Sketch stairs can be added to an Assembly, but Component Stairs can’t…
Multi-segmented grids: To create a multi-segmented grid, select the Multi-segment tool in the Draw panel of the Modify|Place Grid context tab. This will enable sketch mode for you to draw the grid line. This will work on linear and radial grids or a combination of lines and arcs in the sketch, but must be a continuous segment. http://blogs.rand.com/support/2012/03/revit-2013-miscellaneous-improvements.html
There is one thing about Revit 2013 that I love above all the others – View Templates.
They are now truly powerful and useful, and they should improve our project management and documentation consistency. And by ‘our’ I mean all Revit users. If you haven’t picked up on it yet, there is a difference between ‘Assigning’ a View Template, and ‘Applying’ one: Assigning – creates a link between the View and the View Template definition (when you change the Template, all views with that template assigned update to match the template) Applying – is a one-off, drive-by application of the template settings to the view. No link is created.
The key step in Assigning a View Template is clicking on the View Template property of the view (see image below)
Even more powerful is the fact that you can create Types from all the different kinds of views – even Floor Plans can now have multiple Types. You can watch a video on this at: View Type Creation – WikiHelp
There is a bit of a bug in Revit 2013 at the moment when trying to apply the settings from one View to another – you can’t press OK to get out of the dialog! I expect this will be fixed in an upcoming Web Update for Revit 2013.
Revit Knowz also loves View Templates: Features I love: – Hide at scales coarser than – Re-align origin – Propegate Extents – Apply Default view template via Revit Knowz: Features I love
Good post over at Andekan on Revit Materials in 2013 – I have reposted three things I found particularly insightful below.
First of all – a slight correction. The Andekan post states that: You can’t open the asset browser unless you open a project material in the material editor.
This is actually not true. You can open the Asset Editor and the Asset Browser without opening Materials. Just set a Keyboard Shortcut to Additional Settings:Material Assets. This will open the Asset Editor. Then click the ‘lines’ icon to open the Asset Browser. Its kinda messed up, but you can do it.
Now, on to some good stuff from the post:
Entire Materials can live in .adsklib files: you can take a whole material from inside your project (called “In Document” materials), including all of its different property sets (now called “Assets”), and add it to any number of external libraries that you create. You can also add materials from one library to another. Libraries that you create are stored as standalone .adsklib files, just like the “materials” libraries (read “appearance properties”) of prior versions, so they can be ported and shared between installations with ease.
.adsklibs can contain Assets AND Materials
Libraries These are groups of materials and/or assets that exist outside of any particular project or family. They are saved as standalone .adsklib files, and it’s important to note that a single library can contain both materials and assets. This makes perfect sense: if materials are made up of different assets, then a “materials” library must somehow contain appearance, physical, and thermal assets as well.
How to update and maintain .adsklib Libraries 5. You can only edit materials and assets that are inside of a project. In a library, you are limited to viewing the names of materials and assets, and to performing basic functions like Rename or Delete. If you want to edit a material or asset that’s in one of your libraries, you have to: 1) bring it into a project, 2) make your edits, then 3) add it back into the library to overwrite the original version, and finally 4) remove the copy that’s inside the project (if you don’t want it there).
If you Open a 2012 adsklib file in the Material Browser in Revit 2013, chances are you won’t see any materials (even though Revit claims to be ‘upgrading’ the library). You need to open the .adsklib in the Asset Browser to expose the 2012 Appearance Properties for use in Revit 2013.
To quickly get at your 2012 Appearance Properties, go:
Manage
Additional Settings
Material Assets
Click the ‘lines’ icon
Click the ‘gears’ icon
Open the Library (it will upgrade and add (1) to the file name)
You can see your 2012 Appearance Properties.
To actually get this into a Material, the process from the Material Browser starts something like this:
To apply these appearance properties to Materials, watch the 43 second video:
Needless to say, the whole Materials UI concept and process in Revit 2013 is kinda scary?
Some info from Wikihelp: In Revit 2012, libraries contain property sets and do not contain any materials. If you use the Material Browser to load a Revit 2012 .adsklib or .adstlib file, materials will not display and therefore a warning symbol will display next to the library name. The data in Revit 2012 property sets will be migrated as assets in Revit 2013. In order to access Revit 2012 property sets as Revit 2013 assets, you must use the Asset Browser to load the Revit 2012 libraries. via Upgrading Revit 2012 Libraries – WikiHelp
Autodesk have published an add-in for Revit 2013 that automates the upgrading of RFA, template and RVT files.Go here.
File Upgrader will batch upgrade previous versions of Revit files to the Revit 2013 format. The tool is intended to help upgrade family contents, template files as well as project files. Every time users open a Revit file which was saved in a previous version of Revit, a standard dialog is displayed in the Revit user interface stating that the file is being upgraded. During the display of this dialog, Revit tries to upgrade the document to the current version. This slows down the process of opening a file. To save time opening older file versions during each of the subsequent attempts to open the file, users can manually open each of the Revit files and save it to the current version. This can be time consuming if there is a large set of files to upgrade across various folders and sub-folders. The File Upgrader tool saves time and manual labor by automating this process. This plug-in was first published as an ADN Plugin of the Month: http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/ADN_plugins. The plug-in has been provided with the complete source code needed to build the application, with the intention of encouraging users of Autodesk software to use programming to tailor the products they use to their specific business needs.
Additional info from the documentation provided below:
Usage Inside your Revit-based application, go to “Add-ins” tab ⇒ “Upgrader” panel ⇒ “File Upgrader” to start the command. Clicking this button starts the command and launches the “Revit File Upgrader” dialog.
Under the “Source” text box, specify the location of the folder where previous versions of Revit files resides. Similarly, in the “Destination” box, specify the folder where the upgraded filers will be saved.
Check the file types you would like to upgrade; you can upgrade .rvt, .rfa, and .rte files. By default, .rvt and .rfa are checked.
Press the “Upgrade” button to start the upgrade.
Once upgrade starts, Revit will open a file one by one, and save in the destination folder. The progress can be monitored in the list box at the lower part of the dialog.
After the upgrade process is completed, a dialog box is displayed with the total count of succeeded files over total number of files confirming the completion of upgrade. The status messages are also save as a log file, UpgraderLog.txt, in the destination folder.
For some reason, if the files fail the automatic upgrade process, the users can check the log file, and manually open the files and save them to the current version after resolving the conflicts/errors using the Revit user interface.
The tool handles nested folders. It also handles catalog files (.txt files) if it exists, copying them to the destination folder.
While using this tool, please ensure that the target folder is not nested inside the source folder.
Known Issues This plug-in only works when there is an active document in Revit.
After running the plug-in, the last document remains open in the Revit’s User Interface. The file is saved, but the user will have to manually close it.
These are due to the current limitation of API. We hope to address it in future.
