Tag Archives: View

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.

Steering Wheel Features

While using the steering wheel command in Autodesk products, (I have only tested this with Revit and Navisworks), some of the features have additional options or tools associated with them. For those of you who haven’t used the steering wheel Shift+W will bring it up.

While in the Orbit feature of the steering wheel, the pivot can be changed on the fly by holding the CTRL key down. Now you can locate the pivot point and then release the CTRL key and continue to orbit the model.

Before using the Zoom feature you can hold the Shift key down and it will take you into zoom window option instead of dynamic zoom.

While using the Look feture you can use the arrow keys to walk through the model, similar to W,A,S,D on first person video games. You can also use the Shift key before look to select a face of an element to focus on to.

With the Rewind tool not only can you see all of the previous zoom levels you were at but you can also fast forward to a position incase you rewound to far.

Last but no least you can also right click on the steering wheel and get a list of options, allowing a user to Fit everything to the window, Level the camera, etc.

Revit 2013 3D View Rotation

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As I have been using Revit 2013 I have noticed what I like to consider a bug, or at least a change in work-flow since the last release. Maybe I consider it a bug because I don’t like the new work-flow so don’t be jaded by my opinion. When orbiting a model in 3D it will pick the center of the model as a pivot point, unless you select an element, this then becomes the pivot point, this is the same as previous releases. However if you unselect that element it still remains the pivot point for that veiw (new to Revit 2013, similar to Navisworks) and to reset this you must either close the view or click on the veiw cube to reset it back to the center of the model. I don’t know if this was by design or accident but if it could be set back to the old way this would be nice.

Plan view types

Revit 2013 brings some new features to plan views. First, if you are creating new Levels it will not only create a plan and RCP but Structural plans as well (This is true if you are in Revit, from the Building Design Suite). This can be controlled the same way as before, by going to plan view types and un-highlight the types that are not desired.

The part that I am excited about is the capability to duplicate the plan view type, similar to the way we have been able to create different elevation or section types. For example I have a working, wall and building sections. This means we are not limited to plan views only, we can create enlarged plans, code plans etc. similar to sections or elevations.

One more bonus is the fact that we can have view templates automatically applied or associated to the new views being created. For those of you who might not know what an associated view template is, the view template is linked to the veiw so any changed made to the view template automatically change the associated veiws, plus it locks down the parts of the properties that the view template control.

Show Room-Space Tag from previous Phase

When working with phases in Revit one complaint is that you can’t show rooms from a previous phase. This is where composite views on sheets works like a charm. Composite view means more than one view placed on top of each other on a sheet. Set up a plan view with the phasing set to New Construction and set the Visibility Graphics as desired. Set up another view with the phasing set to Existing, only display Rooms and Room tags in this view, only tag the existing rooms to be displayed (Note: in Visibility Graphics the Room Tags can be set to Halftone to display similarly to existing phase). Once both of these views are created drag the views onto the desired sheet. Revit will align the files nicely on the sheets. The last step is select one of the views, usually the existing room tag view, and change the viewport to one with out a view title. The room name only view can also be duplicated with dependancies if you need to show the room names on more than one sheet.