Where did my Door Tag go?

Just finished a project where I had several custom doors that had to be built as in place families. We just didn't have the time or patients to try to design these doors, as a proper door family. We came across a problem with these doors when tried to tag them though. When we placed the door tags the tags were no where near the actual door. The actual door tags were placed at the model origin point. This was quite frustrating until we figured that out. So be weary if you use in place families and try and tag them the tags will automatically appear at the model origin point

File Maintence on Big Projects

After just finishing the 100%cd of a project that was averaging 300MB on the file size there a couple of file management tips I want to covey that help with keeping the file size as small as possible as well as helps with moving through the massive project easier.


First once a week at minimum one of the project team members should audit the file. This is done when opening the project. you just need to click the Audit check box in the lower right corner of the open project dialog box.

Second because of the memory leaks that are within Revit 2010 you should completely close out of Revit atleast once a day and restart the program.

Third every time you open the project you should be making a new central file. This helps keep a consistent local file. Also if sometake something home sometimes the local file gets disconnected to the central file, so creating a new local file avoids this problem.

And lastly at least once a week when saving to central one of the project team members should click the Compact Central File check box.

NCS PLotting Guidelines and Revit

The Plotting guidelines is a graphical part of the NCS. The plotting guidelines has two focus, first the line weight of plotted lines, and the color of those plotted lines.
The NCS calls for 9 different line weights, while Revit has the ability to assign 16 different line weights. The definition of these 16 line weights are defined by inches or millimeters depending on the Project Units. In this section of the NCS the different line weights are defined only in millimeters, but in the part 10 of the NCS they define the line weights in both millimeters and inches.
The default line weights that Revit defines for the first 9 line widths are close to what NCS defines, but are exact, so these scales will have to be adjusted.


The NCS limits the color variation that can be printed out to 255 colors which should be more than enough for 2d drafted objects. The colors are defined by RGB not CYMK. In Revit there are about six places where colors are defined, Object styles, Line styles, Fill patterns, Materials, Walls and Color Schemes.

2010 Worksharing

When working on a project with more than one person working on the model you have to enable worksharing for the project. I like to call this centralizing the project, since you are creating a central file. Steve has written quite a few posts on Revit OP on this subject, but here are my 2 cents. One of the first thing I was told about worksharing was to create a workset for each system of the building, then I was told to make as few worksets as possible, then i was told told to create a workset for each level of the project. By this changing mindset on how workset should be created tells how much our industry is a practice. I'm just finishing a project where the revit model was right about 290 mb, on this project we ended up having about 10 or so worksets. We found it invaluable to have this many worksets. Some the geometry of the was pretty intense and we were able turn these objects off in many of the views where the geometry was not visible. This sped up production time, since we didn't have to wait for the heavy geometry to continuously regenerate.

2010 has made a couple of modification to the way you use worksharing, that we found extreamly useful. Because of the intensity of the model and the fact that we had 6 people working on it, each team member made a new local file every day and even sometimes twice a day. I didn't think i would like it but 2010's new function of a central place to have local files actually sped this process up.

Now I just need to do another 2010 project that isn't quite as heavy and figure out if the memory problems we were having were a glitch in the program or it was just the geometric intensity of the model. I had to do a couple of thing in 2009 today and it was painful trying to remember where things were in the old UI.

Get Bruce to AU

Some one I know from the 505 BIM Users group put together this video to get him to AU this year, check it out.

AU 2009

It's been several weeks now that registration for Autodesk University has begun. I'm really excited and nervous about AU this year. There are some classes that are going to be offered that look really interesting. On top of that I'm going to be teaching Revit-tizing the U.S. National CAD Standard. I checked today and I have 51 people signed up for my class. I've given talks to group about that size before, but it will be for Autodesk, and that is just cool. Hope to see you all at Au this year.

Above Water

Whew
Just finished a deadline that had been killing me. Now to reach for the next one oh well.

This is not going to be one of my normal blog entries, I'm going to vent a little about a problem my company just went through.

We are working on a pretty complex building design , as such we had decided to do it in Revit 2010, not sure if that was such a good idea in retro spec. Believe it or not but my issue has not been with the new UI. I'm one of those people that actually like the new interface, just wish that the change was just made a little bit more gradual and there was some duplication on where things are. My issues has been with the stability of 2010. I agree with some people out there when they say that 2010 is the most unstable version they have had in long time. In some ways I think it can be blamed on the new UI to a degree because it is a much more graphically intense UI, and Autodesk changed the graphics engine on 2010. This new graphics engine was built around Direct x 10, which is for Vista machines not XP machines, so in essence Revit 2010 was built for Vista. Autodesk has kind of addressed this, they say to make sure you have the 3gb switch activated on your XP machine among other things. Something my company has discovered that I'm not a hundred percent sure of on about 90 percent. On XP machines it is also helpful to have a more memory on the Graphics card.