Revisions #2

It’s been a while since I posted about the topic so it’s time for an update. Some of the following will echo previous comments but I’ll do my best to add some more substance.

Over the past few releases, managing revisions has become somewhat more…manageable. In pre-Revit 2008 versions, if you needed to create new sheet “sketches” with the updated views, you had to tear the original document set apart by moving views over to new sheets. This made it impossible to then print a “construction set” incorporating all the changes. The introduction of dependant views was a great addition, especially for elevation and section views. Now you could finally keep your main document set intact by placing the dependent views on the new smaller sheets. Any clouding placed in one of the dependent views showed up in the other view, making it possible to reprint the original updated document set.

This brings me to one of the golden rules of revisions in Revit: always cloud in the view, not the sheet! I consider this as a best-practice. Sure you can cloud within the sheet and the revision schedule will pick these up just the same, but if you open a revised view you wouldn’t be able to tell what changed unless you opened the sheet view.

Unfortunately this recommendation does not work for schedules as you have to cloud directly on the sheet. This topic comes up in discussions all the time on the AUGI forums. Just last week I had an encounter with this very issue when new rows were added to some door schedules that already had clouded revisions. Since these clouds have to be on sheets and are independent of the rows themselves, they can easily end up marking the wrong elements as a schedule grows or shrinks in length. This is clearly an area that the developers need to address in the future.

When tagging clouds, I prefer to use an abbreviation that is easy to remember rather than using the sequence number. For example instead of having a tag with a value of “2” which then forces you to look at the revision schedule to find what it corresponds to, I prefer to see “AD1” instead for “Addendum #1”. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in having this preference, however Revit doesn’t give us a dedicated parameter. As a workaround I tend to use the “Issued To” parameter for the abbreviation and then modify the revision tag to report that parameter instead.

In the image above you can also see a revision called “README”. I like to use this to mark areas that require attention or to communicate changes with consultants during design. One can get rid of this at some point but I like to keep it there and use it as a “holding tank” so to speak.

Another thing I find lacking is being able to create a view or drawing (sheet) list and report all revisions per view/sheet. I understand why this isn’t possible as currently Revit doesn’t support multi-value parameters, however it would be a very valuable feature. For example during design, you could have a unique revision for each team member and use clouds to mark up areas of work for each member. It would then be easy to create a view list and sort by revision, thus giving each member a list of views they need to work on.

We can get close to achieving this by using the Current Revision parameter. Obviously this is only possible for a drawing list (sheets) as views don’t have any revision parameters. The Current Revision parameter will report the last placed revision in the sequence on each sheet (assuming numbering is Per Project). So referring to the image above, the Current Revision for that sheet would be Addendum 3. But what if I want to filter for all sheets that have Addendum 1 clouds? The trick is to temporarily shuffle the order of the rows in the above dialog to get the revision you want to filter for at the bottom of the list. So in the above example if you want to list all views that have Addendum 1 clouds, you would move that revision to the bottom of the list and filter for it.

Do I have time for a final wish? Sure, why not! Ok here we go…I want the ability to select a row in the drawing list and click a button to open the relevant sheet, similar to the “Highlight in Model” button available for showing other scheduled elements in the model.

Revisions #2