Plugs

No, this is not about Revit MEP. I just have a bunch of announcements/news items that are probably of interest to the Revit community and want to condense them into one post. I’ve been a bit busy and frankly don’t want to fill your inbox with a ton of infomercials. I receive a lot of “press releases” but don’t want to turn this blog into more spam so, since this is my blog, I get to decide what to post and when! And probably most of you have already heard those from other sources, so here we go…

Apps/Plug-ins/API

Kiwicode’s Family Browser has received some really great upgrades recently (thanks Phillip!). The browser window can now be re-sized without having to enable borders and we can now link families from various folders. I cannot wait to set aside time at work to assemble some custom palettes (favorites of sorts). There is also a Favorites tab where you can add/link families so they are literally at your fingertips. Say you are detailing for the rest of the day: you would use this tab to place the most needed components so you can be fast and productive. It’s a brilliant idea! The search function is also quite snappy now. The first time you click into the box, it indexes the families (takes a few seconds) and then, subsequent searches are almost instant.

As you can tell I’m really excited about these improvements, but in my opinion the best one yet is the revamped insert behavior. Now when you click on a family in the palette, it automatically previews with no need to click in the canvas. A single click places an instance, just like native Revit behavior. And if you click on another family while actively placing other instances, it automatically switches to the new clicked family and you can continue placing the new instances. This is also native Revit behavior and makes this plugin feel like it’s part of the software. These were real sticking points for users in the previous version (from personal experience) and now it feels completely seamless.

Kiwicodes really listens to user feedback. Check out my previous post on this topic and note the list of wishes; they’re almost all implemented and then some!

Steve Faust of Revolution Design has some really great apps too. I just want to mention Keynote Manager and the recent Selection Master. Steve has graciously given me a license for the latter and I plan on writing in more depth about his tools, but wanted to plug them now so you can check them out.

Have you ever had to delete unwanted levels in your project and couldn’t because it would have taken a lifetime to find all the families hosted on them? Thanks to the re-host feature, now you can with Selection Master. This tool is a must-have in every BIM Manager’s arsenal. More on these tools in future posts.

Digipara’s Elevator Architect is another tool I’ve been aware of for a while. Unfortunately I tried using it in a recent project but it has failed me. Due to time constraints I have not had time to troubleshoot in depth, although the authors have been very responsive in trying to collect data. Hopefully in the future we can get to the bottom of the problem and use it successfully. As always I might write more in depth in the future.

Learning Revit (and Vasari)

Renowned author Paul Aubin has a new Revit family building course on Lynda.com. You can read all about it here. If you want to sharpen your family building skills (and you know how important this is), you cannot go wrong using this great resource!

What!?! You don’t know what Vasari is? They are up to version 2.1 on Labs and I really wish I had an extra 10 hours a day to play with the cool features that are not in Revit. If like me you’re finding it hard to keep up with everything and don’t have time to test yet another application, you can go to the newly launched Vasari Talk (yep, another link for your bookmarks!). You can participate in live webinars after signing up, or you can watch past recorded sessions.

Navigating Revit

By now you all know that 3Dconnexion’s devices work with Revit. I have not had a chance to try one yet but it looks like it would be a great tool. In the meantime, they are having a drawing for a trip to Autodesk University in Las Vegas on Nov. 29 – Dec. 1, as well as airfare, accommodations and a SpacePilot PRO 3D mouse. You can click here to enter. And speaking of AU, I was lucky enough to make plans for attending this year (thanks AUGI and PhiloWilke!) and am looking forward to meeting up with some old buddies. See you at the AUGI booth!

Evangelizing Revit (and digital simulation)

Abstract submissions for SimAUD 2012 (the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design) are fast approaching. The upcoming symposium will be in Orlando, Florida and you can find more about it here. You can also go to this link for the proceedings from the past two years.

Plugs

Face Painting in the Family Editor - FIXED!

Following up on my previous post on the topic, the Factory provided a hotfix for this today. You can read all about it courtesy of Kathryn at Revit Clinic. 13 is such a lucky number, isn’t it?!

To use this functionality, create the parameter first in the Family Types dialog. When you then launch the Paint tool, the parameter will be available as a material in the dialog.

Installation of the hotfix is a snap…just copy and paste the dll.

Face Painting in the Family Editor - FIXED!

Immaterial? I don't think so

This is a follow-up post to Immaterial? from almost a year ago. I promised to write about a new method we’re employing in one of my comments but got too busy. Finally I’m getting around to it. Be warned: it’s long.

I originally held off posting to see whether 2012 would bring any solutions on this front but that didn’t happen. At least now the bottom of the Custom Parameters section adjusts with the Materials dialog…hurray!

The least-worst solution I prefer is ugly workaround #1 as mentioned in the previous post. I hit a serious snag while experimenting but finally got through it. I like to refer to this methodology as the Materials sample board concept. Think about your office for a minute: you probably have a vast library of samples. This is analogous to the Materials dialog in your Revit project file. You don’t use all materials in your library in every project, nor do you schedule all materials used in your finish schedule (Ex: insulation, gypsum board, etc.). The same applies to Revit projects. Even assuming every material was actually used in some form or fashion, you’d want to only schedule a select few as finishes, which requires some filtering mechanism.

When crafting office-wide workflows, you have to be careful to keep things simple. This is a hard thing to do when the tools don’t do exactly what you want. So compromise is absolutely necessary in order to arrive to the best-possible solution. It won’t be perfect or satisfy every requirement, but will result in an improvement over how things are done today.

We all understand materials sample boards: designers pick paints, flooring materials, ceilings, glass, cladding, masonry & brick finishes etc. and present them on a board to get client approval. Those materials then find their place in the project, usually within room finish schedules, tagged elevations, etc. So my goal was to extend that concept into Revit. Presentation of those materials was not at all considered as you just cannot achieve that through print.

As discussed before, Revit will only schedule a material if it is used on a placed object. So the starting idea was to place “material swatches” in the project template and make them very difficult/impossible to delete by mistake, without resorting to obtuse ways of concealment such as through worksets, phasing or design options. This was a very important requirement so everything could be pre-set in the template, including the finish schedules. It was also very important to have the same materials used in the material finish schedule as materials in the objects themselves and utilize built-in & custom material parameters to store information that we want to see scheduled such as Manufacturer, Color, Pattern, etc. This would open up possibilities of building material libraries per client and/or project type to be re-used in the future.

Another important requirement was grouping of finishes by surface/object, such as Floor, Walls, etc. Since various materials (such as paints) could be used on different surfaces, it was also essential to have the ability to add unique schedule notes to each material in each application, which meant that this information could not be stored within the material itself. This issue, coupled with concealment methods, turned out to be a head-scratcher.

Material Swatches

The starting point was a simple generic model family that was to be placed multiple times in the template. After several iterations and reasons, it became clear that shared and nested families were required. Each shared “swatch” was nested multiple times into a base family that would represent the application/surface of those materials.

Multiple types were then placed in the template and editing these family types becomes the UI when building the finishes information. Type Comments is used for the schedule sub-headers and Schedule Order is for defining which application order is displayed in the material schedule.

In this example, I have 5 placeholder materials for each application but of course you could add more to suit your needs. Since we have 8 applications, 8 instances were placed in the template. The solid geometry of the swatch family was then set to not be visible and finally reloaded, making them completely invisible and unselectable.

Concealment

Here are some interesting family facts that made all this possible:

• If family geometry is made to not be visible, material take-off schedules still pick up the materials used and properly report quantities (volumes/areas of materials on non-visible solids are excluded). Hence the use of this technique will not skew your take-offs.
• Families are selectable in-canvas even with no visible geometry unless all reference planes are set to “Not a Reference”.

These are the key elements needed to let us place “swatches” to host finish materials and prevent accidental deletion. Note that one can still pick the family in the browser and delete it, but you also get a warning that you’re about to delete “x families”, so it would be a deliberate mistake or done purposefully and not accidentally.

Material Facts

As mentioned in the other post, only the material name can be used in room schedules. Revit does not permit duplicate names so this can be used very effectively as a “Type Mark” since duplication cannot occur. The only hitch is that you cannot rename a material in the schedule: you have to rename it in the Materials dialog.

By using the Material Class, you can isolate the materials that represent finishes to make navigation easier.

In the above picture I’m also highlighting a big shortfall in Revit: the inexistence of multi-value parameters. For example walls in certain rooms often receive multiple finishes: a paint and ceramic tile or FRP panels. My workaround is to create materials whose name represents a group of multiple finishes. This is solely used in room schedules. For the record, this is not something I’m happy about! However there’s no other way to achieve this and when using text parameters, we’re essentially doing the same thing.

The Finishes Schedule

To build a material take-off schedule (for Generic Models) to filter only the materials in the “material sample board”, I simply filtered for shared parameter “Schedule Order” as “parameter exists”, which is also used for sorting the application order (Floors, Base, etc.).

Conclusions

So why all this pain you ask? Well, keep in mind that once this is set in your project template, all it takes is for users to pick the materials and edit as necessary or create new ones. It also opens up the possibility to save material libraries rich with information that can be re-used. Not to mention that with material tags that read the material name, you’ll have flawless coordination with the “type marks” used in your finish material schedule. Room finishes can also utilize these materials in lieu of text parameters, although for multiple finishes you have to resort to the workaround mentioned above. Finally, we also have to make another check: that each finish that shows up in the finish material schedule is actually used in the project since these are manually added. For this purpose we also set up a “checking sheet” that contains a series of filtered schedules to make sure no finishes have been missed or added. Obviously it would be great if things were all automatic, but at this point this is as good as it’s going to get.

Immaterial? I don't think so