I was talking with a Revit user the other day that was having trouble placing a Truss object in their Revit Structure. After they placed the truss, it would disappear even though all visibility settings for the view were correct in allowing it to display. Needless to say, the user was frustrated. The problem was that there were no members defined for the truss, so only the truss’s reference lines were visible when the truss was highlighted.
This article addresses a feature in Revit that seems to have gone unnoticed by many Revit users. That feature is the anchor symbol for multi-segmented equality constrained dimensions.
Part of the power of Revit is that when a multi-segmented dimension has had the quality constraint applied to it by picking the EQ symbol, the objects being dimensioned will move in equal distances when one of the objects is relocated. The anchor symbol gives you more control over that dimension function.
The anchor symbol allows the user to control which object is the anchor and will stay stationary when adjusting the spacing between objects that have had an equality constraint applied to the dimension string. If the user is not aware of this anchor symbol, then it appears that they have no control over which objects move and which one stays in the same position. It is nice to have the ability to specify which objects move and which one stays in the same location.
In a previous life, I was employed by a large Architectural firm with a primarily residential focus that performed a lot of home design for home builders. One of the characteristics of creating home plans for builders was that they typically desired houses that had mirrored versions of the same plan. While this is done in other construction types, it is typical for most home plans.
Autodesk Revit contains both Reference Planes and Reference Lines, but it seems that most people do not understand or utilize Reference Lines. While Reference Lines are used as control lines for information within a family similar to Reference Planes, they are not a type of Reference Plane. It is its own type of object designed for a separate purpose. Basically, you should use Reference Lines instead of Reference Planes when you need defined endpoints for a work plane. A prime example of an important Reference Line usage is for allowing for the rotation of objects within a family. A general rule is that if you want something to rotate, use a Reference Line to control it.
Do you ever want to easily visualize what objects are on different worksets in a view in Revit®? Autodesk incorporated this ability into Revit® with their 2012 versions, but it seems to have gone unnoticed by many users. Worksets are a highly utilized function used within Revit® by any organization where multiple people need to work on a Revit® project at one time. There is a tremendous amout of information available on what worksets are and how to use them to manage your project, so this article is to just address the ability to control how you see worksets in a particular view. This is a helpful feature for troubleshooting projects to ensure that users are placing information in the proper workset.
Details are a vital part of the documentation process for building design and construction projects. CAD users who have used AutoCAD for years have typically developed a large detail library, or at least possess many details used on previous AutoCAD projects. Those details are valuable as a lot of time and knowledge has gone into developing them. It is important to be able to access those details for usage within Revit.
While there are various methods utilized for re-using AutoCAD details, not all of them are good solutions and some can add corruption to your Revit project file and create problems.
Specifying information concerning doors on architectural plans is an important aspect of conveying information to the contractor working in the field. Residential designers and commercial designers tend to have different approaches to this situation as commercial projects generally utilize a door schedule referencing a number tag at the door and residential projects generally have the door size shown directly on the floor plan. While it seems like a door size tag for residential projects would be a basic feature in Revit, there are no default tags to display the door size in typical methods. In this article, we will take a look at a process to create a typical residential door tag. This process can then be modified slightly to create other variations of the door size tag and also window size tags. 
Wouldn’t it be nice to easily organize your Revit schedules? Revit provides the user with various ways of organizing views in the Project Browser to make it easier to find your desired view, but schedules do not have the same organizational capabilities of other types of views. Most views have a “Title on Sheet” parameter that can be used to be display the desired title for that view when it is placed on the sheet and yet have the View Name parameter be something that organizes well in the Project Browser. Schedule views do not have that “Title on Sheet” parameter.
Typically, users will name the Schedule view as the name that they desire to appear at the top of the schedule since the “Title on Sheet” parameter does not exist for schedules. That naming process means that schedules may not organize optimally in the Project Browser since they will be listed alphabetically. We want to achieve having a title that does not use the schedule name.
I was recently working with a client on getting electrical receptacles to show with a solid gray fill to represent when the receptacle is connected to an emergency power circuit. Since receptacles are shown as annotative symbols in plan views, it created a different situation than can be done in non-annotative families. In non-annotative families, you can create the solid fill and send it to the back so linework can be seen on top of the fill. With an annotative family, fill patterns are in masking regions and will cover any linework that might also be in the family. This meant that a different approach needed to be utilized to get the circular solid gray fill to not cover the symbolic lines going through the electrical receptacle.
This article will look at how to create the fill to display correctly, and also how to make the fill display only when you specify that the receptacle is on an emergency power circuit.
Architectural drawings have been created throughout the years with the intent of accurately and effectively conveying the design intent to the builder for proper construction of the building. Utilization of CAD made it easier for the designer to show the various components that made up the wall by showing lines representing the edges of each of the wall components. When showing the multiple components of a wall, we have traditionally shown the lines representing the two faces of a wall as darker lines than the interior linework of the wall. When using Revit, this same appearance can be easily accomplished.
There are many times that you want to print just a specific area inside Revit and at a specific scale. In AutoCAD, you have the option to print a window and set the scale in the print window, but that option does not exist in Revit. That is very annoying to AutoCAD users moving to Revit. However, there is an easy way to accomplish the same thing with Revit without much effort.
As an Architect, I find it helpful to be able to look at a floor plan and see the occupancy load for each room, and some building permit reviewers require this information be shown on the plan. My previous blog article addressed creating a schedule in Revit to show occupancy loads for rooms. This article will take off from that point and desmonstrate how to create a room tag to place on a floor plan view that shows the occupancy load of the room.
