Revit Server is Desktop no more

Well, we finally gave up. Reluctantly.

Our Windows 7 setup seemed to be working just fine. However we were plagued by Revit crashes following a successful synchronization with central at the location connected to the Local server. At first we thought bandwidth was to blame so we upgraded our connections by installing business cable at the location with the least bandwidth, fully dedicated to Revit Server to Server traffic (2Mbps up, 12Mbps down). We left the previous connection in place to other uses such as VoIP, VPN, etc. In the main office we left the bonded T3 (3Mbps up, 3Mbps down) alone but removed traffic shaping to make sure Revit Server received maximum capacity.We also configured the Revit Servers with their own public IP address so traffic was outside of VPN and thus not slowed down by encryption. The servers are protected and not accessible from outside the network through various router rules and protection safeguards.

Unfortunately this did not eliminate crashing at the user’s desktop. Our next experiment was to switch the Central and Local servers around to see what effect this would have (not the physical machines). We ended up with the Local server in our main office with around 6 people working on server-based projects and 2 at the remote location saving directly to the Central server. Through our upgraded connection, we could now create central files through the Local server, which was not possible in the past. So we know that at least bandwidth cured that issue. The crashing unfortunately followed the Local server and users in the main office started experiencing this crashing following a successful SWC, 90% of the time. Go figure.

Our next step was to install Windows Server 2008 SP2. We did this on the Local server first. Lo and behold, the crashing ceased even with the central server still running Windows 7! At this point we don’t know exactly why this is happening and gave up on our endeavor. We still think Windows 7 should do the job but somehow, there’s some setting somewhere that is causing Revit to blow up. Or maybe WS2008 is more efficient at handling limited resources such as RAM? But why would Revit crash, with no debugging info. available?The machines we’re using as servers are low on RAM so who knows? The journals do not point at the culprit and Revit mysteriously crashes after successful saves (servers keep running fine, projects do not corrupt and the Revit Server administrator reports the saves are successful), so at this point we bow our heads and wave the white flag. Bummer.

Revit Server is Desktop no more

Face Painting in the Family Editor

You might recall Steven Campbell’s post Revit Families: To Split or Not to Split… (no, this isn’t his photo. I know, he’s in hibernation at the moment or so it seems). I honestly was unaware of that hidden feature until his article as in the past, I habitually just assigned material parameters directly to solids and never thought of face painting as a parametric option.
Unfortunately in Revit 2012, we lost that ability with the arrival of the new UI that gives us a visual palette of materials when painting surfaces. I really hope we’ll get it back in the upcoming service pack. The functionality is still there as families upgraded to Revit 2012 function properly. However if you “unpaint” the surface, you won’t be apple to re-apply the material parameter. So in the meantime if you need this functionality, start your family in 2011 and upgrade it once you’re done.

EDIT: This has since been fixed through this HotFix. Thanks Factory!

Face Painting in the Family Editor

Subtlety - Crop Region

Here’s one for Steve’s Department of Subtle. Prior to Revit 2012, when you assigned a scope box to a view and the crop region adjusted based on that, the view control bar still showed the crop region icon as follows:

When a view is assigned to a scope box however, you cannot disable the crop region, even though the icon leads you to believe you could (and so does the properties palette). I have no doubt this confused some users, myself included.

To make matters worse, if the crop region was “disabled” and then you removed the scope box from being assigned to the view, the crop was still in effect. To get it to function properly, you had to re-enable it and disable it once again.

In Revit 2012, the crop icon is now greyed out if a scope box is assigned to a view in both the view control bar and the properties palette. I think these subtle changes help users realize why those shape handles are missing from the crop region!

Now once you remove the scope box, these controls are enabled and with one more click, the crop region can be disabled. Thanks Factory!

Subtlety - Crop Region

Missing panels in contextual Modify tab

This has been happening sporadically in Revit 2011 and I believe it’s been fixed in 2012. Basically you would be editing a profile sketch such as a wall through Edit Profile, you switch your view to a standalone RFA family and upon switching back to the project environment, the contextual panels disappear and the contextual Modify tab switches to the usual Modify tab only, leaving you stuck in sketch mode with no apparent way back to the project.

The first way out is through assigning a keyboard shortcut for Finish Edit Mode: all 8 of them in 2011 (and 9 in 2012!). Honestly, I think there should only be one as the user doesn’t care which particular sketch mode is active: they just want to learn one shortcut that gives them the ability to finish any sketch mode. I sympathize with the technical reasons why there’s more than one, but if that is truly necessary, why make them look identical with no way to distinguish them except through endless hours of trial end error?

The second method makes the panels reappear so you can continue editing the sketch or finish/discard; here’s how you do it:

1. Start a new family, pick any one;
2. Load it into your project;
3. Once you get the error that it cannot be placed in this mode, hit Ctrl+z to undo.

For some reason the panels come back. Obviously, do not switch back to the open families or you’ll lose them again! This has happened to me several times now, especially when I open a profile family to “steal” the linework and paste it into the profile sketch of a wall. So if this happens again in 2012 in one of the 9 sketch modes, one of these methods might help you get out of a bind.

Missing panels in contextual Modify tab

It's not me; It's you!

After a year or more working in a certain version of Revit, it is natural to notice subtle changes when switching to a newer one. So it comes as no surprise that I’ve been noticing how difficult it is in Revit 2012 (even with SP1) to select something. I’ve had other users point out the same thing so I don’t think I’m losing my mind just yet. What’s up with that?

When hovering over objects, they used to pre-highlight seamlessly but in 2012, this seems to have broken down. I wonder if this is a side-effect of the new solid color you get when selecting something, or perhaps the ghosting functionality? Who knows…it’s really annoying and I hope it gets fixed soon!

Edit: Seems that this issue is specific to HD 3000 on-processor graphics on the second generation Intel chips (i7) and also coupled with curtain walls used for tilt-up walls (basic walls used for panels). The combination of these made things very weird when pre-highlighting but it seems that disabling hardware acceleration helps reduce the problems.

It's not me; It's you!

More API goodies

This is yet another subject I’ve been meaning to write about for some time now. Advanced Solutions’ BIMAssist is another set of tools made possible through the ever-expanding Revit API. I got very excited watching the video of the new feature “Room Surface Parameter Extractor”, which is not part of the tools available in IMAGINiT’s Utilities for Revit. It’s nice to actually see different tools packaged by each of these companies. Their main target audience however is their subscribers, and from what I’ve seen over the last years, pricing for non-subscribers could easily make Anderson Cooper’s The RiDicULiST.

The BIMAssist page contains video clips of each feature, which is probably what convinced me to try it. It was a period when I was struggling with finding an acceptable compromise (recently, the word of the day in politics) to documenting finish materials in Revit. Which reminds me that I really need to post my wrap-up thoughts on the subject from almost a year ago, but back to the subject…you can go and see each one for yourself.

My testing experience was somewhat conflicted. It took forever to get the 30 day trial license to function. And tanks to a busy schedule, it expired before I finished my testing, however they were extremely helpful in extending the license, so thanks a lot for that!

Unfortunately I was not as excited once I found out exactly how the room surface parameter extractor worked. Rather than bore you with a lot of writing, here is my list of notes I jotted down:

• Door Mark Manager: Numbers doors based on the To/From Room number;
• Project Cleaner is a very nice tool to have. Useful when sharing a 3d model and you want to make it lighter or remove sheets, views etc. without having to do it the manual way (such as grouping and saving out the group or linking the project into a new file and binding it);
• Sheet Number update: Also quite nice when you need to renumber sheets without having to do it the long way (we usually have to rename it twice if the final sheet number is already in use: append a suffix, renumber the other sheet and renumber again by removing the suffix);
• Fire Rating Coordinator: I was excited at first about this tool, but as I read the help, all excitement faded and turned to disappointment. This tool is making the wrong assumption that the door fire-rating will be the same as the partition fire-rating: Wrong! Take a look at (for example) IBC 2009 Table 715.4 and you'll notice only a handful of situations where that holds true. Also notice the importance of the partition/wall type: The fire-rating alone does not tell the whole story. So a 1 hour wall can mean a 1hr, 45min. or 20min. door depending on whether the wall is a Fire Barrier, a Shaft Enclosure/Exit Passageway, and Exterior wall or a Smoke Barrier. Clearly this tool does not address any of these issues;
• Room Surface Parameter Extractor: I had really high hopes for this tool and was very excited. Unfortunately
  I'm a bit disappointed after testing:
• Painted materials are not recognized. This is a big issue because creating unique wall types just to designate different colors is just not the way to go. This tool should be able to read the materials on the surfaces around the room and not just the ones in the definition of the element;
• Only the material name is reported; why not give the user the ability to report certain material parameters instead, such as Type Mark? I also tried doing a thin finish floor above the floor slab and it worked if there was only one floor (finish) in the room. However if you had 2 floor finishes, there's no way to list only the finish materials of just those floors. The option "Comma Delimited List" in "Surface To Use" ends up reporting all the floor layers, which is not what we would expect of a “surface extractor”. I also found it to be a bit slow when running, even if I selected just one room.

Anyway, if you want to see these tools for yourself, you can participate in a free webinar coming up this Wednesday 10th August.

While we’re talking of tools, make sure to visit the ADN Plugin of the Month page at the Autodesk Labs site, where various tools are made available for free in exchange for user feedback. For example there is a Door and Room renumber tool that I find very easy to use, and recently they released another handy one called eTransmit. Finally, Jochen of b.i.m.m released the updated tools for the Revit 2012 version, so be sure to check those out too. So many tools, so little time to keep up with them all!

More API goodies

Details (where the Devil is)

Are you still spending countless hours detailing your Revit projects? What if you could find most of the details in native Revit files, properly built with detail components linked to Building Product Manufacturers (BPM) in a library of (currently) 125,925 drafting views organized nicely and very easy to preview and navigate through? Oh, and did I forget to mention it’s for free to the user?? Sounds like a pretty good deal to me!

Mark Siever of ARCxl has successfully transformed this venture from being a fee-based service for the end user into a totally free service thanks to the involvement of BPMs through direct links to their product offerings. Now I know that most firms will have something to say about how this and that looks and how they don’t fit their standards, etc., but keep in mind that with these details you get very close to the end goal much faster than starting from scratch. I really think you should create an account, take a peek and see for yourself.

Details (where the Devil is)