What You See is NOT What You Get

You’re probably familiar with the acronym WYSIWYG. It’s one of the beauties of Revit, where what you see on screen is what you get in your prints. For the most part, that has been true prior to Revit 2013.

I’m surely late to the game in writing about this and it probably makes this post totally useless, but I suppose if I struggled so much to figure out how to fix the following problem in Revit 2013 and Autodesk Support themselves were unable to point me to the correct Hotfix (being told the usual canned response that the development team is aware of the problem but we cannot tell you when it’ll be fixed yada yada yada, even after pushing back to try get more detail), then I assume some soul out there might benefit from these ramblings too. This has been known for a while as you can see here.

Revit 2013 was no longer acting WYSIWYG when specific conditions were present. If certain elements were behind others that were set to 100% transparent and were totally “blocked” by said elements, then you see them on screen but you don’t get them in print. Bad, very bad, especially for Healthcare documentation and Interiors in general.

As you can see above, I said “on some machines”, but this problem actually affected all machines which were just updated to Update 2 but not with the hotfix.

It turns out in my random testing that my machine and another user’s worked fine and you guessed it…I had updated these manually a looong time ago in an effort to cure other problems with 2013, but forgot all about it (you know, the drawing area jumping into the ribbon? Yeah that one, but this hotfix isn’t so hot for that problem). I finally put 1 + 0.5 + 0.1 + 0.35 + 0.05 = 2 together and figured this hotfix actually worked to resolve the above symptom.

Anyway, I also checked that the recent Update 3 (for OneBox)incorporates this hotfix as well, so just skip it altogether and install Update 3 as fast as you can. There are separate downloads for the stand-alone packages.

I sincerely do appreciate the effort that most give at Autodesk Support when you file a Support Request, but sometimes I just cannot figure out how something like this wasn’t documented properly in their internal system and a conclusive resolution offered right away instead of having to deduce it myself. Oh well, that’s enough from grumpy Dave!

What You See is NOT What You Get

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

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