IMAGINiT Building Solutions Blog

Copy/Monitor Realities - Floors from Link

By Jordan Mussett, IMAGINiT Building Solutions 

Have you ever had a floor look like this because the structural group is responsible for model ownership of the floors?

Or maybe this?

When the floors are in a different model, the Attach Top/Base option isn’t available. Well, it is, there just isn’t anything to attach or join those walls to.

The same problem and solution presents itself with exterior architectural walls that join with structural floors, see detail image above. If the floors are in the Structural Model, they need to be copy / Monitored before the floor material can be taken out of the wall material or vice versa.

So what do you do? One way to deal with this is to Copy/Monitor the floors from the Structural Model. This will allow you to attach your walls to the underside of the floor above, something that is essential for every model. Not only does it make the model look good from the top, it can supply more accurate material takeoffs. Six inches of wall doesn’t seem like a whole lot but when you multiply it times all the walls on a floor for every level, it can amount to quite a bit. BIM models and numbers derived from them are only as accurate as they are modeled.

To Copy/Monitor, go to the Collaborate Tab and find the Copy/Monitor Tool. Select it, then select the Structural Link. To make an accurate copy, go to the Options and copy over the exact same floor or make sure you are matching it up with a floor type in the architectural model with similar material and thickness.

Note: you will need to go into your Visibility Graphic Overrides and turn the floors from Structural off, especially for the exterior wall condition.

Before and after below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might be wondering what will happen with attached walls when I decide to copy / paste aligned to selected levels? These walls are in a group because the building has similar floor plans from the 11th to the 26th floors. The interior walls are all in a group and that group is copied to the other levels. Revit performs admirably and attaches the tops of the walls in the copied group to the corresponding floor. This, however, is assuming that the floor has been Copy/Monitored from Structural and that the floor to floor heights are the same. If the floor to floor heights aren’t the same, the group will copy but the walls will be too short.

Revit Family Type Names Explained

By Jordan Mussett, IMAGINiT Building Solutions

Have you ever edited a family and afterward, your types look something like this? Keeping the original type even though you made two fresh new ones in the Family Editor?

Revit tends to hang onto Family Types until you purge them out. I like to think of it as a defense mechanism of sorts. It keeps you from deleting too much unintentionally.

I’m picking tags for the example here. More specifically, I will be using the Area Tag because I know that by default, this Tag has only one type. When there are no specific types of a Tag, or any family for that matter, the Type Name matches the family name. There will always be at least one type like shown below. The Area Tag has one type by default so it says the same thing in both lines.

I’m going to edit the family and add two extra types. I will start by clicking on one of the existing Tags and clicking Edit Family.

In the Family Editor, I will add two types, Area Tag w Comment and Area Tag w Area Type. The details of creating Tag Labels with appropriate visibility parameters is a topic for another time. I will load the Tag back into the project and choose “Overwrite existing version and its parameter values”. For the purposes of the Tag editing example, the option picked here doesn’t matter.

The main burning question is, how do I get rid of the extra line item here in the drop down? 

This is where the Purge Tool comes in. It is on the Manage Tab on the Settings Panel. 

You will need to use this to purge the extra Type out. The first thing I do in the dialogue is click “Check None”. If you do not click this button, everything that isn’t being used in the project currently will be gone. That means Wall Types, Title Blocks, Tags, Line Types, Text Styles, you name it. It can be very dangerous. We are looking for a specific target, so I will navigate to Annotation Symbols (Tags), find the one I no longer want, and click "ok".

This should get rid of your extraneous Family Type and leave you with only the Types you want.