TIPS & TRICKS are meant to provide quick information about smart (or just any) ways to solve particular Revit problems, simplify certain tasks or find workarounds, which we need to look for in Revit far too often. You can post your own Revit tip, trick, hack, workaround or whatever else you would like to call it by clicking the link below.
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Statutory submission for Hong Kong from Revit
They were developed for a pilot project of a school in Hong Kong done with P&T Architects Ltd. and submitted to HK Building Department in 2015 and were shown for the first time during a meeting of the Hong Kong Revit User Group (HKRUG) in P&T on 17th February 2016. The presentation below shows selected methods and procedures for configuring
Modelling a truly curved Curtain Wall
Revit Curtain Wall is a very useful tool, but lacks a proper implementation of truly curved Curtain Panels and Curtain Wall Mullions. Such functionality is necessary not only for curved glazing, which in real life is often avoided because of high costs, but also for elevation cladding in cases like the one shown below. Building with curved elevation cladding panels
Controlling the visibility of Level Marks for many Levels
Changing on/off the visibility of all the Level Marks in a multistorey project could be time consuming if done manually by clicking the tick marks one by one on every Level. Manual visibility switch of the Level Mark Fortunately there is a solution. In the Type Properties->Graphics of any Level family there are two on/off properties controlling the default display of the
Opening a project with linked Revit files and the linked files without unloading them from the project file
Linking other Revit models to a Revit project file is a powerful functionality, which among other uses, allows combining separate buildings with different configurations of floor levels into one complex. Unfortunately Revit does not allow opening at the same time the linked models and the project (master) file, to which they are linked. This makes e.g. analysing different massing options
Rotating a plan view without affecting other views or the Project North
Sometimes, especially in case of detailed Floor Plans showing areas of special interest of larger spaces (like escape staircases or entrance lobbies), there is a need of orienting those detailed Floor Plans on sheets to a different direction than True North, Project North or the limited options available under the Rotation on Sheet instance property of Viewports (90° Clockwise or
Overcoming the 9144000mm limit of the coordinate value of the Project Base Point
When trying to relocate the project using Manage->Project Location->Position->Relocate the Project to match the real local coordinates of the site it is not possible to use values larger then 9144000mm. In practice, the coordinates are very often larger than this value. 9144000 mm error reported when relocating the Project Base Point However, relocating the Project base Point by editing on
Exporting user defined groups of Walls to different AutoCAD layers
Revit needs to generate .dwg drawings according to a CAD standard, which requires placing Walls on different layers and assigning different colours to them according to specific grouping criteria, e.g: Groups of Walls and AutoCAD layers they should be placed at required by the CAD standard Layer Modifiers in DWG/DXF Export Setup table allow placing objects of the same Category
Using multiple Revision Schedules on the same sheet
Lets's say thet the company standard requires revisions to be shown on a sheet in a standard table with descriptions and dates, but also in a simplified table containing only revision letters below the drawing number, as shown below. Revisions should be shown on a sheet in two places in full and simplified table. A solution to this problem is
Customizing the order of any list of names
Control characters RS and US (Left ALT-030 and Left ALT-031) are not only invisible, but are also at the top of the alphabetical order. This means that each of those characters when inserted before any name in Revit will move this name to the top of any alphabetically sorted list of names without changing the name. This allows creating custom
Overriding measured dimensions
Keyboard combinations Left ALT-030 and Left ALT-031 (numbers must be typed from the numeric keypad) represent two control (non-printable) characters from the ASCII table (record separator RS and unit separator US respectively), which are recognized by Revit as characters, but are not visible. We can use those characters to “cheat” Revit when it requires inserting alphabetical character(s), but the user
Magic alphabetical sorting
I bet you often wanted to control the order in which Revit shows stuff in its multitude of windows and lists and still keep your original names of the entities listed, be it Filters, Floor Plan Types in the Project Browser, View Templates, etc. In all those cases the default and only available order, which Revit uses is alphabetical. So, unless you
Revit cryptic knowledge – what is the “R” field at the end of the “in-canvas tooltip”?
You all know very well "in-canvas tooltips", although you may not be aware of this official name, which I found in Revit online help. In-canvas tooltips are yellowish tags, which are displayed next to the cursor when it detects (and highlights) an object in the Drawing/Modeling Area. They provide very useful information about the detected object - its Category, Family