A Doors Life

As I mentioned in an earlier post I presented a session called "A Door's Life" at the recent Central States Revit Workshop. It tackles creating a host door family that nests 2 panels, 2 frames and 2 handles. It also features a nested clearance form for clash detection and a variable plan swing angle. The host door permits rotating the 3D panel and hardware to any angle as well, though 0-180 is probably the range that's most useful.

If you are interested in more information this is the handout that attendees received (embedded here).

As the handout will tell you it isn't meant to be the perfect door. It's a demonstration of concepts and how to put them all together. If you're lucky you'll end up with something you can use right away or at the very least have a good idea how to get where you want to go.

Click to Download the completed files for each exercise.

Hiding Columns in Schedules

We can hide a column if necessary. Hopefully that's not a surprise. Each field in a schedule has a parameter called Hidden Field, available when we are looking at the Formatting tab in the Schedule Properties dialog.

We can also right click on a column while editing a schedule, in a schedule view, and choose Hide Column.

We can use right click to Unhide All Columns but it will reset them all, as the name implies.

If we use this on more than one column and only want to restore one of several we need to return to the schedule properties dialog and the formatting tab to uncheck the Hidden Field parameter.

Transfer Project Standards and Shared Coordinates

These two are not friends. They are even less friendly when worksets are involved. In earlier releases the project base point and survey point were assigned to Workset1 (2012 and older). In a post some time ago I mentioned a support issue that IDEATE's techs encountered where a user assigned them to a different workset and eventually deleted that workst. It resulted in unpleasant crashing.

If you look closely in 2013 and 2014 you'll find they are assigned to a workset called Project Info and we can't change that anymore.

Unfortunately the more mundane information like the project name, number, issue date, client name and address and many more are also Project Info.

When we use Transfer Project Standards hoping to share the same mundane project info with related linked project files (seems a reasonable expectation) Revit wants to transfer project base point and survey point information too. You'll get this dialog when you fire up Transfer Project Standards (TPS).

This is what my dummy project looks like before using TPS, note the Survey Point's coordinate values and position.

Here's what it looks like after TPS is done. The project base point and survey point have reversed their orientation to one another and they are very far apart now (I zoomed in closer though), far enough that the walls are tiny and hiding under the project base point icon.

If two files are already sharing coordinates they aren't immune to this "feature" either. In my testing I find that the coordinates still get messed up if I use Transfer Project Standards and Overwrite in order to pass along the other project information. It appears that the safest thing to do once Shared Coordinates are established is... DON'T Transfer Project Standards AND leave Project Info selected.

I think that the Project Base Point and Survey Point should be more isolated so they have their own Project Setting based workset, not shared with other Project Info. I'm glad they made it harder (impossible) to reassign them to a different workset to eliminate the other problem I mentioned earlier but they've introduced a new quirk as a result.

I find it mildly amusing that Transfer Project Standards acronym is TPS...reports anyone?

Linked Ceiling Hosted Light Fixtures and MEP

A ceiling hosted light fixture can cut the host ceiling. When an architect uses one of these fixtures the ceiling surface the Revit MEP user has to work with actually has a "hole" in it. This means that they can't put their own light fixture in the same spot because there is no ceiling there.

Technically that's an oversimplification. We CAN put a fixture in the same location but there isn't a face for Revit to detect easily. If you try to use the Downlight - Recessed Can family it's origin is too far from a ceiling's grid pattern to let us put it within a tile. We can put it in randomly and then move it to the correct location. We'll get yelled at though, the light isn't properly hosted now.

If we do the same sort of thing with the troffer family (2x4 fixture) it will be a bit more tolerant as well as not losing its face association.

This sort of discipline collaboration isn't tons of fun.

Drafting Views have an Origin

When we create a new drafting view we are presented with an empty view. We are free to begin our drafting exercise anywhere we see fit. It's not obvious but there IS an origin in the view. If we import a simple CAD file that has some lines that define where the 0,0,0 origin is we'll find out exactly where the origin is in the drafting view (use Auto-Origin to Origin).

What does it matter? It may not matter at all. I've often wondered about it since Revit cares about keeping us near the origin of the file for our model views and complains when we import external files that are very far from origin or very very large.

As such I can't help but wonder if we ought to be careful to keep our details near the origin of drafting views too. I have encountered drafting views that have their contents very very far from the origin. It's easy to do, just zoom out a bit and start detailing. It just seems inconsistent with the best practice expectations for model views.

I'm inclined to create a "template" drafting view in a project template to begin drafting views with (duplicate them) with the origin clearly marked, like shown above. I'd welcome someone from the factory chiming in to say this is a good idea or unnecessary.

Revit Server Documents

If you visit the wikihelp site for Autodesk Revit Server you'll find (if you look closely) these documents are available for your use/review.

Bandwidth Requirements for Revit Server
Cost-Effective Revit Server Deployments
Locking and Worksharing in Revit Server
Revit Server 2012
Revit Server and Riverbed Steelhead
Understanding Revit Server
User of Revit Server on High Latency Networks

Revit MEP Circuiting

I created a short video that describes the basic interaction between electrical devices and creating a circuit. It's really meant to help explain what happens when a device is already assigned to a circuit and we select it along with other elements that aren't circuited. The ribbon changes based on our selection and a circuited devices impairs our ability to create a circuit for the other devices that are eligible to create one.

• A device that is not part of a circuit, when selected by itself, will cause the Power button to appear
• A device that is part of a circuit, when selected by itself, will display the additional Electrical Circuit tab
• Multiple devices that are both part of a circuit and not part of circuit will only display the context ribbon relevant for the devices, no circuit tab or power button
• Selecting multiple devices that are assigned different electrical requirements will disable the Power button

When we select devices we need to be sure to glance at the ribbon for clues. Here's a video (no audio, turn on Captions).

I also wrote an earlier post about circuits if you're interested.