Family Templates and View Orientation

An exchange of posts at Revitforum.org with Alfredo regarding family templates prompts this post. The thread began with a question about orientation. I've written about this in the past. I was confused by the use of Exterior/Interior labels then.

I find a fair number of new Revit family editors seem to start out with door families. If that's your first foray into content you might starting thinking the top of the view is "front". It's labeled Exterior. I tend to think of the exterior side of a door panel as the front side when making one. This tripped me up for awhile. I wrote the post thinking the other templates were wrong when compared with the door template, at the very least different. Technically they are all the same, front is at the bottom of the page.

I recently examined every imperial family template (release 2014) that is used for 3D geometry. They all respect the notion of orientation where the bottom of the view is front, the top of the view is back, the right side is ride and left is left. Some templates have labels like Exterior/Interior and Placement Side. In the thread at RFO Alfredo noted that the Generic Model Adaptive template does not respect this orientation. In my view it does but when the template was created the front and back views were named incorrectly. The front view is really the back. If we examine geometry using the view cube we'll find every family will show the geometry the same way when we manipulate the cube.

He also mentioned the Profile Mullion template. They've provided labels to help orient yourself when you sketch your profile. In this image you can see that I've created a bullet shaped mullion profile and applied it to a curtain wall. The bullet ends up on the exterior side.

What is curious is that if the profile is not symmetrical the result is a mirrored condition when applied to the mullion in the project. That's a little unexpected.

If, in an elevation view, I place a detail section that looks up the profile matches what I see in the mullion family.

So we have to twist our perspective around a bit to get a sense of orientation. The short story is that mullion profile is a mirror of what we see in plan with respect to right/left orientation. Exterior and interior are displayed as the labels imply.

Definitely quirky...

Autodesk Revit 2013 Does Get an Update

Last Friday I asked if Revit 2013 was going to get an update. It may have just been aggressive timing on my part but when I was looking there wasn't. A little bit later a reader provided a link, via a comment, to the Design Suite location for the web release update. Over the weekend I received an email letting me know that it is also listed under the Revit "pile" of versions too.

So the short answer is YES, Revit 2013 does get an update too!

Autodesk Revit 2013 Doesn't Get Web Update?

Autodesk has released a web update for Revit Architecture, Structure and MEP 2013. They each have their own web update files. If you don't have one or all of those versions installed, like me, and only have Revit 2013 installed, then we seem to be out of luck at the moment. If you're thinking, "I'll just download and install those other updates and I'll be good!" Nope you'll get this message.

At the moment there is no web update release 3 offering for Autodesk Revit 2013? I guess it is immune to what ails it's less endowed brethren? I sure hope they didn't forget they've got a fourth version of Revit?

You can check out the updates for each discipline focused version here:
Autodesk Revit Architecture 2013
Autodesk Revit Structure 2013
Autodesk Revit MEP 2013

There is a place for Autodesk Revit 2013 but there's no web update release 3...yet... fingers crossed.

Scaling Revit Families

Every now and then there seems to be a convergence in the "Revitverse". A series of events, themes and user attitudes and desires emerges. Lately it seems to be the notion of scaling families. Revit has not permitted the arbitrary "make this 2x bigger" unless we could provide all the constraints and parameters that allow that kind of input and result. For example we don't usually ask for a desk or chair to be twice as large. A chair becomes too big to use if so. I believe that this logic prevailed in their choice to be more restrictive about scaling things as arbitrarily as other software allows.

A common thread in scaling lately has been classical architecture and columns. These are defined by ratios and rules to some extent while the sculpting applied to them seems to have much more freedom. Reading other blogs and attending the Revit Technology Conferences and Autodesk University made me plan to write a post that provides some links to the various places that you can find intriguing information on this subject. With the many bloggers focused on Revit it really didnt come as a surprise that somebody beat me to it. That someone is Mark Cronin, who I chatted with in Auckland at RTC. He wrote a summary of resources that you'll find useful, techniques that capitalize on new features as well as one that recalls a longstanding feature that we've all managed to forget about.

Please let me encourage you to read Mark's post for the details since he took the time to compile it in the first place, you really should.

Thanks Mark!

Thin Lines and Printing Sheets

Reading reports (at RevitForum.org) of the Thin Lines feature affecting the output when printing from sheet views. In my own quick test I'm seeing the lines of the titleblock being printed respecting Thin Lines being on which isn't good.

The model views appear to be printing correctly, just the title block's own lines seem to be affected. When I printed a model view using Thin Lines the result was the same as with Thin Lines off. In other words, working as we've come to expect, the Thin Lines feature had no impact on printing. Or, we've not noticed it before.

When we use Temporary Hide Isolate we get this dialog to ask how we want the feature to be regarded. If Thin Lines is meant to be able to get printed then perhaps the same sort of warning/option ought to be offered?

Any readers that can confirm this too? Seems like an undesireable "feature".

Revit Journal Folder and Saving Files on Network Drives

Revitform.org member "Cellophane" dropped this reminder/tip recently.

When you save project files that DO NOT use worksets and family files on a network folder Revit stores a copy of the files in your user Journal folder. Since release 2012 Revit has been using this location for the Journal folder and files:

C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Autodesk\Revit\Autodesk Revit "version"

While chatting with support they gave him this explanation:

"This happens when saving directly to a network location as a data security function, i.e. if the network save fails, the data can be recovered from the local journals folder. If you save locally you will not populate the folder. The reason behind it is saving non-worksharing files to a network introduces a greater possible of failure, so dropping a copy in the journal folder is a way of recovering them."

If you don't keep an eye on this you'll end up with quite a lot of files there. If other people use your computer and Revit then they've probably been "stealing" some disk space from your pc too. As tedious as it might seem to have to clean this out from time to time, the feature came in really handy recently when I managed to kill a few families that I thought I no longer needed. The next day a change came along and I needed them back. No, I didn't archive them for some reason...still not sure why. Regardless, the copies in the Journal folder sure came in handy though! I'm glad I didn't clean them out the day before.

Revit 2014 API Languages

Revit 2014 has added a couple new language options for people who can speak to Revit through its API (application programming interface). If you have a long history with CAD you might have spent more than a few hours "Lost in parenthesis" (LISP)? In Revit we can get lost in them when we deal with conditional formulas in the family editor.

In Revit 2013 the API supported two languages C++ and C# (technically any VB.net language). Revit 2014 has added Ruby (aka Ruby on Rails) and Python. If you have no programming experience they are not gems or reptiles, just alternatives to the far more widely used C++ and the much newer C# (and supposedly "easier to learn").

The dialog is a little smaller too (really subtle eh?).

If you are looking to get started with the Revit API you might consider Don Rudder's book:

Instant Autodesk Revit 2013 Customization with .NET How-to

Looking for some hands-on training with a sherpa? Get in touch with Harry Mattison (Boost Your BIM), he's gone from deep within Autodesk working on Revit and its API to the life of a freelancer who shares his knowledge on his blog and creates applications for hire. He's started offering some online training too.

Don Rudder and Case-inc have also offered API focused training in the past and are always considering hosting another so keep an eye on their site for a future class offering.

I've also written a couple blog posts before about getting started with the API (though I'm still remiss in taking it seriously myself).

Getting Started with the Revit API
My First Revit Plug-in

Years ago when I did some programming more seriously I found the book "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell quite helpful to help understand the process and concepts.

Happy coding!