Revit Assembly Code Basics

Revit families have a built-in parameter called Assembly Code. By default, this feature references the UniFormat, created by the US-based Construction Specification Institute (CSI) of which I am a member. From their website, Unifromat is defined as...

"a method of arranging construction information based on functional elements, or parts of a facility characterized by their functions, without regard to the materials and methods used to accomplish them. These elements are often referred to as systems or assemblies." Click here for more information.

Read on to learn more...

Electrical Calculations in Revit - Why kVA Totals Can Vary from Feeder to Panel

Because my firm created the electrical portion of the MEP Productivity Pack (MEPPP,) which CTC sells to the world, we have seen a number of problems and fielded many questions from customers over the past eight years (with CTC providing the lead on all support). This has helped to expand our knowledge of Revit and improve the MEPPP product.

One question that comes up from time to time is why the kVA Totals for Panels are sometimes different than the kVA Loads on Feeders. An example of this can be seen  in the following image.

What is happening is Revit is inconsistent with how it tabulates the loads.  Both are...

Warning - Face Based Content Moves Vertically in Revit

Anyone who develops MEP models in Revit knows that only face-based content works due to the limitations of working within the context of linked architectural and structural models. However, I find a lot of people do not know about a subtle issue that causes things like receptacles to move vertically at some point during the project.

Read on to learn more...

Recap of Midwest University 2018

Another conference has come and gone already this year... Midwest University 2018 hosted by Cad Technology Center (CTC) - aka CTC Express Tools.

The conference had over 500 attendees and covered a wide range of topics, from Autodesk Revit to Civil 3D. This was a two day conference, but I was only able to attend  on the second day. So I missed the world's #1 AI robot Sofia unfortunately.

The location was at a brand new convention facility, Mystic Lake Convention Center,  just outside of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area in Minnesota. Although it made for a long day, I live close enough to have driven there and back in the same day.

Given the reasonable conference cost and relatively close proximity to the #6 ranked airport in the USA (according to this article anyway) Minneapolis / St. Paul International Airport, it makes this a great option to share, learn and network on AEC design technology with a strong emphasis on Autodesk products, add-ins and more.

Below are several comments and photos, in chronological order (click to enlarge image).

Invisibility Advisor - A New CTC BIM Project Suite Tool

I got a brief demo today of the now available new Invisibility Advisor by CTC Software.

I just give installed the update and give it a quick spin, here are my results...

I opened the furniture plan and the main floor plan views. Let's see if it can do a simple one; select the chair in the view I can see it, and then select the view it is hidden in...

Good job... as seen in the next image, the Revit Category is turned off. Now I have...

Revit's To and From Room Values for Doors and Windows

When numbering doors, we often associate that number with the room number the door swings into as shown in the first image below; door 103A swings into Workroom 103.

Revit has the ability to schedule room information, in a door schedule, based on the room it swings into and out of. However, there are a few things you need to know about how this works to use it successfully - or, in a predictable way.

This post will cover the issue and offer a few tips. At the end I also mention a free tool from CTC to automatically renumber doors.

When creating a door schedule...

Dealing With Off-Screen Dialog Boxes

In most Windows apps, it is possible for a dialog box to open off-screen and thus not be visible or directly accessible. This can be caused by a number of things such as changing the screen resolution, adding or removing a monitor, etc.

I dealt with an issue yesterday where someone thought their session of Revit was freezing every time they started a specific CTC Express Tools app... once they started the command, the entire Ribbon grayed out and became inactive. It appeared the only way out was to crash Revit.

Turns out the dialog was...

Electrical Focused Intro of MEPPP - Demo Video

The new MEP Productivity Pack (MEPPP) has a ton of new features to support MEP design and documentation. I created a demo video which provides an overview of this new package from the electrical point of view in the YouTube video linked below. 

I recently wrote about the mechanical-focused video here: Mechanical Focused Intro of MEPPP Demo with Blake Guither.

There is so much introductory material, this is nearly a one hour presentation! This is in addition to all the short, bite-sized videos, I mentioned previously by CTC's Shawn Zirbes; MEPPP Intro Videos.

Just a few highlights highlights:

ElumTools Blog Post: Luminaire Family Validation Made Easy

Matt Kincaid, software developer at Lighting Analysts, Inc., makers of AGI32 and ElumTools, posted on their blog about a new luminaire validation feature in ElumTools.

In case you don't know, ElumTools (ET) is an add-in for Revit which facilitates professional lighting analysis. One of the dialog boxes available within ET is the Luminaire Manager. Here we see a listing of all the light fixture families in the current Revit project and their settings. By default, all the settings come from the Revit family. Most changes made here, such as picking a different IES file or adjusting the Light Loss values, automatically get pushed back into the family in the current project.

Calculated point-by-point illuminance results in foot candles (FC)

Additionally...

Mechanical Focused Intro of MEPPP Demo with Blake Guither

The new MEP Productivity Pack (MEPPP) has a ton of new features to support MEP design and documentation. Blake Guither, mechanical engineer at Gausman and Moore, gives us an overview of this new package from the mechanical point of view in the YouTube video linked below. Our updated electrical overview video is forthcoming.

There is so much introductory material, this is a one hour presentation! This is in addition to all the short, bite-sized videos, I mentioned last week by CTC's Shawn Zirbes; MEPPP Intro Videos.

Just a few highlights highlights:

MEPPP Intro Videos

A few weeks ago I announced the new Mechanical Electrical Plumbing Productivity Pack (MEPPP) available by CTC Express Tools, which my firm helped create. This product is a labor of love between two engineering firms and CTC; and also a refinement of the Electrical Productivity Pack we created on our own nearly 6 years ago and is being used by electrical engineers and contractors across the USA.

Additionally...

MEP Review of Architectural Model

You are just getting started on a project and need to familiarize yourself with the building. The architect just sent their current version of the Revit model. Consider the items in the following list to help get things off to a good start.

1. In the Options dialog, on Rendering section, set Render Appearance path to a custom “Revit Textures” folder you create on the network. Copy any texture files provided by the architect (e.g. jpg or png files). This will help with any visualization or VR you might want to do from an MEP perspective.

Additionally...

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...

Revit Material: Material Name in a Family

How can we easily share materials between families? There are a few different ways to approach this depending on your needs. One is to create a custom material library, another is to use Transfer Project Standards.

If the Material is already setup in the project environment, it will NOT be changed when loading families with the same materials. Revit assumes the project is correct and will not change that material every time a family is loaded. With that knowledge, all you really have to do is make a dummy material with the correct name, load it into a project with the correct material (i.e. identity, graphics, appearance, etc. settings) and then open that family for editing. Now you have a family with the same settings.

On a related note, one could also use the Revit Family Processor (by CTC Express Tools) to quickly add, delete or change Materials in several families at once. This has some limitations (due to the API as I understand it) but can definitely help. The image below shows how one might add a Material name (LHB Maple in this example) to several families.

• FYI: The Family Processor is a great way to get rid of all the default Materials loaded in your content (which came from the family templates).

The Free Tools in CTC BIM Batch Suite

Last week I used a few CTC Express Tools to save a ton of time and thought I would share that process here. What's better, two of the three tools I will discuss are free!

I needed to get a few hundred families out of a large project, add, change and delete some parameters (plus add formulas and a lookup table) and then load them back in. Per the image below, it is possible to simply export all the families from a Revit project, but for a large project with hundreds, if not thousands, of families, that would take a long time.

Enter CTC BIM Batch Suite for a more surgical way in which to harvest content from a Revit project.

• FYI: When installing this Revit add-in, you have the option to install a free PDF writer as seen in the iamge below. This shows up in all programs, such as Microsoft Word.

The add-in has two free tools; Family Exporter and Family Loader. These are the two I will be talking about. The other two commands require a license.

The Family Exporter allows you to select which categories to export. Plus you can search, add prefix/suffix and more as shown below. I just needed the electrical content, so that is all I selected.

Notice, we can also segregate the exported content into sub-folders.

Several of the CTC tools provide a "results" dialog as shown below. The trick is to look for anything red on the right... that means something did not work.

All the content is now available via Windows Explorer!

Now, I needed to add, delete and modify parameters in all of the exported content. I used the Family Processor from the CTC BIM Manager Suite. This tool is not free, but it can be purchases as a network licenses and shared within a firm. I also replaced a lookup table and added formulas as seen in the image below.

• FYI: these settings can be saved to a file... in fact, these settings were prepared by Blake Guither, from the MEP firm Gausman & Moore, who I am working with on this project.

Finally, to get the content back into Revit, I used the free Family Loader tool. Notice the "Suppress overwrite dialog" check box? Huge time saver!

• FYI: I wish this tool had a "use current project" option. You have to browse for the host project to load content into... this is tricky when the project is in C4R; the local file is in a obscure location.

Good stuff!

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:)