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!

Resetting the User Interface in Revit 2011

If you have ever had a user stuff around with the ribbon in 2010 or 2011 you may have already worked out a way to reset the User Interface (UI) or you may have just manually put everything back where you found it

But Revit keeps these settings in the UIState.dat file which is stored in a secret hidden place where windows doesnt want you to find it.

If you couldnt find it here is the location;

Windows XP
%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Autodesk\Revit\Autodesk Revit {Product Name} 2011 
Windows Vista

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Autodesk\Revit\Autodesk Revit {Product Name} 2011

Once you find the file all you need to do is delete/rename/move the file and Revit will recreate it from the default settings when it opens Revit again

There must have been a number of people asking how to reset the UI because Autodesk has now released a script which will basically do the above for you, you can find the script here

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=14880949&linkID=9243099

Another tip is you can copy a UIState.dat file into the location of each user which will setup that user with quick access toolbars, any ribbon customization etc. If you combine this with a copy of the office Revit.ini file you can setup workstations pretty quickly without even opening Revit!

Certainly one to be careful with, and be particularly careful of build numbers, as I have seen UIstate.dat files causing problems if the build isn't consistent

Structural Families - Categories & Parameters - Beam cutback in plan

I recently gave a talk at REVIC (Revit Users Group of Victoria) on Structural families, where I talked quite broadly about structural families and the settings available which affect their display in the project. It required a quick refresh for myself when preparing in some areas for settings which are not commonly used.

In the next couple of posts I will investigate in more detail or explain a few of the settings less commonly used and known

One of the settings specific to the the Structural Column Family is the checkbox "Beam Cutback in Plan"

Sounds quite straightforward, but it actually only applies to the symbolic line for the beam in plan

The two options we have are;

• From Geometry
• From Bounding Box

Symbolic linework with the two options

So checking the option "From Geometry will only take the Symbolic line through to the column and it will leave the model geometry unchanged

Regardless of the cutback option you choose, your 3D geometry wont change

In most cases this is fine, you dont need the beam geometry to continue through to the column web

But if you do need to model the beams accurately with a set distance straight from the column web, you will need to start playing around with the beam family and the start and end extensions

More Family settings soon...

Weird Revit - Projection lines non-bearing walls

So I get a curveball late last week that has me thinking, and turns out to be one of those weird Revit things.

Concrete GA plan, with plenty of hidden lines for slab folds and beams etc. So we are set to Structural discipline. But this particular job has a lot of structural walls which are to be concrete, and then a lot of facade brickwork walls.

Our clever Revit worker, puts the non-structural walls onto a structural usage of non-bearing. And models away, but after a few days he models some more walls and they don't show up in the same plan.

After some quick investigation I am stumped, why are some walls showing and not others. They have almost identical properties, and they are in the view range. If I change the plan view properties to Co-Ordination they show up but then I loose my beam and slab hidden lines.

So I look into the view range again, the walls showing up happen to be in that dead zone between the bottom primary range, and the view depth.

Defiantly one to keep in mind!