Tag Archives: Quirk

Wall Vertical Structure Grayed Out

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While assisting a client I was showing them how to create a vertically compound wall the only tools available to me where Sweeps and Reveals.  Modify, Merge Regions, Assign Layers and Split Region were grayed out.  I had the section preview active in the dialog so this wasn’t the issue.

Camera View Limitation 1

I usually modify families by selecting them in the Project Browser and not selecting them on the screen.  In this case this was my downfall, I hadn’t noticed that amongst all the tiled views on the screen the active one was a camera (perspective) view.  A well known fact is that there are many limitations while having a camera view active.  For instance having a camera view active will limit the capability to activate a Revit Addin or Extension.  Having access to only a couple of the vertical structure modification tools was a new one to me.

Revit 2016 R2 Background Process Calculation Failed

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Yesterday I did a post on the new feature for calculation processes, ironically later in the day I had a failure with this same feature, nice timing for a follow up post.  One of my clients was working away in a view and the Background Process dialog box opened up with the warning “Color Fills calculation failed”.  Which is odd because the work we were doing in the view shouldn’t have made the color fills be regenerated.

2016 R2 Background Processes Calculation Fail

I then opened the file on an additional computer and the same dialog came up whenever the view was opened.  I also find it odd that when it does error out it will give a Calculation Failed  group in the legend, however I didn’t see any areas that displayed that way, nor is there a category that matches in the Scheme.  I would love to have a report or error dialog that would tell me why it failed but this was not the case.

Revit 2016 r2 Family Types Dialog

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One thing that has changed in Revit 2016 R2 is the dialog box for Family Types while in the family editor.  It is following along with the rest of Revit and has allowed for Searching.  This is a welcomed feature for those families that have a bunch of parameters involved.  This dialog has also moved all of the buttons (i.e. New Type, Add Parameter) from the side of the dialog to the top and bottom.  Again a nice touch for viewing those long formula strings associated to parameters.

What has also changed is the fact that the dialog box doesn’t remember the size of the columns.  For instance if you make the formula column wider once the dialog is closed and reopened it goes back to the default column widths.  Not a good feature addition.

Revit 2016 r2 reference planes follow up

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In one of the forums a user had suggested that Autodesk set the default value to newly placed reference planes “Is Reference” value be set to “Not a Reference” instead of weak reference.  This has been possible to set up for a while now.  If you create your own family templates then make sure to start to draw a reference plane, but before clicking on screen set the “Is Reference” value to “Not a Reference” then draw a reference plane, and delete it.  Now save the family and rename in windows explorer to .rft.  This feature doesn’t however work on everything, it will still be a “Weak Reference” when copied or mirrored.

So yes I agree it would be nice if Autodesk would make the default setting to be “Not a Reference” when reference planes are created no matter if drawn, copied, mirrored or whatever.

Curved Grid Quirk

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There have been numerous posts on curved grid lines and getting them to display as well as many forum responses, even Tim’s post on correcting the height of the curved grids.   I have known about this for years but today none of these tools were working for me to display one single curved grid in a project, this is where I had noticed a quirk with grids.  I was able to reproduce this situation in both Revit 2015 and 2014, I don’t have older versions installed so couldn’t test there.

If the 3D extents of a grid line is larger than 237° the grid will not display in any perpendicular section.

Grid_CurveQuirk

If the grid needs to be shown further in plan and still needs to be displayed in sections, then toggling the grid extents to 2D and rotating it around in a plan view is the answer.  However remember this doesn’t have to be done in all the different plan vies, using “Propagate Extents” will push this change into all the other plan views as well.