One of the most troubling support issues is when a designer working in Revit exclaims that things moved, deleted or were altered “on their own”. It takes a delicate approach to resolve this issue, as it is often a question of process or an incomplete understanding of the tool. For many years, Press and Drag has been something that I’ve advocated as disabled when deploying Revit to a large firm. To do this, we would simply enter the following line(s), if they don’t exist, in the Revit.ini:
Now, in Revit 2014, there are a number of new options, and again most of them are by default enabled. The question is, should the helpful BIM Manager change these settings, as we have before, or is the general skill level of designers using Revit now at the place where they can make their own informed choices? To select, or not select? That is the question, again.
You can get to these settings in Revit 2014 at any time from the Modify tool drop down, or on the Status bar, in the lower right corner. See images below.
Here is a run down of the available options:
Select Links
Select Underlay Elements
Select Pinned Elements
Select Elements by Face
Drag Elements on Selection (The old Press and Drag with a more descriptive name)
Out-of-the-box, Revit has Select Elements by Face disabled. This makes good sense, else working in 3D or elevation/section views would be unpredictable and inconsistent with prior behavior for most tasks. I somehow think modifying any of the options would cause more help desk calls in the future, not to mention more frustration by someone when they can’t select a thing that is clearly visible on screen.
Below are the new options that you could put into your Revit.ini should you desire. Enabled is a value of 1, and disabled is a value of 0. Again, I’m just not sure of the right thing to do. I’ve indicated my current thoughts in blue.
Leave it to David Light to have the scoop earlier than most of us. Like in years past, hop on over to his blog for everything Revit upgrades and how this can help your BIM productivity. The webcast (livestream.com/autodesk) starts in only 35 minutes.
It’s that time of year again… The birds are singing, the snow (if you had any this year) is melting, and Autodesk is taking the wraps off new updates to your favorite design applications. Along with those rollouts, are new origami inspired logos for both the company and it’s major products.
And, look: There’s a few features for Autodesk® Revit® 2014 listed on the product page now, and teaser images to go along with them. Some of my favorites (that I can share at this time):
So, for those of you who have attended Autodesk University in the last few years, the idea of technology trends coming together to form one perfect storm of innovation is not new. This concise talk (sans slides), by Brian P. Mathews who gave an excellent presentation at AU2012, is worth viewing.
This is one of a few teasers in advance of the big webcast coming on March 26th. This is presumably the announcement of the new Autodesk 2014 product line, which has been almost as regular as the returning of the swallows to Capistrano. You can view the live webcast on March 26th either here: facebook.com/autodesk (click the Webcast menu) or here: livestream.com/autodesk.
For those of you who have not yet read Harry Mattison’s Boost your BIM blog, and you want to find new and creative ways to be more productive using Revit through the API (application programming interface), get going! The blog started in December and has a lot of really juicy stuff, if your interested in this aspect of BIM – I know I am. There’s plenty of coding samples to get your ideas churning.
Harry is a ‘The Factory’ veteran, having been with the Charles River Software company, the original name of Revit Technology Corporation in the late 90′s. Now that’s street cred. This one’s going in the blogroll.
These are the rambling words of a weary traveller, about to embark on the frozen waste that is Windows 8. Normally excited to try new things, I have reached a point in my career where the marketing hype around a product has little excitement any longer. I must admit, I volunteered to put myself through this, so hopefully you won’t have to. Buckle your seat belt.
I admit, I was very afraid after watching Chris Perillo’s dad struggle with the new experience (above). This did not bode well, and made me feel like I am too old for new things. But I soldiered on.
Day 1
With a shiny-new laptop, loaded with powerful specs, I admired it sitting there as an inanimate object for a short while. I think I apologized to it, for making it take this journey with me. I dove in with some hesitation. Expecting to find an interesting and new experience, I quickly discovered that it’s not for me, and those who don’t use keyboard shortcuts will forever be perplexed on how to find the desktop, err second desktop. Enough about the OS itself… this is about running Revit on it, in it, around it… or something. So here goes:
I installed Revit 2013 on my shiny Windows 8 computer and although not a touch-enabled screen, I knew there would be little to gain from it with Revit without a UI redesign. I am playing the role of tester for this configuration. Initial experiences were good. The RFO Benchmark utility works just fine, and the machine I tested had admirable results. Note to self, run in Safe Mode for really good results, and you’ll see how much baggage the OS carries.
Day 2
Revit opened fine that first time. Now that I’m actually using it and actually tried to make and edit things that I realized why Revit is not yet on the Autodesk Windows 8 compatibility list. Below is what I’ve found you might experience, and why I strongly recommend against upgrading to Windows 8 until or unless these issues are addressed in a product upgrade. Otherwise, we will have to wait for a future release that may be designed for Windows 8. No timeline for that has been made public at this writing.
I’ve categorized and captured my comments in the following format. Impact – Description
Ribbon
Low – Panels cannot be pulled off the ribbon to make floating in the workspace.
Critical – Contextual ribbon does not display any panels or tools. Try clicking family, and there is no load family or model in-place tool. Try selecting a family, and there is no edit tool. Select a wall and there is no edit profile, attach, etc… The non-functioning Draw panel shows up instead!
Medium – Similar to above, enabling Raytrace means you have no way of stopping the process or exporting the image. You have to close the active view and re-open it to return to the previous visual style.
Vasari
Critical – Beta 1 does not run at all. This is known and easily discovered on the discussion forum, however what you don’t know, you don’t know.
Day 15
API
{Varies} – The Python for Revit tools don’t function at all. More accurately, Revit hooks don’t work. Standard Python commands work – my usual test is:
import this
I wonder if some libraries are simply not found in the new OS. Given I’m only beginning to learn Python, I can only rely on my experience trying (unsuccessfully) to run the samples provided by the highly admirable Nathan Miller.
After tinkering a bit, I realized that the contextual ribbons will return if you cycle through the display of the tabs. This sometimes take more attempts to make it happen, and I’ve found that each time I edit something I need to repeat the process. Oddly, this does not seem to occur in the family editor.
Day 18 Add-ins
Medium to Critical – Most of the Add-ins written for Revit 2013 rely on the dotNET framework 3.5 or earlier. Windows 8 comes with 4.0 however, you have to jump through serious hoops, and in some cases you would need to work with your IT department to set up exceptions to group policies that are in place and get your hands on a Windows 8 disk or ISO (something that OEMs do not provide with new computers any longer). All in all, if you require any Revit add-ins, including the free ones available from the Autodesk subscription, good luck to you. You may be in for a bumpy ride, aka a very long Microsoft whitepaper on the subject..
Day 20
So, I’m ready to face reality. Time for a downgrade or at least create a Windows 7 virtual machine to continue to do my work in Revit. For that matter, maybe I don’t need a PC at all… if only I could do all my work from an iPad, that would feel way more civilized. At least the UX would be predictable, and simple to understand. I did after all, find more gray hairs on my head this morning.
Your results may vary
Others, Like Robin Capper have had good results with the upgrade.
Life Safety Gnome, the official mascot of Revit egress paths.
For many versions of Revit, we have used Steve Stafford’s Line-Based Generic Model family for representing Egress Paths in our life safety drawings. It has served us well. At the time, this was absolutely the best way, given the available tool set. Certainly, you could use dumb drafting lines to sketch the path, and not have any ability to schedule or tag… but we like BIM here at Paradigm shift, and strongly believe in creating your own tools when they don’t already exist.
Revit 2013 has opened up some new possibilities. With railings, you can now schedule and tag their length. Mathew Miller wrote up a great process for documenting Life Safety / Code plans, and you should definitely check it out. Then go follow him on Twitter.
Are you back? Good. Yes, I completely agree – one could simply create a custom railing for the path. I liked this quite a bit, and the more I tried refining it, the more I didn’t like the ability to edit certain aspects. The new component-based railings cannot entirely have all components turned off – there’s always a rail at the overall height of the instance.
I think the best solution I’ve come across thus far, is from one of NBBJ’s own – Kelvin Tam in our Columbus office. It is made from an adaptive component, so the points can be placed manually where needed, and easily adjusted. There’s also some additional benefits to using this method, as you’ll see in my short video. This is a rough draft, and comments are always welcome.
