Blends have Two Sketches

From the been there done that department I bring you a little reminder, Solid and Void blends have two sketches; a base and a top. It's pretty common to see two sketches in the base and the user wonders why they can't move on to the top sketch. When the blend process starts Revit is thinking "base", regardless of the orientation of the blend you are making. How can you tell? Easy, there is a button for Edit Top.

That can only be appropriate if Revit thinks we are working on the base. There isn't even a button for Edit Base until after you click Edit Top.

Once you have two complete sketches, each in their own "world" (Base and Top), you can Click the Green Check mark for Finish Edit Mode. If you need to revisit one or both of the sketches you'll find you can go straight to the Base or Top Sketch via separate buttons, just have to select the form first.

Remember, two sketches, two, two are better than one or twice as nice.

Voids Voids Voids

If you read through Autodesk documentation for Revit and the best practices document that they published some years ago you'll find casually mentioned recommendations to "avoid voids" because they will negatively impact performance. That turns into a conversation overhead later, "Never ever use voids in families!!" Hmmm...

Recommendations are wonderful, wonderful when they actually mean something meaningful. A warning like don't use more than six voids in a family. That's specific, I better not use more than six voids or something bad will happen to me, and my project. Then again I might just get wild and create families with seven voids just to make other people mad and drive project performance into the gutter?

I've read and heard similar warnings and recommendations for using formulas, "Avoid using too many formulas in your families". Is eight too many or seven hundred? I'm guessing seven hundred is worse but what about twenty five or forty five. Have we crossed into unsanctioned and untenable content now?

I'd love to see more practical recommendations that quantify things better. I seriously doubt a family with several voids is really going to harm a project, even if there are five hundred copies of the family in the project. I suppose we need to turn the Revit "masses" loose and test all kinds of situations to come up with more specific recommendations?

In the meantime I'm going to keep being careful to avoid voids all while wondering how many voids to avoid...

Party Wall Doors

You know the doors that are in hotels that pass between rooms. They make it easy to rent two rooms side by side, one for kids, one for the parents...or co-workers traveling to a meeting etc. I got a question via email asking how to approach this. The issue expressed was that Revit won't let you put two doors on top of each other. They want to list two doors in the schedule (one for each side) so the more or less obvious solution of showing both panels and swings in one family didn't cut it.

One solution is to edit the door family and eliminate the Opening element and replace it with a void instead. This allows you to adjust the depth of the void so it only cuts one half of the shared wall. Place two doors and align them...voila, done. If you make this an instance parameter driven option your regular single flush door type could pull double duty, cutting all the way through a wall or only half way.

Another approach could be a single family that uses two nested (and Shared) families. The door could be assigned to the Generic Model category so the assembly doesn't schedule in a door schedule, the nested shared doors (assigned to the door category) do instead. Alternatively the category could be assigned to doors too but you'd either have to filter out the assembly or the individual doors because you'd have an "extra" door.

Whatever solution we use we do have to consider how "we" schedule doors and how the product is dealt with by a manufacturer. Since the frame has to built to accomodate two panels it might actually be better or correct to create a single door family that just happens to have two panels. Everything is a bit trickier the deeper you look at the question, at least when you aren't just concerned with what a door looks like in a plan view drawing.