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.
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.
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. 
The AEC industry is seeing more clients requiring Building Information Modeling (BIM) on projects. Some clients have very detailed standards and expectations for the BIM process, and some clients say that they want BIM but have not idea what they really desire or how to get BIM. And then, there are clients that fall somewhere between those two types. Many clients (especially in the private sector) that have BIM standards in place have not publicized their standards, but will provide it to the design/construction team for specific projects. However, there are public entitites that have established BIM standards and have posted those standards on the internet and are accessible to anyone with internet access. Since it is nice to reference those BIM standards, I thought that I would list various public entities which have BIM standards that you can reference.
It is now the last day of 2012 and I am looking back over the past year and considering what has happened in my world of design software. Working so closely with the software, it is sometimes easy to forget how much has changed or occurred in the past year. Technology and software continually changes so it is never boring keeping up with it. Since I am an architect in the United States who deals with Autodesk software, that will be the focus of the article.
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.
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.
Working with building codes is an important aspect of working as an Architect during the design stages of a project, and knowing the occupancy of each room is a key component to that. This article will demonstrate how to create a Revit schedule that shows the occupancy load for each room in your BIM file. It will use a key schedule as the source of information for calculating loads, so this article will address creating that key schedule as well.
In the various Revit software packages, it is possible to hide family parameters so that they are not visible in the family’s properties when in a project file. This is often desirable for situations where the family creator does not want the user to even know that the parameter exists within the Revit family. This can be helpful for keeping the parameter from being easily modified or just keeping the parameter area less confusing. Parameters that are used strictly for calculation purposes are an example of parameters that may be hidden. Parameters that are used behind the scenes to control visibility of objects based upon other criteria is another example of parameters that may be hidden.
In October of 2011, I wrote an article on the templates that were provided with the various Autodesk Revit 2012 products. (Link to article) Autodesk made some changes to what templates are provided with the Revit 2013 products, so I thought it good to mention those changes. I like the changes that were made and the provided templates make more sense with the 2013 release.
Autodesk 2013 products allow you to create a library that contains the most commonly used and standard materials within an organization. It can be daunting and confusing to users when they go to specify a material for something and there are many materials from which to choose. Autodesk provides many materials Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB), companies will develop materials in-house, and materials may be downloaded, all of which creates a large collection of materials. This article will describe how you can create a central library on the company server in 3 easy steps, from which users can select the preferred material.
MEP Connectors are a very important aspect to the effective usage of Autodesk Revit MEP software. The MEP Connectors, which are attached to Revit families, contain important information that is utilized for design and connectivity features of Revit MEP. They are utilized to connect ductwork, piping, electrical, etc to a family and have many connector-type specific settings and characteristics. This article addresses many miscellaneous aspects of MEP Connectors which are helpful to be aware of.
