Open to Favorites

Little things sure can make a big difference. 

If I have a job I will be returning to. I add a shortcut to it in my Windows Favorites. Then I rename the shortcut to include the project name and number. This is nice because when I use the Open command in Revit can navigate to Favorites then find my project.

Taking that one step farther, go to Options in the File Locations tab, change the Default path for user files: to your favorites folder. Now every time to click Open in Revit, it will take you directly to where your project shortcuts are.

Hide Unused Sections, Callouts, and Elevations

When annotating sheets I often have to deal with more than enough callouts, sections, and elevations that have not been placed on sheets. They clutter the drawing and distract me.

To clear things up, a not so intuitive filter can be made. It employs quite a bit of double negative mentality, but does the job.

First create a new filter. In Visibility Graphics, go to the Filters tab and choose Edit/New....

In the lower left corner of the dialog select the icon that looks like a sheet of paper with a tiny Sun at the upper right. Name your filter something like "Hide Unused Sections and Callouts".

Under Categories select Callouts, Elevations, and Sections. Then Filter by Sheet Number. Make the rule "does not contain" then leave the next box blank.

This filter will find every callout, elevation and section that does not have a sheet number assigned to it. The ones that have not been placed on sheets.

Back on the Filters tab add the newly created filter and uncheck the visibility box.

Now no unused callouts, elevations or sections will be visible in your view. That's better. Get back to work.

Aligned Duct Tags

Want your duct tags to align to duct at all sorts of angles?

Duplicate your duct tag family, go to the family categories button and set the tag to "rotate with component". Save with the suffix "-Aligned" and use it when needed. That was easy.

Radius v. Diameter for MEP Connectors

When placing round connectors in families, Revit allows you drive the dimension of the connector with either the diameter or the radius, but there is a catch.

All of the round connectors must be driven the same way. 

When editing an existing HVAC family to add some hydronic connections, I couldn't change from diameter to radius. A quick test revealed that the round duct connector already set to diameter was locking all round connections to diameter. I deleted the duct connector and the radius choice reappeared.

In this case "all or nothing" set to radius was not a problem, it actually cleaned up the family. It just just a quirk that good to know about. 

Rename Schedules Without Renaming Schedules Names

Thanks to Brad Beal for this tip. 

Today an engineer wanted to have several space schedules have the same name on the sheets even though the schedules were for individual areas of the building, and he wanted to maintain the original schedule names in the Project Browser (Mine is not to phantom why).

There is a great function for this with plan views, but it does not apply to schedule views. My buddy Heath suggested not showing the header at all and grouping all the header cells then typing the common name in. This works but, it is cumbersome.

Then Brad suggested that we just use the Clear Cell tool shown when clicking in the header cell.

Then just type whatever you want in the cell. The result was just what was wanted with about zero fuss.

Revit Toolbars

I have been thinking about Revit and speed. What makes one user quicker than another? That led me to all the customization I used to do to my AutoCAD environment. I also watched a Revit youtube video the other day the guy keyed everything in. He didn't go to the ribbon for a single thing! Kind of like me when I run AutoCAD. It was fascinating to watch.

So, I set out to customize my interface to break myself of the ribbon and build a bit of speed.

Keyboard short cuts will have to play a big part of laying off the ribbon, and I posted on Revit short cuts for Old People a while back. 

But, I need something else. Something like the old tool bars Revit used back in the day.

My solution was to edit the crap out of the Quick Access Toolbar by right clicking on any tool I need and selecting "Add to Quick Access Toolbar". Then I moved the QAT below the ribbon by clicking the down arrow at the end of it and choosing "Show Below the Ribbon". Finally I Minimized the ribbon to panels to produce the following.

I can't guarantee it will make anyone else any faster, but I have noticed that weening myself off the ribbon has made me "Feel" faster. Today that is all that counts.

Filter the Project Browser by Discipline

The Project Browser is just too darn big for me. Not it's physical size, it's all the data. Scrolling through the never ending list of views, schedules, sheets, legends, blah, blah, blah, I am wearing my mouse wheel out. The image below shows a shared MEP model and just the top portion of views.

No matter your discipline, you have to scroll through the others to get to your work.....

Unless of course, you right click on "Views (Discipline)" at the top of the Project Browser and select Browser organization.

Then pick the "Edit" Button.

In the dialog that pops up, you can now filter by discipline.

Then there you go, nothing but Electrical.

This would seem to be great, but when a Mechanical opens the model, they will not see anything but Electrical. I am waiting for the Project Browser to be user specific. I am also waiting to win the lottery.

Delete Revit Backup Files - Everywhere!

If you know me, you know I am the opposite of a hoarder when it comes to electronic files. I love deleting things. It just brings me joy to delete data. So, Revit's need to create backups, just bugs me. It does not feel like good file maintenance to have all kinds of backups everywhere, and a bit dangerous when newbies open these files by mistake.

So once again, DOS to the rescue. Place this text in a batch file and save it in the root directory that you want to clean up.

del /s /F *.0*.rvt

del /s /F *.0*.rfa

del /s /F *.0*.rte

This will delete all the backups of projects, families, and templates in the root and every sub-folder that follows. Double click the BAT file and your work is done.  the /s tells DOS to delete files that meet the criteria in sub-folders, and the /F tells DOS to go ahead and delete locked files. 

To see what you just deleted and the word "pause" to the last line like this:

del /s /F *.0*.rvt

del /s /F *.0*.rfa

del /s /F *.0*.rte

pause               

If you want to know what you are deleting before you delete it. this this.

dir /s *.0*.rvt

dir /s *.0*.rfa

dir /s *.0*.rte

pause          

All of this works for me because a great IT department means I can restore old files at any time. If you don't have the same confidence, act accordingly.

Valves Inherit Pipe Line Types

It is nice when you add a valve to a pipe in single line and it inherits the color of the pipe. It's not so great when it also inherits the line type of the pipe when that line type is hidden. You get something that looks like this.



You can override the graphics in view of each of the valves to force the line type to continuous, but you are probably better off just creating a filter.

This one looks for all the pipe accessories in a view, then applies a solid override to the lines.

Done and Done.

Get PLT files from Revit

It's a crazy world sometimes. Like when you create a wonderful Revit model and your client wants PLT files as the deliverable. Here is how to do it.

1. In the Print dialog, check the box for Print to File. You need to select a printer that doesn't already print to file by the way.
2. Click the Browse button to indicate where the file should be saved.

 
3. Change the Files of Type to Plot Files.









That was a lot easier than I thought.

Change the Number of Lines in Room Tags

This comes from Club Revit's Linked In page. A user asked how to change the number of lines in a room tag and Kerry Ward had an interesting take on things. She provided this trick...

"Name the room (single line text) then select the room (not the tag). Go to properties and under Identity Date / Name place your cursor in location where you want the text to split into 2nd line. Then hold down ctrl key and press enter, then apply. The room tag is then split into 2 lines."

I added quite a few breaks in the example image below to demonstrate how far you can take it. You can see that it comes with the side effect of reflecting in schedules. On the MEP side of things it may not matter at all. 

If you are curious, changes the room names in linked files will propagate into the space tags that call the room names.

Search the Project Browser

With the enormous amount of MEP families needed to complete projects, it can be hard to find to the family you want when you need it.

Did you know you can right click on just about anything in the Project Browser and ask for the Search tool?

Then just type in some key word(s) and let Revit find it for you.

Installing Revit 2014 Jacks Older Versions Ribbon

If you don't have the luxury of NOT using older versions of Revit, and you have installed the new 2014 version only to start having weird ribbon issues the older versions....

Check out the fix here

Seems like the ribbon get one step behind user activity. Minimizing and restoring the ribbon will catch it back up, but it will fall behind on the next ribbon pick.

Replace the file indicated in the fix and all is well again.

Revit Speed

No matter how fast our machines get, I have yet to have someone say "Revit is too fast"! It seems the opposite is always true. Well if you are looking for a lot of little ways to speed up Revit, here is a list of things to try. Some will help you and some might hurt. So one size doesn't fit all, but if you are looking for ideas.... here's some.

1. Work in wireframe not hidden modes. You can use a very selective view template to set all your views back to hidden before plotting.
2. Only open the worksets you need on open.
3. Reload latest before you sync.
4. Purge the crap out of all your linked Revit files.
5. Compact your Revit files once a week.
6. If you have a lot of people accessing the model at the same time, use scheduled times for syncing to prevent database collisions.
7. The slowest machine accessing the central brings the whole lot down.
8. Keep open views to a minimum. Just click close hidden every 5 minutes or so.
9. Don't make or use over the top families that are over-modeled.
10. Have only a generic drafting view open during saves and syncs.
11. Check and clear warnings.
12. Keep complex sketch-based items to a minimum.
13. Break your model into smaller models and link.
14. Restart Revit every 4 hours. 
15. Work in dependent views instead of the overall view.
16. Detach from central before printing.

Revit 2013 Pipe Breaks Plumbing Fixture

I ran into a new one today where pipe running over a sink in a linked model, broke the sink like it might break another crossing pipe.

For what ever reason, if you check the "Underlay" box in the Revit Links tab of Visibility Graphics, life gets better.

Better, but not perfect. The sink appears correct, but not subdued. I'll take it for now, but I am not happy.

Preset Sub Catagories

I like to use sub disciplines to sort by in the Project Browser. It is easy to define M, E,P, and even T disciplines, whatever. What is not so great is when users get creative with their sub discipline naming and things don't end up matching creating a mess in the  Project Browser .  A nice way to pre-load your standard sub discipline naming convention is to create view templates in your template and assign the sub discipline names in them. Because they are in the view templates, they will show in the drop down list of sub disciplines even if they have not been used in a view yet. Sweet!

Using Character Map in Text and Tags

If you were not aware that you can use special characters in Revit to add things like a diameter symbol to text, check out my previous post. In that post I showed how to figure out the key-in required to produce certain symbols just by typing them into the text string. in this post, I'll show how to leverage the many special characters that do not have a key in but existing in the font.


Revit MEP supports oval duct, but the symbol in tags my firm has used since hand drafting is the Greek letter PHI. Unfortunately there is no key in for the PHI character. I can however, use the "Select" and "Copy" buttons to copy the character to the clipboard and paste it directly into a text string.

In this case, the symbol legend.

It can also be pasted directly in a label for a tag as a suffix.

Happy New Year!

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!

Pipe Rise and Drop Wrong Size

I had a job the other day and my pipe rises were gigantic!

These are the annotation symbols in single line. To fix things, click on the little angle arrow next to the Plumbing and Piping group label and ensure annotation scaling is being used then change the Pipe Rise/Drop to a smaller scale. Fittings can be changed separately.

You may find that every time you change to a smaller scale it reverts back to the original scale. This is probably being caused by the fact that units for pipe size do not go to a scale that precise. To change that click "Project Units" on the Manage tab, set the discipline to "Piping" and set the rounding to the required precision.

Now take a look at your symbol. Hopefully, things have gotten a lot easier to read.

Imported DWG Files Have Thin Text

There are times when AutoCAD files are required to be added to Revit project files. There two ways to incorporate AutoCAD DWG files into Revit. One is to Insert the DWG and the other is to Link the DWG file. Inserted DWG files remain static and don’t change in Revit when they are updated in AutoCAD. Linked DWG Files update each time the Revit project file is opened or when a reload is forced from with the Revit project.

Inserting is preferable when the DWG file will not need to be updated like a legend, note, existing background, or detail. Inserted DWGs can be placed directly onto a sheet, view, or into a drafting view, depending on its use. 

Linking is preferable when the DWG file will be updated as the project progresses. 

Either way, if your standard text font is Simplex for AutoCAD, when that file gets into Revit it plots too light. My solution is to change the text style in AutoCAD before Importing or linking to Revit.

1.    To maintain the readability of text, use the Style command in the AutoCAD file to be Inserted/Linked and change the Standard text styles font to Zurich Lt BT. 

2.    Navigate to the View or Sheet that requires the Inserted/Linked DWG. (Create a drafting view by selecting the Drafting View tool on the View tab of the ribbon if required.)

3.    Select the Import CAD tool or the Link CAD tool on the Insert tab of the Ribbon.

4.    Browse out to the required DWG. Before clicking the Open button, Select from the drop downs of what Colors, Layers, and Positioning.  

5.    Click Open to place the DWG file in the View/Sheet.