Tag Archives: Frustration

2013 Stair and Handrail Quirk 2

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As I am setting up my new template for 2013 I will be posting all the little quirks I find so everyone doesn’t have to bang their head on the keyboard as I am doing.

At first glance these tools look great, however once you get into the nuts and bolts of them you will find many different quirks.  Today’s quirk is with the Handrail Type and Top Rail and how they display, or how they don’t display.  One of the values both of these have in common is the capability to have a fillet radius at all the joints.  A really nice feature for this release, however the plan views don’t display them, unless the views’ detail level is set to Fine.  Note this is only for PLAN views, all other views display them correctly.

Be cautious however, because sometimes the top rail will disappear when these are adjusted.  I haven’t found the exact reason why this happens, I am still digging into this issue.

 

I don’t want all of my plan views to display in fine so I wanted to show a Visibility Graphics tip to everyone.  The far right column of the Visibility Graphics dialog box allows for an individual category to be set as desired.  For Rails in 2013 I have set this to be Fine so that all fillets will be displayed in plan views.

 

I also am puzzled at the inconsistency of when rails above are being displayed.  In the image below you can see in the inside handrail is displayed all the way up the stair, however the outside rail disappears at the landing.

If anyone has a solution to any of these quirks please comment and let myself and the world know.

2013 Divided Path Command

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I was working on a layout of a panelized system around a tower, and I was using the new Divided Path commannd.  I found it has a limitation of 200 divisions. At first I thought this was going to be an issue but it made me rethink the shape and I ended up with a better solution anyway.  Just a heads up for everyone trying to use the command.

Revit Schedules Conditional Formatting

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I am a big proponent of using schedules, anyone who knows me has seen me geek out on them.  I also like to use conditional formatting inside of them to help me verify my information is correct.  I did however find a nice bug that came up inside Revit 2013 when using conditional formatting.  In previous releases a conditional format could be used to change the color of another cell, this is where the bug comes in, in 2013 they can only change the color of their own cell.

When trying to check to see if one column is the same as another column I use a Yes/No calculated value to display if the columns match.  This can be done numerous ways this is just the method I prefer.

This way I get a nice Yes or No value in the column line.  Then I can use this value to conditionally format a column(s) to change colors to graphically display if the values match or not.

Which displays the schedule like this…

In 2013 the conditional formatting only works on the cell itself.  In the above picture I am using the Checksum column to change the color of the Occupant Load column, this was done in 2012.  It will upgrade from 2012 and display correctly in 2013, however this can not be done if creating it from scratch.  Autodesk has confirmed this issue and hopefully we will see it fixed in the a future upgrade.  I thought others should be aware of this since I fought with it for an hour before I realized it was a bug…

Plan View Types update

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In a previous post I talked about the new feature in 2013 for Plan View Types, and how they can be duplicated.  I also spoke about the fact that when creating a new Level in Revit 2013 it will generate Structural plans as well, I would like to update this notion a little bit.  When a user creates a new Level it will not only add a Structural plan but any plan type that is in the project, this includes Ceiling Plans as well.  If you decide to update your template and take advantage of this new feature you might want to add Ceiling or Floor to the name.  As you can see I didn’t and now it is hard to know am I creating a floor plan or ceiling plan.

Oh and if Autodesk is reading this will you allow this dialog box to be adjustable.  I am just getting started and I already have a decent sized scroll bar.

Revit 2013 – Temporary Hide Category

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In Revit 2013 View Templates went under a total reconstruct, they are much better in this release, or at least I think so.  One of the major changes was the ability to have views dependent on a view template, so if the view template changes all the views dependent on that template update automatically.  This is a feature that has been asked for many years and to a lot of people is long overdue.

I have one issue with this new feature, if a view is dependent on a view template, the Temporary Hide Category tool is no longer available.  I don’t know if this was by design or if this is an unwanted side effect of something else.  Either way I find this unfortunate, however I wouldn’t trade the new View Template changes to get it back.  If it does bother you the work around is to select all instances of an element then Temporary Hide Element in the view. However this may have to happen several times to accomplish what Temporary Hide Category would do for us.