IMAGINiT Building Solutions Blog

Precise Placement of Revit Sections

Revit's inability to snap or manually align annotation object have long been a frustration to those that have adopted Revit. Jordan Musset shares a little secret that he likes to use with sections for precise placement.

Sections can be a little finicky in terms of being able to place them exactly where you want them. A technique to place them where you want them is as follows. If the section is to be placed exactly in the middle of the expansion joint, follow these steps.

Sections will not use detail lines as a reference and it is difficult to move sections into place after they have already been created. Mostly because the snaps don't always pick up pertinent references within them. Draw a reference plane that is placed specifically where you want the section.

After that, place the section with two clicks, making the two clicks the beginning and end reference of the reference plane. Now the section is placed exactly where intended. Also recommended, delete the reference plane and pin the section in place.

Right Reading Text Labels

This week Jordan Mussett tackles the issue with text labels in hosted content.

There is a short list of families in Revit that you will need to host to the face of either a ceiling or a wall. A good example of this is smoke detectors. Depending on where they are, they can call for either a vertical face or a horizontal face. The problem comes in when there is a text annotation buried into the family. The one to the left below is hosted to the wall at 8'-0" off the floor, the one on the right is using the face of the ceiling at 9'-0" off the floor.

If this text is to read the same direction, there is some work that needs to be done in the Family Editor. First, save this family using a different name if you would like to preserve the integrity of the original or if you aren't 100% sure it will work, it is good to have a backup. Next, copy the Generic Annotation that is there and rotate it 90 degrees. Align and lock to the vertical Reference Plane. The original label us up-side-down because the intent of this family originally is that it be placed on the ceiling, the generic annotation label will right itself in the respective views in the project.

Next, visibility instance parameters are needed to display one or the other depending on if it is using the wall face or the ceiling face.

Load it back in to the project. Change the two original ones to the new family just created and set the instance visibility parameters.

IMAGINiT's RENDERiT contest!

It's baaaaack!

We're hosting our rendering contest again with some really neat prizes. All you need to do is upload your best rendering to the contest site. From there, we'll share your design rendering across our social networks and encourage you to do the same. Share our contest gallery in all posts to drive people back to our voting platform where they can show their support and vote for the design they think is the coolest.

Why do you want to share your rendering and this contest across your social network? Each voter will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a $100 Apple gift card!

Voting will end on October 7, 2014 and the designer who submits the rendering that receives the most votes will win a MakerBot Replicator Mini 3D Printer! 

Second Place is a Polaroid Socialmatic.

Third Prize is a Pebble Steel Smartwatch.

Click here to get to our facebook site for the contest and get all the extra details.

... and have fun!

-joe

View Titles for Views Rotated on the Sheet

Have you ever rotated a Revit view on your sheet? Those pesky View Titles rotate as well. Jordan shows us how to keep them horizontal on our sheets.

The problem; you rotated your view 90 degrees but you want your view title to stay horizontal.

Scroll down the list of families in the project and under Annotation there will be the family View Title. Right Click on it and say Edit.

In the Family Editor, save it as a new View Title so that you retain your current view title. Turn on the reference planes in the Visibility / Graphic Overrides, select all three items. Rotate these items opposite of what you think to offset the rotation of the view. So if you are rotating the view on the sheet 90 degrees counterclockwise, you have to create a view title with these three items rotated 90 degrees Clockwise. You are counteracting the rotation of the view on the sheet to keep the view title horizontal. Be sure to uncheck "Keep Readable" under the instance properties of the text labels or Revit will try to make the text read up the page, not down. When rotating the number and the titles 90 degrees clockwise, it will flip everything around trying to keep it legible.

Load the family into the project. Select your current View Title, click Edit Type, and duplicate. For the new one, name it appropriately and next to Title under graphics, select the new view title that you created. Be sure to uncheck Show Extension Line. If you would like a line to show between the View Title and the scale, you will need to draw your own in the Family.

The bad news, you will need to follow the same process for views rotated the other direction. The positive, the view scale and Detail Number are retained and you can let Revit manage those pieces of information.

Dimensioning Tip in Revit

 

Creating angled dimension in Revit. Sometimes you got to do it.

But picking those points can be really paint and what's even more painful is trying to teach someone else how to do it. "put your curser at the corner NO! don't more it, then it tab, again, again, again, oh that's too many".

 

Just hold SHIFT then hit TAB, it will only pick up Points to create the dimension.

The Factory is back... and telling time with Sundial?

One of your other favorite blogs has resurfaced - Autodesk's Inside the Factory blog went into hibernation a couple of years ago and just yesterday woke up from its long slumber.

Take a gander and welcome them back!

http://insidethefactory.typepad.com/

Revit Origin and Exporting to AutoCAD

This week our own Jordan Mussett explains using the Project Base Point in Revit to export AutoCAD background drawings.

Many Revit users get themselves in hot water when it comes to providing consultants and sub consultants with AutoCAD Backgrounds. In the images below, the Project Base Point does represent the 0,0 point in AutoCAD.

At its simplest, Revit has a point that it doesn't tell you about. There is the Project Base Point, the Survey Point, and what I like to call the original origin. The original origin reveals itself in the following way. When the Project Base point is unclipped and moved, the 0,0 point in AutoCAD is now where the Project Base Point was. Another way to look at is, if the Project Base Point is unclipped and moved, the 0,0 point in the AutoCAD export is now different than where the Project Base Point is in Revit. This is going to be something that more likely than not, the consultants are going to point out to you by asking, why is 0,0 over here? In the pictures below, the Project Base Point was unclipped and moved. In AutoCAD, the 0,0 point stayed where it was.

So what is the safe practice? At the outset of a project, turn the Project Base Point on and use this point as your intersection of two grids preferably at the corner of the building and go from there. That way everyone linking origin to origin will be good to go and everyone receiving AutoCAD exports will be seeing a 0,0 point at the intersection of two grid lines.