Creating a Helix in Revit Using Stairs

Revit doesn't have a helix tool. Why not? For many years now, I have seen a number of different ways to create a helix or spiral in Revit. Zach Kron at Buildz posted back in 2010 using families. HyunnWoo Kim posted in 2013 using adaptive components. I even posted about it myself in 2014 with a very basic method here.

The problem with all of these methods is I don't find them to be very straightforward. The other day I saw a question posted on the forums about how to create a helix and it got me thinking again if there was a better way to do this. (Dynamo was the obvious choice, but we'll come back to that).

So I asked myself, is there any other tool or object in Revit that creates a spiral or helix form? That's when spiral stairs popped into my head! So I opened up Revit and started to play, and this is what I came up with.

Dynamo is also another way you could go about creating a helix & spiral forms in Revit. HyunnWoo Kim posted again in 2015 and created a great video demonstrating the method.

Upgrading to Revit 2017 - Text Issues in Detail

Last month I posted about my personal experience trialing a model upgrade to Revit 2017, to see what effect the latest text updates by Autodesk will have.

I came across a blog post this morning by Ben Bishoff at Ideate Software who has gone into more detail & comparison of these text updates. I thought it was a good article because it gave me a clearer picture of what exactly is happening to the text and how it is moving. (I also happen to use the calibri font used in his example). You can find the post HERE. 

*Insert Sad Face*

RTC Australia started yesterday and I am not there <insert sad face>. It is at the beautiful Hunter Valley in New South Whales. To make it worse, a friend of mine is there, and he keep's sending me cool stuff!! 

So to make up for this massive educational loss, I decided to go through some of the downloaded material from last year's event that I still haven't looked at. Material from sessions I didn't get to see because I was in another. It reminded me of the information overload you get at this event. Some of the material & feedback you won't get anywhere else either. Some bits of presentations though are kindly shared by the authors, like this one about sorting your parameters. I saw the full presentation of this in 2015 and it was information I am now using everyday in my training, family & template setup. 

If you haven't been before, start that draft email to management because it is certainly worth every penny. You can visit the RTC website for future events around the world in 2016. Venues aren't too shabby either! When was the last time you were at a conference surrounded by a golf course AND with a view like this... 

RTC Aus 2016 - Crowne Plaza, Hunter Valley, N.S.W
Image Courtesy of Mr Perez! 

V-Ray For Revit

In my new year post, I spoke about my interest in the beta version of V-Ray for Revit, released by Chaos Group late last year. I still haven't quite gotten to looking at in depth yet, however a case study recently shared by Sam Davis was published by Jeff Pinheiro at TheRevit Kid.com. 

Sam discusses his experience testing the beta version of V-Ray for Revit. I think he did a great job looking into detail of some of the pro's & con's, as well as some great rendering demonstrations of lighting & shadows.  

So thank you to Sam Davis for this case study. You can find it here at the therevitkid.com! 

Free Revit Families and Sample Downloads from 'What Revit Wants'

Luke Johnson at 'What Revit Wants' has been very kind in sharing a very large list of Revit families, tips, tricks & workarounds.  

You can visit his post & the available downloads HERE. 

**Updated 13/06/2017: The link for the new What Revit Wants site has been reinstated, however the link to the original post is no longer available. I recommend visiting Luke's site and search for similar free families and content there. He has a number of other posts that may assist like this one: Free Family Content
To learn more about the What Revit Wants Site update, click here

Thanks Luke! 

Upgrading to Revit 2017 - Text Issues

There has been much hype about the Revit 2017 release. This year, Autodesk have released quite a few exciting new features which has got many people talking. Top of that list amongst others is the update to the text tools. I mentioned earlier in the week though, Autodesk also highlighted some upgrade issues to look out for. For me, the biggest ticket item for upgrade review was the text changes. 

Well, I just spent some time upgrading a few projects to Revit 2017 to test the upgrade problems Autodesk warned us about relating to text. It isn't pretty. Until now, I was only thinking text notes would be affected by the updates, it didn't even occur to me to think of everything else with text in it. That's right, think families.

From the projects I have tested so far, I will need to fix many of my annotation families, including all my reference tags. The text in many of them, now exceeds the limits of the tag design as you can see from some screenshots I have taken. 

Because text has gotten slightly larger, text notes overlapping is occurring all over the place. In some cases, it has messed with the location of where the leader is coming from. (It has moved the leader from the base of the paragraph to the side, causing some wierd long leaders). My titleblocks are also affected, along with keynotes, electrical symbols (some have text in them) & view references. 

I decided to test the OTB template and added a number of text notes, symbols and tags to a wall in Revit 2016. Then I opened it in Revit 2017. This is the affect to the OTB families. I have placed red detail lines so you can see the visual change more clearly. 

Revit 2016 Template

Upgraded in Revit 2017

The north point was interesting. More so, because I opened the Revit 2017 template and the family hasn't been updated by Autodesk. Trivial stuff, but it made me wonder how many of the families in their default libraries will be affected. As I mentioned, our titleblocks will need fixing, but in checking Autodesks titleblocks they appear largely unaffected. Text style and justification as well as the limits of the text box appears to minimise the damage. 

So it seems the negative affect to projects is going to vary depending on text styles your office uses, text spacing & how your reference tags are designed. Schedules are another victim of all this. Our schedules have gotten longer (due to the slight increase in text height). So if you were tight for space, you may need additional sheets. 

Below is an example of large amounts of text and schedules being updated. In this example, the text extends off the sheet and overlaps in some areas due to more than one text box being used. You will also notice the increase in length of the schedule.

Revit 2016

Upgraded to Revit 2017

I can't help but laugh though. This is a feature users have been asking for improvement on for the better part of 10 years. Is this a classic case of be careful what you wish for?? 

I was listening to the latest episode of BIMThoughts last night, where they discussed Revit 2017 new features. I think it was Steve Stafford author of Revit OpEd Blog who made an interesting comment about the text updates. He commented he would have liked all the effort that went into updating text to have gone into other things we really need due to the increase in data & metadata in models and less on text notes. Looking at our latest template and the changes we have in the pipeline, I understand where he is coming from. 

The reason being, we have gotten so use to the shortfalls with text in Revit we have adapted our workflows and reviewed our drawing standards around it. All our general notes that once covered our front sheet & plans are gone (creating proper lists and editing them was always a nightmare). Instead we rely on including these in the specification, preliminaries and trade sections for these types of general notes. (Which is probably how we should have always been doing it). 

All our abbreviation legends are generated using multi-category tagging & schedules as well as custom key schedules for standard keys, an example would be a door legend key. We have only a few symbol legends using the legend views tool in Revit, and none of the text in them uses lists anyway. We are also working on improving keynotes to take care of many of our notes throughout the drawing set.

So in thinking about it, perhaps I would have preferred them dedicating time to the problems surrounding leaders which will still affect all of the above & into the future. More control on their appearance, how & where they come off notes & tags, adding them to view references, handling of elbows when moving tags and text etc. 

Interesting thought. 

Delete Unnamed Reference Planes Using Dynamo

A few weeks ago I wrote my first post about Dynamo. I attempted to answer the question 'What is Dynamo?'. As I mentioned in the post, I am a newbie to Dynamo, having only started playing with it, since late last year. 

I firmly believe Dynamo is going to have more of an impact on the way we work in the coming years. Whilst Dynamo can do a broad range of tasks including creating geometry, for the moment I have a keen in interest in Dynamo's ability to read & write data from Revit, either directly, or via Excel. It's ability to save considerable time on repetitive tasks is really amazing.  

So, if you have never used Dynamo before, I will introduce you to the easiest dynamo graph you will ever make. It can't get any simpler, it only has one node!!

As part of my regular model management, I have a rule of thumb when working on team models, to name your reference planes. If you don't, it is understood they are up for deletion at the end of the week. In the past, it has been a manual processes of tidying up, selecting one reference plane at a time, checking its name, and if it's blank, bye bye reference plane.

Well, thanks to Konrad K Sobon author of the 'archi-lab.net' package available on Dynamo, this task now only takes a few seconds. This package contains a node called 'Delete Unnamed Reference Planes'. Drop this single node on the graph and a second later, all unnamed reference planes are deleted. Told you it was easy! 

Konrad has a website archi-lab.net that I would strongly recommend checking out, it has some great stuff. 

Now if that doesn't convince you to take a sneak peak at what Dynamo has to offer, I don't know what will.

Never used Dynamo?
No problem, follow these step by step instructions to download the package & run your first graph!

1. To start download the latest Dynamo here: http://dynamobim.org/download/ selecting 'Dynamo' (not Dynamo Studio)

2. Start Revit and Open a blank project.

3. Place a few horizontal AND vertical reference planes in the view, naming only the horizontal ones. (This is just to demonstrate as we intend to delete the vertical reference planes, as they will remain unnamed)

4. Go to the Add-ins tab and click Dynamo.

5. Download the archi-lab package by selecting 'Packages' > 'Search for packages'.

6. Search 'archi lab' and click install.

7. You will now notice the 'Archi-lab_Grimshaw' package in the list.

  

8. In the search bar type 'unnamed' to find the node we want

9. Click the node and it should drop on screen.

10. Hover your cursor over the node and list information will drop down telling you how many reference planes were deleted. 

11. By default Dynamo is set to run automatic, so it's already completed! Take a look! You should only see horizontal reference planes (The reference planes we named) the rest being deleted!

13. For future reference, change 'AUTOMATIC' (bottom left of the Dynamo screen) to 'MANUAL RUN' so you can run graphs when you are ready to.

Note: This node is unique in that if you wish to run it again, you will need to delete it from the graph and then add it again for it to work. I am assuming this is so if you have it running in the background, ref planes aren't being deleted as you place them.

This works over the whole project, not just the view. So you can now try adding reference planes to other views or test it out on a project! Now you can show off to your work colleagues!