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...

Worksharing Display Users

When you are using the relatively new Worksharing Display feature you can see which users are assigned to which colors in this dialog.

The history of users interacting with a file can turn into quite a list, it doesn't refresh to reflect the current users, at least not all the time anyway. It seems to retain all the users that have owned or borrowed elements in the file. The little button lurking beneath the list will let you delete inactive users.

You can just start deleting users, don't worry, Revit will tell you if someone is currently borrowing or owning something in the file.

View Template Usage

The other day I wrote about my transition between Revit versions and differences between what we can do with View Templates. Harry "Mr. Boost Your BIM" Mattison offered some code to relieve the tension. It's pretty cool how few lines of code and provide useful answers. Check out his post. Be sure to read his post tomorrow too, he's going to enhance it a bit and share that too!

Create New Local Disabled

Usually the culprit is the network path (previous post). If it is intermittent, as in it worked a few minutes ago but now it isn't, it can be something else. It is probably file access, meaning Synchronization with Central by others or someone opening their own local file at the same time.

I find the create new local option is disabled occasionally when there are a lot of other users active. If I select the file and the option is disabled I click on another central to see if it is network related. My thinking is if it does it for several central files then somethings wrong with "me". If I wait a few seconds or minutes I find that clicking on the file again will allow Revit another "look" at the file and the option "wakes up".

It may just be busy people and activity between locals and the central.

Scheduling View Template Usage

When I travel back and forth between Revit versions, say between 12 and 13, I find myself missing things. For example I wanted to see (in 2012) how many views were assigned to view templates and which ones were really being used. In 2013 we can add that parameter to a View List, 2012 not so much. In 2013 we can select a view template and see how many views are assigned to it, in 2012...you get the idea. I wish life and project conditions didn't make it hard to "just upgrade". Just do it, as soon as you can!

Rotate with Component

This little setting is meant to force a tag to rotate with the tagged element, meaning to maintain the alignment.

The easiest example is beam or wall tags following their parent.

These categories respond to Rotate with Component:
Walls, Curtain Walls, Doors, Windows, Railings, Ramps, Stairs (Runs, Landings and Supports), Structural (Framing, Braces and Trusses), Property Boundary, Property Line Segments, Planting, and Parking.

These categories are immune to Rotate with Component:
Foundations, Floors, Ceilings, Roofs, Furniture, Furniture Systems, Casework, Generic Models, Structural Columns, Detail Components, Massing, Mass Floors, Curtain Panels, and Specialty Equipment.

Breaking loose from "Revity rules" the space, room and area tags are allowed to rotate more easily by choosing Vertical, Horizontal or Model, for each tag we use. The Model option allows us to use the Rotate tool to rotate them freely, which would be quite nice for any tag.

Architectural Columns, Shaft Openings remain immune to tagging by category at all.

That seems like a long list but that doesn't even factor in MEP components. Perhaps I'll tackle that another night.

Change Door From and Door To

These settings for doors are determined initially by which side of a wall the door swings into. A door swinging into a room inherits that room as its "to" value. Later if someone flips the door to swing out of the room the parameter does not change. This is intentional and I've written about this before.

Harry started Boost Your BIM a few months ago and he's really dedicated himself to it, bravo! Back then he asked me for some ideas and naturally my mind went blank I could only muster a couple ideas. The beauty of blogging is that the more readers you have the more ideas you'll get. He's been keeping busy with many interesting examples.

The other day I was chatting with a Revit user who was expressing frustration with the From/To issue and I thought that a simple "click this click that" experience might at least improve the situation for him. I wrote to Harry and a day or so later we've got this to consider. Cool!