Overriding Dimensions in Revit

Say you are putting together a detail that has a dimension in it but for it to look appropriate, things really won't be to scale. What I am getting at, is that you want to put down a dimension that is wrong. Revit won't allow you to override it using the feet and inches symbols from your keyboard. Instead you get this judgmental dialog.

Go back to Dimension Text dialog by clicking on the dimension twice and select the "Replace With Text" option. 

1. Right click in the text field
2. Select "Insert Unicode control character"
3. Pick "US Unit Separator (Segment separator)"

Type a new dimension into the Text box and click OK. 

                                                                Wa-Shaw! 

In the image below these walls are either 8'-0" apart or 1'-6" apart. You don't know, because of my awesome Revit trickery.

Follow the same steps and put a space in instead to clear the dimension altogether.

I realize that this may be perceived as pure EVIL in the Revit world.... and well, because it is.

The Evil Santa Cows says "Moooo, Haha, ha!" 

Merry Christmas!

December AUGIWorld features Industry Insights

The December issue of AUGIWorld serves up plenty of perspective from industry professionals.

In "Halfway to Paperless," Bryan Thompson offers his solution for getting us beyond just talking about a paperless office and actually realizing it. 

Melinda Heavrin, AutoCAD Architecture expert, thoroughly discusses "Material Matters" within the product. In "Stuck in Neutral, Christopher Fugitt offers his view on AutoCAD Civil 3D and what is needed to make that product all it could be. 

Super Families: A Kit of Parts - Many Revit users find families difficult to master. Author Nicholas Kramer makes the concept easy to grasp by breaking it down into parts. 

Advanced Rendering in Revit - Kyle Benedict plumbs the depths of producing presentations using tools within Revit.

and a small offering from yours truly...

Getting to the Next Level - creating a BIM environment goes far beyond implementing Revit and calling it done. Firms will need to spend money, spend time, and build a culture of embracing change, says the author I call me.

Happy 7th Birthday to CAD Shack

7 years today I got frustrated with an editor that changed an article of mine, and I started the CAD Shack Blog so I could write what ever I wanted, when I wanted. 


I was all about Autodesk Building Systems at the time. The Aviator won an Oscar for best picture, New England won Super Bowl 39, Katrina happened, and I paid $2.17 a gallon for gas.


In a lot of ways, things sure are better now. Here's to 7 more years.

Revit - Rooms vs. Spaces

The more I use Revit, the more I want to leverage the information in it. Lately, that has been in the form of calculations for my firm. Today, room area calcs. The architect set up the rooms to calculate the room area from the face of wall. We need a little bigger number electrically to maximize light per square foot, so we want to run these calcs form the center of wall instead. This is easy to change for rooms by changing a setting in the Area and Room Computations dialog.

No matter what we did, we could not get the spaces to also jump out to the wall center as well. A quick look in the Help file exposed the reason why, andwe also picked up a few facts worth knowing and passing along.

So straight out of the Help file, here are things to consider about how Revit Architecture and Revit MEP Share Information when you link a Revit Architecture project to a Revit MEP project.

• Spaces (created in Revit MEP) can be bounded by elements in linked models, in the host model, or in both.
• Spaces are affected by room separation lines. Rooms are not affected by space separation lines.
• Spaces are measured from the wall finish face.
• In Revit MEP, spaces use the computation height that is defined in the architectural model. See Computation Height.
• A space understands in which room of a linked model it resides, and it can report the identity of that room. This information is based on relative locations, not on a link to a specific room ID.
• Multiple spaces can access the identity of a single room in a linked model.
• Rooms can exist in design options. (See Design Options and Rooms.) Spaces cannot exist in design options.
• If the architectural model changes, spaces are not deleted in the host MEP model. Spaces can become unenclosed, redundant, or ambiguous, as they would if the same changes were made in the host model.
• Modification of one model does not propagate to linked models. If the architectural model and the MEP model link to each other, changes to the architectural model may not be matched by changes in the MEP model until the MEP model is opened, resaved, and reloaded.