Category Archives: Revit

Revit Posts

Schooled by the Spouse

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Dezi was writing an article for AUGIWorld about Revit Structure basics and I was helping with the screen captures.  It is amazing how many tips you learn from the spouse when one of you is writing a technical article.  Just as amazing is how upset you get at that same person for not telling you these tips in the past during one of the many many Revit conversations.

Anyway what I learned from her was that the ribbon tabs in Revit can actually be moved, simply by holding the CTRL key down and dragging the tab.  I don’t recommend moving all the tabs around but if your interface looked like mine and you have several add ins installed which create there own tabs the modify tab gets pretty far off the screen.  I can now stop complaining about this and simply move my Modify tab in front of all those other tabs that have been created.

Rotating Crop Regions

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While working with a client this evening (yes on a Friday night…. my name is Revit Geek after all) we discovered something I didn’t know.  If you have ever tried to rotate a crop region and the rotate command is greyed out, that is because your view is set to True North.  Apparently crop regions can only be rotated when the view is set to Project North.  This did make sense once I thought about it, if your view is set to True North why would you want to rotate it away from that.  If you are wondering why we were trying to rotate the crop region it was due to the fact that the plan didn’t fit on the sheet.  If you use the “Rotation on Sheet” value the view title rotates with the view.  However if you rotate the crop region in the original view then it is rotated on the sheet and the view title remains in its’ normal location.

Roof Overhang Values

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A question came up on Revit Radio yesterday that I thought would make a good post.  The question was about roof overhangs and how to control if the distance is measured from the face of the wall or the wall studs (wall core in the Revit world).  The first thing to clarify is that everything I am showing is ONLY true if you use the Pick Wall button instead of just drawing lines while inside of sketch mode.  I use pick walls because if the wall moves then the edge of the roof will move with it and maintain the overhang value.

So how does Revit determine where to set the overhang value if you use Pick Walls?  In the Options bar next to the overhang value there is a check box for “Extend to wall core”, when this is selected the overhange value is taken from the face of the core, if this remains unchecked then the overhang is determined from the finish face of the wall.Then the question came up what if I want it to have a birds mouth notch?  There is a setting for this too.  In the properties of the roof there is an option for Rafter or Truss, if the value is Truss (default option and shown above) then the roof starts on the exterior face, if the option is Rafter the roof is set to the inside face.

These explanations seemed to answer the question, let me know if it didn’t clarify things for you.

Wall location lines

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So a post over at Linked In today got me thinking about walls.  When I have clients start off a project they usually start with some sort of generic wall type, then as the project develops the walls get changed out to be something a bit more specific.  Not everyone knows that when a wall type is changed it looks to the location line to know where to adjust from.  So if you change a wall and its’ location line is Wall Centerline then it will grow or shrink equally on each side, if the location line is Finish Face Exterior then it will grow completely to the inside.

When changing the exterior walls that need to grow to the inside. Select all the walls that need changing and change the location line appropriately.  This way it isn’t a crap shoot to find out if they moved in, out or equally.  When changing  all of one wall type, use the “Select All Instances >> In Entire Project” tool to speed up the process.

Revit Floors Room Bounding

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On Monday Steve Stafford posetd about how finish floors can do bad things when passing a model off to the MEP consultants.   I have also seen this cause issues when the architects go to tag their rooms and and the tag won’t display the room information.  The same situation is true as Steve had posted, all finish floors should be non “Room Bouding” in the Revit model.

As a good practice I will have architects set the “Function” to all finish floors to be Interior.

Now that this is set I will create a “Filter” so that it’s “Funtion – does not equal – Interior”.  Then I apply this filter to a 3D view where I turn off the visibility of the filter and only have floors displayed.  Now I can just select all the floors in the view and turn off  the Room Bounding check mark.