Tag: supertip

SuperTip #3 – Keyboard Shortcuts

Luke Johnson
The best way to become faster at using Revit is to trigger more commands with the keyboard. This is a trick that anyone using AutoCAD learned years ago. You can just hit a few keys much faster than you can find a little button with your mouse. Plus, you don’t have to wait for the interface to catch up with (yes, I’m talking to you, Mr. Ribbon!)

Over the past few years, I have put together a pretty comprehensive and fast set of Revit keyboard shortcuts. As I am right-handed and will generally have my right hand on the mouse, these shortcuts are set up around the fact that my left hand will be sitting around ASDF on the keyboard. Most of them are based on two-character shortcuts, and they generally reflect the first letters of the command they are triggering.

Some of them are a throwback to the old AutoCAD days (you will know them when you use them 🙂

So, here is my gift to all of you:

Keep in mind that you can check the Keyboard Shorcut of a command simply by holding your mouse over the button of that command. The Tooltip will show the Keyboard Command.

If you have any other tips about Keyboard Shortcuts, please comment here.

In other news, now you can follow us on Twitter.

SuperTip #2 – Planes

Luke Johnson

No, not aeroplanes: we are talking about Reference Planes. So, the tip is:

Always name reference planes that you intend to keep and use.

Reference Planes lie at the very core of What Revit Wants. Revit is a program, so it needs parameters. In order for understand objects in 3D space, it needs to establish a ‘plane’ to work from. Obviously, Reference Planes are the basic, garden variety type of Revit plane – there are also Grids and Levels. These are just planes that do some special things, like host a view.

If you want to quickly see what planes exist in your project, open a 3D view and then start the ‘Set Work Plane’ command. This dialog shows all the NAMED planes, including grids and levels. Can you start to see why you should name Reference Planes you intend to keep and use? That way, you can quickly make them ‘current’ by using this command.

This also allows you to clean up your drawing. If you adopt this tip, let’s say you come back to a drawing a few months later and it is absolutely cluttered with Reference Planes. Which ones can you safely delete? Well, you have named all the important ones, so you can delete the rest!

SuperTip #1 – Levels

Luke Johnson

Over the past few years using Revit, a few tips just keep coming up. These are things that Revit consistently wants you to do, in order to have a pain free modeling experience. I call these ‘SuperTips’ and I will progressively reveal these on this blog.

SuperTip #1 – Don’t make too many levels

It may seem like a basic thing to say, but many amateurs will get in and create levels for everything little thing, which results in a huge mess as the project progresses. Try to make the minimum amount of levels possible. These should always coincide with the major structural floor levels of your building. An excess amount of levels will make the project difficult to work on and difficult to work in. Please refer to this previous post for some tips on how to deal with this issue.

If you create heaps of levels, it will be very difficult to track which level elements are created on. For assistance with this, please refer to this previous post.

Instead of creating unnecessary levels, consider using reference planes in areas where you would normally put a superfluous level.