Tag Archives: Undocumented Feature

Revit Building Pad cut pattern

I had a client as this week how to change the fill pattern line weight for the building pads in his project. I explained to him that Line Weight 1 is reserved for for fill patterns, simply adjust that value and it should adjust all fill patterns. Turns out I was wrong and should not have used the words “all fill patterns”. Building pads in Revit do not follow this rule, the fill patterns line weights are tied to the Object Style Projection line weight (as seen in the image below).

In this clients case he had changed the Projection line weight to be 6, the Out Of The Box template has it set to 1, so during testing I was baffled on why it adjusted with the Line Weight 1 value.

If you know of any other cut fill patterns that don’t abide by the Line weight 1 rule I would love to know about them.

Revit 2022 undocumented feature

I was giving a presentation this week and realized a new small thing that has been fixed (in my opinion it was a bug). If you were in the family editor in 2021 or prior and wanted to move a parameter up and down, sometimes it would be greyed out. This was due to the fact that a group above the parameter selected had been minimized in the Family Types dialog.

Revit 2021 Family Types Dialog with group collapsed

However in Revit 2022 with this same scenario a user is able to move a value if one of the groups above it collapsed.

Revit 2022 Family Types Dialog with group collapsed

Revit 2020 BIM360 Synch with Shared Coordinates .dwg files

When Autodesk introduced their cloud platform BIM360 Docs for Revit (formerly BIM360 Team, formerly A360, formerly Skyscraper). There was an issue where if a linked file using shared coordinates was moved (mostly .dwg files), thus modifying the shared coordinates, the file would fail to synchronize. The user had to use the save command first telling Revit to ether save the “current” position, do not save or disable shared positioning. This was a bug where this dialog box was not allowed not come up during a synchronize process and only during a save process. Well in 2020.2 I can say this is no longer the case. Today I added several .dwg files using shared coordinates and when I went to synch the dialog box popped up. Thus saving me from yelling at Revit and having to go back and save the file first.

Revit 2020 New Parameter Types

In Revit 2020 Autodesk added a new tool for Path of Travel. One undocumented added bonus to this is it added two additional parameter types: Time & Speed. I noticed these when setting up a new template for a client and I was adding in a new Project parameter.

As expected these are also there when creating family parameters.

Of course if this new parameter type shows up for both families and projects then we must be able to set units for them. When going to Project Units there will be options to adjust the settings, which would obviously affect the Path of Travel tool but any custom parameters added using this value.

Off the top of my head I haven’t figured out exactly how to use the values. Originally I had though of contractors being able to add time values to elements but since the units are maximized at Hours not sure how it will work. I then thought of the clock families I have created. I also realized that if the Time value is set to Hours then a user can enter the seconds as 600 s and it will convert to Hours, however the value for minutes is “min” which I can see getting confused with minimum values, or is that a hack for values where you don’t want to type in min after every input (I think that is a terrible idea but that is what came to mind first)

At any rate these are here to experiment with and see what values we can use them for.

Revit 2018 eTransmit to upgrade project files

I have written briefly about advantages to the Autodesk eTransmit for Revit, the 2018 version made a small but significant improvement.  While talking to the Revit Colaboration Team and upgrading a project Kyle had pointed me to this post about upgrading a Project Hub.  The document had a hidden gem in it about the eTransmit tool.  In the 2018 version they added the button “Browse folders …”, previously we could only browse for a single .rvt file.  This button allows a user to upgrade an entire folder.  The files will still have to be opened after the etransmit, such that they can become central models once again.  But the time saved not having to wait for each file to finish only to open another is eliminated.