Tips and Tricks with Revit Structure
Please find attached a very useful quick reference card for Revit. Great when you have forgotten where your families are stored, where the ini file is located or perhaps where the IronPython libraries are stored. You will also find a handy users guide to many widely used short cut keys.
Download the PDF here!
Revit 2020 Quick Reference Card
Happy 2020 to everyone. You may notice that I have created a new look and feel for the site, the original site going back to April 2009! Hope you like the new logo and appearance?
Anyone who authors Revit models or works with 3rd party consultants that use Revit has surely experienced poorly coordinated models and struggled to understand why models do not federate and overlay as expected.
Many of these issues are simply down to a lack of understanding of the Revit coordinate system or properly communicated BEP’s, but these are fundamental to the correct setting out and coordination of projects. Revit 2020.2 offers some help by being able to visualise the Project base Point, Survey Point and the Internal Point within linked models. Also, you can no longer unclip the Project Base Point, meaning that the Internal and Project Base Point are normally consistent, however, see the note at the end of the post!
The image below is displaying the two Project Base Points, the blue being from the active project and the grey being from the linked model
Here you can also see that the Internal Origin point is also displayed in grey on a linked project. This is useful when checking that the Project Base Point and Internal Origin are overlayed.
When a linked model is selected the Project Base Point shows the linked model icon and the relevant properties such as the North/South, East/West, Elevation as well as the angle to true north. Very useful when trying to understand why Revit models will not federate and overlay correctly.
As many of you will already know, Revit has an internal origin which can be different from the Project Base Point. The Internal Origin point can now be displayed with a new sub category within the Site category.
When setting the Project Base Point you should now use Specify Coordinates at Point or acquire coordinates rather than directly selecting the Project Base Point and moving. You will notice that selecting the PBP and using the Properties Palette or directly typing the coordinates will move the PBP independently of the internal origin.
LawrenceH
Sometimes it’s a good thing to rewind back to basics and look at some of the things that really matter when using Revit on a day to day basis. Obviously, the interface and colours that are used and presented can make a huge difference. Below you can see the Revit 2020 Options dialog. Here you will probably notice the recent additions of ‘calculating’ and ‘Rebar Editing’.
The ‘calculating’ colour is used when working with structural connections, especially when propagate connection is used. Revit will background process the connections and display the elements with, by default, Cyan.
The Rebar Editing colour is used when editing rebar constraints, see my previous post for details on this new feature!
Anyway, back to the basics. When sketching elements such as floors or perhaps editing wall profiles we are used to seeing magenta lines as shown in the image below.
You can change this default by editing the line styles. To do this select the Manage ribbon, click Additional Settings and then Line Styles as shown in the image below.
You are then presented with the Line Styles dialog. Here you can change the Sketch colour to anything you like.
In the example below I have changed the Sketch line style to green.
This can obviously be quite useful if you have colour blindness with certain colours or are working with different background colours.
Hope this helps,
Lawrence
A very quick tip and trick when you need to create a 3D view that is oriented to another 2D view. In large projects you are presented with a list which does not come with a scroll bar or search tool. This means that you can spend a considerable amount of time clicking around to get your required view.
Simply create a new keyboard shortcut for the Orient to view command, take a look at the video for a quick and easy solution.
Hope this is useful
Autodesk Revit Structure 