Using Radar

What is Radar?
Radar is a method of detecting distant objects and determining their position.

When do I need it?
You just linked a developed Revit model into a new project file and you can't seem to find it. Ever happen to you? I know it happens to many. This is where having radar comes in handy.

If I just imported a project and I can't seem to locate the imported model the first thing I do is setup my radar.

1. Go to a floor plan view and add four new elevations looking in all directions.

2. Highlight these new elevations in your project browser and go to element properties.
3. Uncheck Crop View and Far Clip Active parameters.

4. Open each view individually and zoom all (ZA) until you find the model you are looking for.

Users new to file linking can waste valuable time searching for imported models. Next time just tell them to setup their radar.

Excerpt from a Revit Standards Manual

Some time ago I finished writing a 35 page Revit Standards Manual for our office. Since this is a blog for Revit Beginners I thought I would share an excerpt...

"One thing to keep in mind when implementing Revit for the first time. The more you rely on Revit's advanced features the more training your staff will require to use those features. Flexing families will require training, advanced scheduling will require training, developing clean condocs will require training... and so on. When you can, you should keep it simple. The difficulty is that, if your office is like ours, users will often demand things from Revit that requires the use of more advanced features. Hence more training becomes necessary. And, as people come and go, you will find out that even basic training never really ends."

Journal of Building Information Modeling

Read what some of the industry experts have to say about BIM in the relatively new Journal of Building Information Modeling.

The Revit Clinic

Harlan Brumm has started a blog called The Revit Clinic. I'll look forward to reading his remedies.

Revit 2009 Rendering

Here is me doodling with Revit's new rendering engine in 2009.



I had to scale the roof tiles to 16' and the grass to 6". I also had to load some of our custom families to detail the elevations. The plants are out of the box.

My Work

It occured to me that I never once posted pictures of any project I worked on, so here are two images from a model I built back in Revit 4.5

Revit Factory

Buy or sell your content, tutorials, and textures at the Revit Factory.

Apply View Template to Schedules

Not sure yet if this was added to 9.0 or 9.1 but you can now create a view template from schedule views. I revisited my first post and realized that just because Revit's schedules defaulted to Arial font back then, doesn't mean I have to live with it now.

Revit News & Resources

The UK Revit Users group is hosting a Revit Design Awards 2007 but you have to work in the UK to enter.

For those of you familiar with Content Highway or other Family File managers there is a new program being exhibited at this years AIA Convention in San Antonio, Texas. It's called techtonic and includes many very attractive features. TechtonicStudio also has a library of 100,000 commercial interior finishes for those of you who do a lot of photorealistic rendering and could use a new source of material maps.

Sometimes visitors to my blog ask me how they can print the blog for future reference. If you have a PDF writer like PDFCreator, CutePDF, or PDF Factory you should be able to print the webpage to PDF.

Some thoughts on Revit

Some people have to be reminded that the project file is a database and like any database the more and accurate information about the project you put into the model the more analytical modeling and scheduling you can get out of the model.

Building highly parametric families that flex can be just as tedious as software programming if you're not familiar with the "programming language" or in this case the many rules and shortcuts for family file creation. The family editor is in essence a "graphical" programming environment. Being more visual, this is probably the perfect programming enviroment for architects. As a rule of thumb the more automation you want to build into family or project files the more skilled your users have to be to modify these files later. Not everyone in the office needs to understand the rules of family file creation to use these families, but they would need some expertise to open these family files and make significant modifications. I know the same is true for many BIM applications.

Autodesk publishes basic usage of the tools in Revit, but there are many clever things an office can do by mixing and matching different tools and parameter values to get the project file to analyze the database and report and illustrate the information you need (and some information you didn't know you needed).