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.
In years past it has been easy to reset coordinates on a Revit file, simply link in a different Revit model and acquire coordinates from that model. Yet this changed in Revit 2017 and Steve Stafford has written an excellent article on the topic where you have to select “Do not share site of selected instance”. What happens when you have several Revit files linked to your project? I really don’t want to change that setting on 5, 10 , 25 instances of linked models. There is another way. If you link in a .dwg file and acquire coordinates from it, then you can go back and acquire the newly updated coordinates of the original Revit file.
Image 1
What happens when you have several Revit files linked to your project? I really don’t want to change that setting on 5, 10 , 25 instances of linked models. There is another way. If you link in a .dwg file and acquire coordinates from it, then you can go back and acquire the coordinates of the original Revit file.
In my opinion the first thing I do is create a new “Site” or shared coordinate setting. This way I can go back to the original setting if something goes wrong. To accomplish this go to the Manage tab>>Project Location panel>>Location command. In the Location Weather and Site dialog switch to the Site panel.
Image 2
In the Name Dialog type in a new Site Name. Once a new name is created, select it and choose “Make Current” as seen in Image 2.
Image 3
Once this is done then link in a .dwg file. For me this file has one single line drawn from 0,0,0 at an angle and is extremely long, such that it will reach past the extents of the modeled building. When linking this file I always select Origin to Origin as my placement setting.
Image 4
Once the .dwg file has been successfully loaded, coordinates may be acquired from this file to “Reset” the internal coordinates. To accomplish this go to the Manage tab>>Project Location panel>>Coordinates drop Down Acquire Coordinates. Once this command has been selected you must select the .dwg file in the view.
Image 5
Once the coordinates have been acquired from the .dwg you may now acquire coordinates from the linked Revit file. If your Revit file is a cloud version (BIM360 Team or Docs) then you will have to do one of the following: either remove the linked .dwg file under manage links, or save the project (not synchronize) and when the Location Position Changed dialog box appears be sure to select Disable shared position
Image 6
If everything seems to be successful I would suggest going back and removing the old Site as seen in Image 2 above.
If you are on a project that has several Revit files linked into it, and all of those files have updated the coordinates to match then each file will have to be selected and in the Choose Site dialog (see Image 1), the “Move instance to:” value should be changed to match the newly named site. If everything has been done correctly then all of the models should adjust accordingly.
During my last Revit Radio session I was had made the comment that Material Assests can’t be purged out of a family. The discussion arose as I had found a bug in Revit 2017 that if you attempt to delete all the materials out of a family then Revit was just crashing. It didn’t do this on all families but specifically on View Title families, both OOTB and custom versions. Aaron Maller wrote in explaining me a work around to remove the material assest. This mornign I was gong to blog about his work around but wanted to first attempt to figure out why the family was crashing in the first place. My first troubleshooting thought was to purge the family and to my surprise we can now Purge material assests (This is huge for us content generating geeks). Not only that but it will allow us to purge all materials out of a family, it doesn’t leave default.
FYI purging the family of materials didn’t make it crash but deleting the material did. I stopped looking since this is a better option anyway.
I recently posted about the issues that will arise when upgrading a project from Revit 2016 to Revit 2017. Upon further investigating there is a significant quirk when comparing text to tags. I was updating a detail container file for one of my clients where they use mostly Keynote tags with a bit of text alongside for more clarifications. At first glance it may not be noticeable, however if you zoom out you can see a difference and if you make the a text value match the tag value it is easily seen on screen.
If you look closely at the screen capture above you may notice that the top line of text looks a bit more pixelated (ironically it was more noticeable in a screen capture then on the Revit screen). As seen in the capture below it becomes more noticeable the further you zoom out in Revit, it almost looks as though the text is bold and the tag is not.
To really make a comparison I typed a piece of text (shown in blue below) directly over the tag (shown in black) and as you can see the text is spacing, or kerning, is larger in text than tags as well as the height being slightly taller.
I had thought that maybe this was an issue with updating the project and the tag as well. I created a new tag from the 2017 template and the same thing occurred. I don’t envision this causing many issues with upgraded projects but something I think should be addressed by the Factory if future releases.
By now I am sure most of you have heard about the all new text editor in Revit 2017. If notSteve has covered the new features and Paul has posted a Lynda video on the features. I have yet to hear anyone talk about the issues with it when a file is upgraded. Last year at several conferences Autodesk said that when there was a new text editor they maybe an issue when a file is upgraded. The help file even lists this as a warning under the What’s New:
“Important: After upgrade, review all views and sheets to verify the changes to your text instances. See Upgrade Information for Revit for more information. ” When looking at the Upgrade Information for Revit page it is the first thing listed and an additional warning to verify all upgraded projects.
I can say with assurance that yes I am seeing issues when upgrading projects. The real issue that I have been noticing is the text boxes are getting larger in height when a project is upgraded.
I had a suspicion that something like this would happen which is why I have been suggesting to all my clients that is a project is in an early phase consider upgrading prior to adding a lot of text. I always hope that most users are using less text and more tags so there may be less things to fix.
