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

More on Keynotes

This is a quick follow-up post to this one on the topic of keynotes. I have to confess that this is one of my least favorite tools in Revit. Not because of the potential of using keynotes in documentation, but because of the overall lackluster implementation in Revit, which tends to leave a lot of holes in the workflow.

We have also been plagued by too many visibility and collateral issues in the past:

• Pre-Revit 2013, keynotes didn’t work properly in dependent views (never posted here about it after reporting the issue, but it was resolved in Revit 2013);
• Borrowing of Sheet Worksets when keynoting elements in Linked Files as explained here at the Revit Clinic in pre-Revit 2014. This has been addressed in the current release as explained here, which is my primary reason for upgrading existing projects to 2014;
• Besides the visibility issue noted in my previous post, keynotes buried in design options, even if not visible in the view due to V/G settings, still schedule in the Keynote Legend (thanks to Trey Klein for this one!);

I’m sure there are other issues, such as the inability for multiple users to edit the keynote text file, API limitations that prevent developers of Keynote plugins to reload a modified keynote text file as soon as it is modified, and the list goes on.

Steve Stafford has a very good post on the topic if you’re into using this functionality. My biggest point of contention with keynotes is the over-use of User Keynotes, which increase “laziness” in updating Revit families in content libraries to actually include keynote information and discourage abiding with firm standards (assuming they exist). There are instances where keynotes need to be placed on the fly such as in addition & renovation projects containing demo plans, where you’re mostly assigning “actions” to collections of elements rather than definitions/”nouns” to singular elements. However in most cases, I encourage users to first assign a keynote value to their families, and then place Element Keynotes instead.

If you’re a heavy keynote user, you absolutely have to use a plugin. Mr. Stafford references a very good one by Steve Faust of Revolution Design, called Keynote Manager. I believe this is the first plugin ever built to address keynoting inefficiencies and is nowadays a very mature and full-featured product. I have been toying around with another one recently from KiwiCodes called Keynote Browser. It is still not as fine-tuned as the Keynote Manager, but could be a slightly cheaper alternative if you don’t need as much functionality, although at the moment Steve’s solution is much more solid and reliable.

More on Keynotes

Phantom Keynotes

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

We have had several users report that some items in Keynote Legends could not be tracked down in any sheet view, even after verifying that keynoting default settings are correct. This issue had me scratching my head for a while until I figured out what was going on.

Here’s a typical scenario where this could occur: You have a core & shell project that was documented and under construction and the model gets copied as a new project for the Tenant build-out phase. As the model cleanup process commences, users start reporting that they cannot find some keynotes that are being reported on the legend.

While troubleshooting, I noticed that when enabling the view's underlay, the phantom keynotes showed up together with the tagged elements, which then led me to tweak the view range and ultimately discover how these project files were started and what the root of the problem was: when the view range was adjusted, keynoted elements were no longer visible, but still reported in the Keynote Legend. As you can see in the image below, a plumbing fixture was keynoted and properly listed in the legend:

In another view, the cut plane and top plane were lowered until the element and keynote were no longer visible in the view::

In the above image, you can also observe that right-clicking the family type also reveals that the object is not visible in the view, yet it reports in the legend. Note that hiding the element and/or tag in the view makes the legend update accordingly, but in the above example the legend is misreporting.

This has been confirmed as a bug and slated for a future fix. In the meantime, please be careful and use this example to help in your troubleshooting efforts.

Phantom Keynotes