Minutia - Design Options glitch

I stumbled across this today during a training session on Design Options. It seems to be more of a "glitch" than a bug. Here's what transpired...

I had two plan views (called Option 1 and Option 2). Some walls were part of the Main Model while a couple others were part of Option 1 and Option 2. At one point I was explaining how you can set a design option to be the primary option and accept it, which would then delete all the elements belonging to "rejected" options. Revit also pops up a dialog prompting you to delete all views that were assigned to these design options, but also gives you the opportunity to uncheck some/all of them. So I tried this...unchecked all views and clicked Delete. The design options went away since I only had one Option Set, but now the plan view that was set to the "rejected" option set did not update. Click the link below for a video clip (no audio):

Design Options Glitch

But don't panic! There are two ways to nudge Revit into coming to its senses. Either enter and exit the Reveal Hidden Elements mode and the missing elements return in that view, or simply close the file (remember to save it first!) and then re-open and things start working properly once again.

Minutia - Design Options glitch

Floors and Color Schemes

Prior to Revit Architecture (RAC) 2008, when one added a Color Scheme to a floor plan view (back then it was termed as a Color Fill), if Floor visibility was turned on, Revit would issue a warning and turn it off for you so the colors would display correctly. This meant that in some cases, the “correctness” of the plan representation would be compromised.

To illustrate, imagine you have a colored floor plan on Level 2. There is an opening in the floor slab and a stair goes down through it. The last few steps leading to the first floor are covered by the slab above (the opening doesn’t go the entire length of the stairs).

Since Revit wanted you to turn floor visibility off, you would see the entire stair run, which is incorrect. The last few steps (shown dashed in the image above) are supposed to be hidden, so the workaround for this situation was to hide the last few steps by placing a filled region with the same solid color fill as your floor plan space.

In RAC 2008, we now have “Color Schemes” and Revit no longer turns off Floor visibility. But hold on…don’t get too excited! Unfortunately, there is a bug, which is known by Autodesk (and hopefully we’ll see a fix sometime in a future release).

Even though the floor is visible, it is in some state of “transparency”. The last few steps show through the slab. Notice also how the continuous wall on the level below shows through too, indicating the floor has become transparent. Notice how the grey wall color shows through the surface pattern of the slab, which is another indicator that the slab has become transparent. Surface patterns seem to display just fine but if a color was assigned to the floor material and the view was set to Shaded, this color is not displayed (compare to the first image).

The above image shows a color scheme set with the option “foreground”. If the option “background” was enabled, the floor area at the steps would not be colored correctly, as shown in the image below. So how do we fix it you might ask? The linework tool? No, actually that doesn’t work on this portion of ths stairs. Somehow it seems that Revit knows this shouldn’t be displayed and the linework tool does not “see” these lines.

So the same workaround as in previous versions of Revit still applies….head for the filled region! (the floor surface pattern was left visible so you can see where the filled region is located).

Floors and Color Schemes