Viewport placed on a Sheet. This makes total sense, and allows you to trace from a Referencing View, through a View Tag (telling you which Sheet and Detail Number that View is on), and back again… The Viewport knows which Detail Number it is, and which Sheet is referenced from.

Ok, that is What Revit Wants. And in fact, it doesn’t allow you to have duplicate Detail Numbers,

detail%2Bnumber.png

… because that would be madness, right? Well, in some Architectural firms, they may have drafting standards which indicate something like this:

  1. We will reference Interior Elevations from our General Arrangement Floor Plan
  2. The View Tags will have letters a, b, c, d and so on for each Room
  3. These Interior Elevation views will be placed together on Sheets
  4. We will append the Room number to the Detail Number so that we can figure out which Elevation a is which…
  5. Meaning that there will be multiple Detail Numbers that could be the same on each Interior Elevation Sheet

I’m not going to speak to the validity (?) of this logic, but lets just say sometimes drafting standards from past ways of doing things don’t mix so well with Revit. How do we work around this problem?

I’m not so proud of this, but it is one of those hacks that just seems to work…

  1. Create the Viewport Title Tag with a Shared Parameter for the View Room Number, and the Detail number in one label together
  2. Use a special invisible character to make the Revit program think the Detail Number is different, when it appears exactly the same to human eyes… as I said this is bad Revit

How do you do step 2? Just copy one of these characters from your Character Map and paste it after the Detail Number that Revit doesn’t want you to have. So you type ‘a’, then press Ctrl+V to paste the special character in to the Detail Number parameter:

zero%2Bwidth%2Bspace.png

This is the Unicode character U+200B: Zero Width Space.

Oh, and have you ever wanted to get rid of that annoying question mark in a Revit Tag because there is no value? Just put in one of these Zero Width Space characters and it will go away 😉

Ok, bring on the Comments 🙂

 

Free Revit Details

Luke Johnson

Over at ARCxl, you can download a bunch of Revit details for free.  According to the website, these details were all created natively in Revit.

The Terms of Use describes the proper way that these details may be utilised, and you must agree to these terms when you register. 

Effective July 19, 2011, two very significant alterations were made to the ARCxl website. We have added CAD/dwg, and PDF file formats to our library. We have also removed restrictions on account location and email address types.

Quoted from
ARCxl for Revit: ARCxl adds CAD/dwg, PDF and Eases Restrictions

 
Upon downloading a detail, you must also agree with this popup:

By clicking CONTINUE, I confirm I have read and agree to the ARCxl Terms of Use in their entirety. I agree to hold all liability for the use, review, compliance with all applicable laws, codes, and ordinances. I agree to seek professional review by an architect or engineer, and that ARCxl details and components are provided as-is without warranty of any kind. I understand that this is a single-use license and not a transfer of title.

Find all instances of a detail object and report them to a file

Luke Johnson

Here is how to do it:

  1. Select the detail item.
  2. Right-click > Select All Instances > In Entire Project
  3. Attempt ‘Group’ command

It will fail with an error like this:

However the resulting Error Report contains the view names that all these elements exist in…

Click Expand >> and then Export…
Save the Error Report to a file and have fun going through them one by one 🙂

RTC Dataset Files from Paul Aubin (and others)

Luke Johnson

Paul Aubin has posted his RTC files for download.  In this package is a ‘Detailing Sandbox’ RVT file that includes a pretty comprehensive Wall Section that is annotated using Keynotes.  There is also folders with content related to Coordinates and to Finishes.

To quote:
For those of you who attended my sessions at RTC Australia, I mentioned that I would be posting the dataset files from those classes. I am not sure when the RTC folks will publish them to their site, but I thought I would get them posted here in the meantime. …

RTC Dataset Files | Paul F. Aubin

Here are some other links to RTC files for download:

Revit for Planning RTC USA files for download

Revit Conceptual Massing on a REAL Project (via Revit Futures)

How to add a label to a Component Family (automatic tag)

Luke Johnson

Sometimes you will want a component family to ‘always’ show a certain label. In other words, you do not want to have to manually ‘tag’ the family after placing it in project. How can we do this?Basically, while in the component family (for example, a Plumbing family), load the following Annotation family:
Generic Label.rfa Now, place an instance of the annotation family. You can drag the type directly from the Project Browser and drop it into the Ref Level view.You should link the parameter in this annotation family to a parameter from the Plumbing host family (you should know how to do this by now!) When you load this Plumbing component into the project, it now comes with an ‘automatic tag’, of sorts. However, there are some things to keep in mind – the main one being that this annotation will show in any view where the host family is included in the view range – it will not be masked by geometry.So, use this method with care. I have found it useful for things like a Hot Water System family, where you always want to show ‘HW’ in plan views. And I have handled the visibility issue with some trickly view filters.