Retourner and Feature Stories

Hello!  I’m back from a break and ready to re-take up blogging.  Thanks to Tom for his efforts to keep the information flowing.  As many fellow bloggers out there know ..its work.

I was fortunate to visit some great cities: Amsterdam, Cologne, Munich, Bern and Lucern.  The U.S. should look to its past and across the ponds to re-establish some decent rail service.  It was really a treat riding speeding ICE trains that arrived exactly on time and dropped me off right where I wanted to be. 

…anyways back to work.

I’ve gotten some first and second hand feedback that people enjoy posts that provide insight into factory feature production.  Given this I’ll make an effort to share some stories on some 2011 features and start with ....custom elevation tags.

The first thought of anyone who didn't learn Revit this year is probably what took so $%#&@#* long.  .........yeah....ummm.....sorry..about that.

The main complicating issue was the fact that elevation tags differ from all the other symbols in that they supported multiple views.  This required a different solution and complications kept inflating estimates requiring more people to be involved who were already booked ect....ect...  Believe me we wanted to solve this guy and it was a real let down each year when it remained an open issue.  2011 it was do or die.  This thing would not get the better of us.

Lets review some solutions that were explored over the years.

Allow one to choose a symbol to use for the arrows and one for the body.

This seemed fine yet the body and arrows are closely related making it difficult to imagine how one could make the content so it all lined up properly in the project.  When you edit a section head or tail they are always separated so they don’t affect each other.  Not so with elevation tags.  Imagine someone iterating for a long time trying to get it right. Additionally no joy for those who needed flexibility in the number or direction of the arrows.

Draw the arrows and body in the same family and use a parameter or subcategory to assign line work to a view direction or the body.

This was workable yet again didn’t allow for flexibility in view direction or the number of views.  We'd have to hard code the directions (up/down/left/right) and the number of views (4).  It would also be possible to assign a left arrow to a right view or forget to make an assignment which is stupid. It looked like a very manual and error prone process.

Copy Section code to the Elevation category

This would allow you to place something like a section but Revit would treat it as an elevation.  Let’s just call this a hack.  It would be a gesture but leave many requirements on the table - multiple interior views for instance.

Nesting!

This was the breakthrough.  One could make an arrow symbol and nest it into the body symbol.  This would allow the arrow to behave as a single thing rather than a bunch of lines and one could accurately position it relative to the body previewing the final assembly.  The view direction would be inferred by the system and the number of arrows could be 1 - n.  Happy Joy Joy!  There was a concern that family nesting was too advanced to be a required skill yet BIM managers typically make the content. We would also ship examples for modification.  All examples we had collected were now possible as well as some unconventional examples:

Work left to do?

Sections have an embedded behavior where the symbol line maintains a horizontal orientation.  Many would like to see this capability in elevation tags.  Currently this only works for the lines in the section content we ship so there would need to be some UI exposed to allow you to specify if a line can rotate or not.  Please share any additional items below.

Next

In an upcoming post I’ll continue this story as work hardly ended once we had the design.  Features often encounter something I like to call “Lurking Evil”.  In this project it came in many forms.

_erik

Comments

[Joel Osburn]

Thanks for posting this; I like the inside story of the steps along the way to a solution.

I too, would like the internal symbol line to remain horizontal. And I'll add one more thing that still needs to be done: there must be a way to have one drawing number for multiple elevations within a symbol. This convention is so old and embedded in our ways of thinking (not to mention codified in the National CAD Standard) that we NEED to be able to do this. It also helps with graphical conciseness; reductions in graphic density typically increase clarity, always a worthy goal.

Here's one idea for how this could work: When placing an interior elevation tag, only one view should be created. This view would really be a view container, much like a sheet except that it can itsef be placed on sheets. The container would then include any walls in the room the symbol is placed in, as specified by the existing show/hide arrows checkboxes. Since the container acts like a sheet, the individual elevations could be moved with respect to each other simply by operating on their crop boundaries. Imagine how much simpler the project browser would be!

[Erik]

Interesting proposal Joel. The key to cracking these is to find some existing technology that can be leveraged without feeling forced or unusable. I'll take a look into this. It is a separate issue from the ability to customize the tag and so it was treated as such to keep things from getting bogged down but it clear the need is still present.

[Software Testing Services]

Thanks for posting. I like the whole story and the solution to it. the convention is also too old that will each can understand well.

[Amy]

Amazing post.

[Joel Osburn]

Erik -

I understand that there are challenges, but I think it's an endpoint that just everyone wants. The rest of the world will not change simply because it's difficult for Autodesk to implement, and the standard is the standard. We have clients that require adherence to the NCS, so then how do we meet that obligation with Revit? Answer: lots of Autocad skullduggery, and a total waste of time (profit).

The idea I posited was an attempt at a viable solution, but I don't know anything about the internals so can only guess. I am also wary of creating yet another corner case.

[Anthony Hauck]

completely understand.  It came up in 2011.  The new feature was released without this requirement in the interest of keeping things moving forward but it is something left to do.

[Joel Osburn]

Thanks, Erik. I think we can all relate to endless task lists. The more one accomplishes, the more items pop up seeking attention!