The end of 2010 is approaching fast

Time flies, and 4 months into the blogging game I finally passed the 1000th view this week *Hurray*
After some busy periods throughout the year things are finally falling back into a routine, and blog posts are popping up a bit more regularly. I have also been spending quite a lot of my spare time training for another newer aspect of my life MTB racing. Which in 2010 has taken off with me racing in over 25 races this year, including some good results.

Tomorrow night we have the annual REVIC - Revit Users Group of Victoria Xmas party. This is the 3rd year now we have run it at Rydges just outside the city, on the pool deck. The weather is looking perfect with a nice afternoon forecast for some networking, drinks & slideshows of users work from the year

Rydges Pool Deck

We ran a internal competition in our office to encourage images from the year, which turned out to be a great way to get everyone invovled. Of course most people left it until 30minutes before the set deadline to ask for some last minute tips!
 We invited the entire office to vote, and ended up with a good spectrum of the office getting involved and voting. It was interesting to see the results, and see what impresses each group of people. Most are impressed by realistic renders, but it was good to see some non Revit people impressed by detail views of complex modelling and even extracts of 2D presentation drawings

Winning Entry

The winning entry was a collection of renders on a few theatre projects and a public building, which was well put together

Heres a quick collage of some of the images put forward for the Revic Xmas Slideshow

So to all those who are finishing up for the year in the next few weeks, have a great Xmas and a relaxing new year

New Revit Forum

I was hoping it didn't come to this, but I have officially signed up with a new Revit based forum group "Revit Forum"

http://www.revitforum.org/
 
With the ongoing saga at AUGI, some forward thinking (and some upset) ex(?) AUGI contributors have setup a REVIT specific forum site

Based on a very easy to use vBulletin format forum engine, you can easily setup RSS readers and the like and even use something like Tapatalk iPhone which is pretty neat

Who knows where it will go from here, and whether AUGI will resurface in anything close to its previous form

But there are already some notable minds adding their thoughts over at Revit Forum, with close to 100 users and 500 posts in its first week things are starting pretty quickly

Defiantly worth checking out and signing up

Structural Families - Categories & Parameters - "Show family pre-cut in plan views"

Following my recent post on Structural Family settings here is my next post on the topic

Another commonly misunderstood setting is "Show family pre-cut in plan views"'

This setting applies to both Framing & Column families.

Framing Families
The setting is fairly obvious for framing families, it is basically a setting that allows you to control how a raking beam will display when it continues above the cut plane

Frame Example

Plane view in fine detail level

Side Note:
No matter the setting, if a beam continues below the cut plane, it will be shown to its full extent. This is an area that newer users struggle to remember with Revit. The same goes for floors/ramps, stairs etc. Revit will only cut an element continuing above the cut plane and simply show whatever is below to the bottom of the element

Stairs are the best example to explain this. In the image above the situation is clear, no matter how we configure the view range at the top level we see the stair all the way to the bottom.

The same goes for structural framing, if the beam passes through the cut-plane we will see the beam until the bottom. This setting just allows us to control weather the beam is also shown all the way to the top


Column Families

But when we get to the "Show family pre-cut in plan views" setting for column families things become a little less clear


This is how Autodesk describes the setting for columns:

Extract from the 2011 Help file :
Unchecked:
When loaded into a project, if you want the column to display in plan view based on the cut plane of the project’s plan view

Checked: 
Consistently, regardless of the cut plane of the project’s plan view

This is correct for plan views, but what if you want to take a callout of a column or cut a detail section from a section. With the option checked, the column will only display up to the cut plane level in the family file.

Example of problem with "Show family pre-cut in plan views"

So we could push up the cut plane in the family, but if you are talking about a straight forward column you would be best to just turn off the setting.

The setting is only really useful for complex column shapes where you want the column to always display as per the plan view in the family

But be aware that all OOTB (out of the box content) are set with this setting, and that all standard templates are preset with this setting as well

Defiantly one to look out for, and if you are running custom content in your office, consider unchecking the option if you haven't already. It will save some people some time if they come across this problem on a project

AUGI........where have you gone?

So I have been trying to get onto AUGI since Wednesday and it finally opens up the forums this afternoon and all is now clear.

AUGI as we know it is currently off the web. And all previous threads a gone, temporarily or not that is one scary thought!

Not just for Revit users, but for all users. Particularly AutoCAD. There was years of information stored in those forums. And when a problem occured with any Autodesk product, I would generally go to AUGI before I go to Autodesk support


This thread speculates what has happened, but it appears to be a problem with the old ISP
http://forums.augi.com/index.php/built-to-last/viewthread/83/

Hopefully they can retrieve and reinstate all the old threads

Either way my vast collection bookmarked threads will be useless I am guessing!