Phantom Keynotes 2.0

Summer is here and life’s getting very busy, long vacation is over (sadly), now it’s time to get back in the swing of things! I just realized I missed re-posting something on Keynotes and Legends, so here we go…more to come, stay tuned.

NOTE: This is a re-post from the HOK BIM Solutions blog

I posted about this topic in the past (see Phantom Keynotes) and it seems that we keep finding issues with Keynote Legends reporting keynotes that don’t seem to exist in the view. I have also written a follow-up post (see More on Keynotes) to discuss other visibility issues and other problems related to this functionality and the current User Interaction shortfalls. Recently some Electrical users pointed me to additional instances of misreporting by Keynote Legends, so this post will summarize those findings. These can be reproduced in Revit 2015.

1. If the Annotation Crop Region is not enabled, keynotes attached to objects that lie outside the model crop region are still reported, which is completely unexpected. The result is the same whether you use Element Keynotes or User Keynotes. The expected behavior should be that if keynoted objects lie outside of the model crop region, those keynotes should not appear in the legend, regardless of whether the annotation crop region is enabled or disabled.
2. Another instance of Phantom Keynotes occurs with keynoted elements in close proximity to the view’s model crop region. This issue is exacerbated even more when the tags are far from the objects they are attached to. With the Annotation Crop Region enabled, the keynote still appears in the legend unless the boundary of the Annotation Crop region touches the edge of the keynote annotation. This is completely unexpected and the following series of images illustrate the problem:

 

If the Model and Annotation Crop Regions are adjusted such that both the model element and the keynote tag lie outside these boundaries, the legend will rightly not report that keynote:

However the Keynote Legend will still incorrectly report the keynote if only the model element is outside of the Model Crop Region, but the Keynote Tag is within the Annotation Crop Region (the legend is actually only concerned about the tag, not the model element):

 

Please be very careful when using this functionality and double check your work (don’t assume that the Keynote Legend will hide unrelated keynotes for you!). The only workaround at the moment is to pick the keynote tags that shouldn’t be listed in the legend and manually hide them in the view, which is a very ugly workaround. The following process needs to be followed for each view:

1. Select all instances of the keynote tag in the project;
2. Remove all keynote tags visible in the view from the selection;
3. Right-Click and Hide all instances in the view.

The desired and expected Keynote Legend filtering is as follows:

• If the keynoted model element is not visible in the view and as a consequence the tag is also not visible, do not report it;
• If the Keynote Tag is not visible because it is manually hidden in the view or because it touches or is outside the Annotation Crop Region, do not report it.

Phantom Keynotes 2.0

Multi-Disciplinary View Coordination

Back in 2008 I posted a response to an AUGI thread which contains tips that are still relevant to this day and might be unknown to some users. So I thought of echoing it out here.

The main question was about what the best process is to ensure that view extents (ex: plans) are coordinated between different sheets and different disciplines. The discussion then centered on Scope Boxes:

“When you create a scope box, it's just like drawing a rectangle in plan. You can specify a height too (that's why it's a scope box and not rectangle!). Make sure you give it a good descriptive name (Ex: Area 'A'). You can then go to a plan view's properties and under Extents, assign the Scope Box that defines the area you want to see. The crop region will automatically coincide with the scope box. In fact to change the crop region, you now have to modify the scope box by moving the drag handles and the crop region will follow.
So for a large project, the workflow would be as follows:

1. In an overall plan view, place scope boxes to "chop" your plan in meaningful pieces so it fits on your drawing sheets. Name them accordingly and place any matchlines and view references here;
2. Create dependent views (let's say you have 5 plan areas....create 5 dependent views and we'll assign them to the 5 scope boxes created in step (1));
3. Go to each dependent view, name it something meaningful (ex: Area 'A') and assign the appropriate scope box to it. You can turn off scope box visibility to remove clutter as you typically overlap scope boxes so you can show some context (you have to do this to properly use matchlines);
4. If you want to make changes to the crop region, always go to the parent view, turn on scope boxes or use the Reveal Hidden Elements button (if scope boxes were hidden, they'll become visible in magenta)....you can now modify them and when you're done, click on the Reveal Hidden Elements button once again and they'll go away or hide the category. Your crop regions would have automatically followed the changes in your scope boxes;
5. The above is done typically by Architectural. Now consultants just link in as usual, they set a plan view that shows the scope boxes, match lines and view references (perhaps set to "By Linked View" to facilitate this) and copy all these elements into their project file. You do that by tabbing until the object in the link is highligted, then copy and paste in the same location*. Now you just need to carry on from step (2) once you have the same scope boxes residing in your project.”

* As Steve Stafford noted in the thread, scope boxes tend to paste exactly in the same spot automatically, regardless of the paste option picked.

Multi-Disciplinary View Coordination

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

My Second Revit Project - Part 4

It's been a while since I posted about the latest project that I've been working on for a while now. Below are some images from last week. There's still work to be done (the weather has NOT helped) but hopefully it will be finished by the end of the year. The last major work consists of demolishing some existing parts during Thanksgiving and then the staff and students will move into the new parts of the building.

It is pretty enlightening to follow a job in construction. Regardless of how many drawings you crank out and how carefully detailed something is, you're still at the mercy of how someone interprets notes/markings on a submittal (or whatever mood they woke up in that day!). Sometimes it feels like there's not enough leadership at the subcontractor level and no amount of hand-holding from the contractor side (superintendent and PM) or the Architect is enough. But I'm finding that by maintaining a collaborative spirit, being nice, understanding and firm, you can take care of the Project and help steer it in the right direction.

We're currently helping our client by creating Evacuation maps for occupied spaces. Revit comes in really handy for this task. Here's a snapshot of one such map (the screen color is off, but the printed output is correct!):

Here are some tips about the tools and techniques used:

1. An Annotation family was created to manage the graphic border layout, title and legend (title block).
2. A floor plan view was created and the appropriate categories were left visible. Everything was set to halftone with the exception of rooms.
3. A color scheme was applied (for Area, By Range set to be at least 1SF). This made all rooms show solid with the orange color we wanted.
4. A Filled Region was applied around the building to make it pop more.
5. The exit paths were drafted in the sheet view after setting two unique line styles.
6. Multiple plans were created by Duplicating as Dependent and placed on sheets (with no View Title). Room fills were controlled by overriding visibility in each view. The Reveal Hidden Elements tool made it easy to un-hide one room at a time for each plan view and hide other irrelevant rooms.
7. An empty sheet was kept handy in the Project Browser with nothing but a title block. To create a new sheet, I simply selected the sheet in the Project Browser and used the copy & paste keystrokes to duplicate the sheet (thanks Luigi for reminding me of this tip!).
8. The Project Browser was filtered to display only these views and sheets, making it easier to work on this particular task.
9. When one area of the building was complete, I used a recently added feature to position a new area on a sheet: Pan Active View by activating the view, selecting the crop region, right-clicking on it and selecting Pan Active View. This is similar to just moving the crop region around, but I found panning the view within the crop to be more user-friendly for this task. This function is only available for views placed on sheets.
10. I'm up to 55 sheets created with about 12 to go, but interestingly enough, the file only gained about 1MB in size!

My Second Revit Project - Part 4

Crop Regions - subtle change

This would probably make the cut for Steve's "Department of Subtle".

Over the last few weeks, while helping a team on a Revit Architecture 2009 project, I noticed that crop regions in plan views did not have drag handles. I couldn't figure out what was going on and made a note to try and get to the bottom of it.

Today I was showing someone how to use scope boxes...what they're intended for, blah blah blah, and how to assign a scope box to a view in the properties, thus automatically adjusting the crop region extents to those of the scope box. And then, epiphany...

I noticed that once a view is assigned to a scope box and the crop region extents are then determined by that scope box, the crop region ceases to show drag handles.

In previous versions, drag handles still showed up in this situation and when you tried resizing the crop region of such a view, the extents would return to their original position, puzzling a lot of users in the process! Here's what it used to look like (similar to crop regions of views not assigned to a scope box).

It might seem trivial to some, but I really like this little change. This makes it clearer that you have to modify the scope box if you want to control the crop region extents.

Crop Regions - subtle change