Be Consistent – Wall Location Line:

This is going to seem an obvious, but being consistent with the management of the wall Location Line constraint is essential when laying out walls in your project. When I dig around users projects, I often find inconsistent strategies, which “can” lead to issues with wall joins. You can set the wall location line parameter when you first place a wall, this is available from options bar.

 

New users often don’t know what all these different parameters are or what they even do. They merrily go away & place walls with different Location Lines set, only to find that walls are not cleaning up as expected. Let me show what each of these parameters are referring when you place a wall. The diagram below shows what each parameter alignment does.

The Core boundary is set in the wall type itself. All wall system families have a core Boundary, internal & external. Observe that its the “green” lines in the screen grab above.

Now whilst this might be a slight sweeping statement, but I advice users to be as consistent as they can. If you are placing your external facade walls, typically ensure they are all set to the same location line. Also, watch the location you choose. If you choose Wall Centreline & you have to flip the direction of the wall, there are no differences, as you are mirroring the wall around its centre line, on which you placed it. If on the other hand you choose Finish Face: Exterior, when you flip the wall, you are flipping the whole wall width, this can impact areas, so be mindful of this.But if you have to change the wall makeup, then Finish Face: Interior may be preferable as you might not want to impact areas within the building.

“Ok!'” What do you recommend then? To play safe, I either make all my external walls be Finish Face: Exterior or Finish Face Interior. What I choose very much depends on the project stage & whether I know the wall build up. As for internal walls, I try very hard to always make internal partition be wall centreline. This strategy has worked for me, I hope you have similar success. But do remember you can change the wall Location Line at any time if you need to, by selecting the wall & changing the Location Line parameter from the properties dialogue box.

Shared Coordinates

Shared coordinates seems to be one of those subject areas which causes a mental block. Not actually sure why, but it does. I know others including Steve Stafford having documented & shared this with people time & time again. I even posted something a few years back which defined the process. Anyway, this is my quick step guide to setting up shared coordinates by “specifying a coordinate” at a point. I am 100% confident with this process, a bold statement I know, but I have helped setup some mega projects using these steps & it works every time for me.

Start by opening the survey drawing in AutoCAD; as good practise check the unit of the DWG, this is achieved by select or typing “DDUNITS”. It’s also worth Auditing the DWG for any errors using the “AUDIT” command in AutoCAD. Next using the “ID” command, ID a point, this may be a benchmark or a survey pin on the survey plan. In the example below, it is an Easting & Northing of 100000,100000, with the units of the DWG set to millimetres.

In Revit, start a new project. Next go to the Site view & notice the Survey Base Point & the Project Base Point. Do not move them right now.

Next import the DWG survey, but it is essential to import “centre to centre”. Do this by going to the Insert tab > link CAD this will open up the Import CAD dialogue. Locate the DWG & ensure the units are set & that you are importing centre to centre.

Once you have everything setup, click the Open button & the DWG will be imported. If you zoom all, you should see the DWG imported & the elevation symbols, very small. Resolve this by changing the scale of the view. If for any reason the DWG is not imported centre to centre, you need to go back into AutoCAD & check the DWG file as there may be an ordinate dimensions setup which can mess with the result. Remove the ordinate dimensions from the CAD file & go back a step to import again.

Next we need to align the coordinate system of Revit with the imported DWG file. Start by upclipping both the Survey Base Point & the Project Base Point.

Next we will move them to a location of 100000,100000 which is on the bottom left hand corner of the DWG. You may want to put the view into thin line mode to help with the line weights, as this can be distracting. Ignore the Northings & Eastings, we will resolve this in a moment. Place the Survey Base Point as below. Do NOT clip the Survey Base Point yet.

Next go to the Manage tab & the Coordinates. Choose the Specify Coordinates at Point command.

Pick the intersection. If this is problematic, draw a model line from the intersection & pick the end of the line where it intersects with the DWG.

In the Specify Shared Coordinates, type in the Northing & Easting to match the DWG file. You may also want to address the elevation level if you know this.

Once you have done this, click OK, to set the shared coordinates. Select the Survey Base Point & now click the paper clip, this will lock the Survey Base Point in place.

With the Project Base Point still unclipped you can then move this either to the Survey Point or to another reference location on the linked CAD file, if you know another survey coordinate or even a grid intersection, place it there. Once you have chosen a suitable location, clip the Project Base Point.

So as a double check, its good practice to save the file & then export the survey view as a DWG by shared coordinates back to CAD to see if everything has been setup correctly. To do this, go to Application Menu, big R>Export>CAD Formats> DWG files

This will open the export DWG dialogue; next go to button with 3 dots which is the Modify Export Setup.

Go to Units & Coordinates & ensure the Coordinate system basis is set to Shared. Select OK.

This will return you to the export dialogue, choose Next.

Name the export ; then Export the DWG to a suitable location. Ensure Export views & sheet links as external references is NOT ticked.

Next open the resulting DWG in AutoCAD. Use the ID command to double check the coordinates have been passed back correctly.

In this example we have zoomed into the location of the Survey base point & used ID in AutoCAD to check the coordinates. We can see from the example that they are spot on in the resulting DWG export.

As an extra check, you can always Xref in the original Survey CAD plan. If they drop in correctly on top of one another, you can be confident that the shared coordinates between AutoCAD & anything you export from Revit are correct.

CASE @ RTC NA

Sadly I won’t be making it to RTC North America this year, but if you are interested in keeping up with all the action from my colleagues, be sure to follow them on twitter.

• http://twitter.com/AYBABTM
• http://twitter.com/fedenegro
• http://twitter.com/mcc_une
• http://twitter.com/alnjxn

Also, all details on classes etc, can be found here..

http://case-inc.com/rtcna2013/

I am an architect….

You may have already seen this before, but if you haven’t, pop on your headphones & enjoy……

Managing Revit data in Excel

I have already demonstrated the power of using a tool such as Exceler8 to export data to Excel. This short video steps you through the process of exporting to Excel, then linking that data to another Excel workbook. The thing I like about this, is that you keep the data moving all the time. Whilst it can get complicated on large datasets its a useful process to get accustomed to. Also, if you update your data in Revit, just export to Excel, over writing the first Excel sheet the second sheet will reflect that change.

Cross referencing parameters

I’m not convinced this is good practise but it might be useful. A request came to me the other day, “I would like to show the keynote parameter & the window mark parameter in the same tag?” On further investigation you soon discover you can either have a dedicated keynote tag which will pull out the keynote reference, but you can’t pick up the window mark type. Or you have a window tag, which can pull out the mark type, but not the keynote reference. This client wanted to show both parameters in one tag. So a quick hack around with some shared parameters & we resolved the request very simply. This is how…..

I started by creating a  “text” shared parameter called fake_keynote.

Next I ensure this parameter is used in the project. I assign the parameter to the window category, I also ensure the parameter is setup as an instance parameter.

I opened up the window tag, added a new label & assign the fake keynote shared parameter to the label in the tag & loaded the family back into the project.

This is what my new window tag now looks like.

You will observe that the tag is still not filling in any keynote data. Now the cool thing here is you can cross reference parameters, but you need to edit the window family to achieve this. I select the window & choose to edit the family.Then I add the fake_keynote shared instance parameter to the family.

I then make the shared instance parameter “reference” the real keynote parameter. This is achieved by adding =keynote to the the fake keynote parameter under the Formula field.

Save the family & then load the family back into the project updating any existing versions in the project. Now  when the window is loaded into the project, the keynote data is cross referenced into the fake_keynote parameter & the tag in turn displays the actual keynote data in the window tag.