Mechanical Electrical Plumbing Productivity Pack

Today's post is a quick plug for a new productivity by CTC Express Tools; Mechanical Electrical Plumbing Productivity Pack. My firm had created the Electrical Productivity Pack about five years ago. This new package is a labor-of-love between two engineering firms and CTC.

Get an in-person demo this week at CTC's booth in the exhibit hall, while attending the BILT-NA 2017 conference. Below are the highlights, and here is a downloadable brochure. In the near future, there will also be a few short videos posted.

The Mechanical Electrical Plumbing Productivity Pack is the...

MEP Project Setup 01

Being the BIM Administrator in a 280 person Multi-Discipline firm has afforded me the "opportunity" to become intimately familiar with all aspects of Revit. In addition to using Revit on Architecture, Interior Design, Structural, MEP... we have used it on industrial, bridge, civil and pipeline projects.

Our firm started using Revit MEP (or, Autodesk AutoCAD Revit Series - Systems Plus per the image below:)) right when it first came out in 2006, which was pretty painful in many ways!

However, that early adoption paid off in many ways. In addition to using Revit on 99.9% of all building projects for the past 8 years, we also created the Electrical Productivity Pack which is sold by CTC Express Tools; Stay tuned for exciting news on this, before or during BILT-NA (formerly RTC) next week.

The First Version of Revit MEP

Here is a list of...

Free AutoSave add-in for Revit

I was exchanging emails with Dmitry Chubrik recently, and he told me about a new Revit add-in his company BIM2B just released. It is called R AutoSave and is available for free via the Autodesk app store.

I installed on my work computer and have done a little testing. I opened a model, made a few changes and then after the specified "Autosave interval" I manually crashed Revit. When you attempt to open the same model you are prompted to use the Autosaved model or the (older) file you have selected (see image below). When I selected the "restore unsaved changes" option, all of my changes appeared!

Rather than spelling out the various options and scenarios, I will just point you to Dmitry's blog post announcing this add-in, as he gets into all of the nitty gritty. Follow this link to read more: http://bim2b.ru/bim2b-autosave-for-revit

One more quick comment... I don't recall seeing an add-in that integrates into the Options dialog as shown below... pretty cool.

I have to do some more testing to see if I want to roll this out to staff. Losing work is never good and this tool could save a ton of time. So it is definitely worth a look, and the price is right.

Revit Fill Patterns

In Autodesk Revit, Fill Patterns help define materials on an element's surface and when it is cut; in elevations, 3D views and sections. This post will cover a few thoughts related to this functionality within the software. Specifically, I want to talk about model versus drafting patterns, custom patterns and then a related and "accepted" Revit Idea.

Definition from the Revit.PAT file

• Model vs. Drafting patternsThere are two types of fill patterns in Revit: model and drafting. Model patterns are used to depict real-world elements, such as bricks, shingles, tiles, etc. They are defined and display in model units. An 8x16 inch brick pattern will show exactly 12 courses on an 8-foot-tall wall. A 2-meter-tall wall with a 200x400 mm brick pattern will have 10 courses. Model patterns appear denser at coarser view scales and sparser at finer ones.
  
  Drafting patterns are defined in paper units. If you import the pattern at scale 1 and print at 100% zoom, the pattern's dimensions on paper will be exactly as specified in the file, regardless of view scale. Drafting patterns are used to symbolically denote materials such as steel, concrete, sand, etc.
  
  Drafting patterns are typically defined with smaller numbers than model patterns. Drafting patterns usually contain sizes from 0.04 to 1 inch (1 - 25 mm); model patterns usually contain sizes from 2 to 20 inches (50 - 500 mm). These are guidelines only, not enforced by Revit. Revit's existing restrictions limit the maximum size and density of the patterns, and a review of these restrictions is planned for a future release.

Fill patterns are used to represent materials on a surface. Any AutoCAD hatch pattern can be used by Revit. If you want an AutoCAD pattern to be used as a Model filled region (versus Drafting which changes scale with the View Scale) you have to add ;%TYPE=MODEL to the PAT file as shown below. The “;” symbol at the front rem’s out the line so even AutoCAD could still use the file… however it might be best to copy the ACAD.PAT file to another location specifically for Revit use.

Text used to define a model pattern

You may also see some patterns with ;%TYPE=DRAFTING as shown below, but Revit will assume “drafting: if nothing is specified.

Text used to define a drafting pattern

When creating a “model” pattern, if you try to use the AutoCAD ACAD.PAT file without making any changes, you will get this error.

Error when PAT file contains no model patterns

There are tons of hatch patterns for AutoCAD one can find via the web. If you need something custom you can either edit the PAT text file, or use a Revit add-in like Hatch22 or HatchKit to create it. Or Hatch Manager by GlobalCAD, which requires AutoCAD, but it makes the process very easy. You just draw the hatch pattern you want (see carpet squares example below) and then use this add-in to automatically generate the PAT file. This file can then be imported into Revit.

Update: Dmitry Chubrik, from the Russian BIM2B site, provided another option in the comments: Pattern Maker. Thanks Dmitry! If anyone knows of others, please share.

Custom pattern drawn in AutoCAD

Over in Revit Ideas, there is an idea about fill patterns that received a lot of votes (353 so far); Double patterns. This is a great idea which I voted for and added to the discussion. Even better, this post highlights the value of this mechanism to find out what we, as users, want. Notice Harlan Brumm, Revit Product Manager, replied, indicating this idea was under review. Later Sasha Crotty, Revit Core Product Manager, posted that the idea was accepted, meaning it will be added to the software in a future release (see image below)! I was even contacted by Autodesk to answer a few questions on this topic. Power to the people, go Autodesk!

Revit Shared Parameters

Shawn Zirbes, from Cad Technology Center (CTC), gave a nice presentation today called Revit Parameter Management: Advanced.

One topic Shawn spent some time on is Shared Parameters. Chapter 10, from my Interior Design using Autodesk Revit 2018 textbook, has a section dedicated to Shared Parameters.

In a slightly different fashion, from what Shawn presented, I will show a few powerful features from CTC's Shared Parameter Manager, a tool from their Revit add-in BIM Manager Suite.

When the tool is open, the left side looks similar to the Shared Parameters dialog from Revit. You can Open or create a New shared parameter file. For this example I will start a new file...

A feature I did not know about until today is the ability to automatically create Groups (for the SP file) based on Revit Categories (one valid way in which to organize your SPs). See iamge below.

Notice, in the next image, the groups have been created on the left. Another cool feature is the ability to Batch Add parameters with the same settings, a big time saver.

Nothing is saved until you click Save.

Here is where things get a little scary...

In Revit's Shared Parameters dialog, you can select an existing SP and click Properties to review it's settings. With CTC's tool you can click Modify, to... well, as it says, modify the SP.

There is a good reason this is called a BIM 'Manager' tool! However, if you know what you are doing, why should you have to leave Revit and manually edit a text file.

Changing the Name, Group, Discipline or Parameter Type will create a new GUID as stated below. The old SP is technically deleted.

Here is the result in the newly created TXT file.

From here you can swap out all the old parameters with CTC's Revit Family Processor. It does everything except labels in tags based on my experience.

Proceed with caution:)