Twist and Shout - (Rotate Behavior)

There has been some perennial buzz on the Revit rotate tool.  Each new person that learns the program has to learn this tool and its peculiarities so the topic persists.  In this post I want to review the current behavior, the access points, and review some popular revamp proposals.

Rotate lives in the modify ribbon.

When activated there are three options:

• Disjoin - prevents joins from interacting with the element during rotation
• Copy - creates a new element when complete
• Angle - allows you to enter in a precise angle

The first click is the start point of the rotation and the second click the end point.  Note: After clicking the first point of the rotation the temp dims listen so you can enter a distance via the keyboard in lieu of the second click.

This brings us to the main issue folks have with the tool: the center of rotation.  The center is shown as a blue control that can be repositioned by dragging it to a new location. The problems are:

• The behavior is undiscoverable. The status prompt or tooltip is insufficient and many go for a long time not knowing the center can be moved. (a % of this blogs readers may have just learned something)
• The center as determined is rarely optimal.  The center is the centroid of the item(s), with a few exceptions such as hosted elements.
• The center is difficult to reposition.  Its difficult to select and drag the control. After dragging its not remembered for future rotations.

 
Figure - Default rotation centers (hosted door, component, group)

There are really two main proposals that have been discussed over the eons.

1. Make the tool a three click operation. (Center, Start, End).
2. Retain (or enhance) the existing behavior yet provide a shortcut to snap the center to the cursor when desired. (the default could prefer one method over the other - preferably the most popular)

I'll share my opinion.

(1.) Simple and while it may mean an extra-click in some cases clicks are just part of performance.  It's proven that a person can make dozens of clicks in the same time it takes another to cognitively process a situation and then respond.  It follows industry patterns including other Revit patterns such as the nearby "Scale" tool.  Some snapping would need to be implemented such as center of Group unless it's not needed.

(2.) Provides a convenient way to place the center but is still as discoverable as the current control drag method.  New users would be unlikely to discover it.  Placing the point instead of dragging it should be better.

Another variation is to employ approach (1) but offer a snap to get the current behavior where Revit calculates the center.  We could also make some better choices such as choosing the family origin, remembering a repositioned center for the active session ect.  My concern would be implementing a dozen tweaks to the current behavior will not address the most pressing issue and cost more than just implementing a three-click behavior.

Note: the option rotate after placement would follow the same behavior as the rotate tool and the shortcut to rotate using the spacebar would be unaffected.

Bring on the comments..  Additional ideas or feedback on the proposals listed here are welcome.

_erik

 

 

Comments

[DoTheBIM]

Just thowing this out there, not saying its a good bad or indifferent idea(s), but something to chew on so to speak...

click/drag....
You could implement a click & drag fuction that would essientially be a live command modifier. You would select object(s), select rotation command (or vice versa), then click on your desired rotation point and drag, then click you start angle, end then end angle.

separate commands...
Mirror has two different commands for different modes, why not rotate? Actually I'd prefer to combine the 2 mirror commands with a key press modifier or similar.

mouse gesture...
Why not implement mouse gestures for different modes of commands

Discover-ability is hard unless people are physically clicking on different buttons to invoke different behaviors.

I saved the best (IMO) for last (and probably most costly)...

Heads up commands...
Put the tools in front of the user's point of focus. Put a little (not ribbon sized) context sensitive tool bar close to the selection (think word 2007+) you could rotate, move, copy, edit boundary, edit text, create similar etc...(depending on selection), then you could put in a sub-context sensitive command it invoke different modes of a command. Helps discover-ablilty maybe, but most helpful in increasing productivity and less dependence on shortcuts.

[DoTheBIM]

Oh and almost forgot... Definitely like the idea of saved rotation points per session if not persistent till changed otherwise. I'm thinking that could be expanded on...

[pierre-felix breton]

IMO one of the reason why the drag cannot be discovered is because we expect little blue grips for manipulating objects. if instead of being the rotate symbol it was a small dot (with the rotate symbol next to it, that might improve things. just a theory...

[Anthony Hauck]

Interesting.  People do tend to associate based on shape or color but when both vary the correlation may be weakened.  This would be interesting to test.

[Luke]

First click should definitely place the rotation basepoint.

Its ridiculous when rotating large DWG files, to have to Zoom out, search for the tiny symbol, try and drag it without it snapping to the wrong point.

Absolutely stoopid.

[David]

The three click (center, first angle, second angle) is definitely the most sensible. Plus, it sounds like it would be the easiest to implement and the easiest to teach new users. Thanks for bringing up the topic (sometimes these little mundane things make a big difference in efficiency).

[David Zeibin]

Three clicks sounds OK, but might be mildly irritating if it's required 100% of the time. Often I don't care where the rotation point is, I just want to quickly rotate the selection CW/CCW by 90 degrees. (e.g. having a shortcut for 90-degree rotation (Ctrl+R, Ctrl+L) would be great)

You could simply add a button next to Disjoin/Copy/Angle for "Place Center of Rotation" for the times when it's necessary, like large DWGs, as mentioned.

[Chad]

My experience with using the Rotate tool is that I leave the rotation center where it is far more often than needing to move it.
Typically when I need to move it, it's to place it at the center of a circle or arc.
So this brings up two separate situations for me;

1. Work on your point 2 to enhance the current functionality, by way of either a button on the Options Bar, or preferably some on screen menu/buttons under the cursor.

2. For a selection of objects which contains a circle or arc which the rotation will most likely be around the center of these circles or arcs, possibly Revit could try and predict the placement of the rotation center.

[yves Gravelin]

Sometime we want to rotate without accuracy, some time we need to click to snap the center of the rotate funcion.
In many case in Revit when I want to choose, I use the TAB key.
You can implement the actual behavior (ehanced) as default mode and the TAB key to activate the three clicks mode and TAB again to return to auto center mode ETC.

[DaveP]

While I agree that the current Rotation Center is rarely in the right place, I'm leery of ALWAYS requiring the user to locate the center.

If nothing else changes, it makes sense to always make the first click to locate the center point, because it's never correct.

If, however, other changes are made so Revit guesses better as to where the Center should be, it may then be annoying to be forced to pick a new Center point if Revit has guessed correctly. Take, for example the "Origin" of a family. If the behavior is changed so the initial Rotation point becomes the Origin of a family, chances are I do NOT want to move it. Now we've introduced an extra click instead or reducing one.

I could live with always requiring a Rotation point as long as there is some simple way to accept Revit's initial guess.

[PatrickS]

I agree that it could be better, but I also agree that many times I don't need to move the default rotation center. A simple Ctrl-Click to locate the center, no matter the zoom level, would be nice.

At the very least, make the rotate line extending off of the rotate center remain the same length regardless of zoom level. That would at least help us find the rotate center after zooming out on a site plan. But if something like the Ctrl-Click method is implemented, then there would be no need for that.

[Dave Baldacchino]

A 3-click setup would be ok, but the current behavior is very convenient at times. Say I'm in a 3d view and want to rotate a face-based light fixture. I can simply click start and click end or type in a rotation. With a 3-click system, it would be annoying to have to find a rotation point, which might be highly inconvenient to do as there might not be something easy to snap to.

So I wonder if you could keep the current functionality as is, but let us define our own center of rotation through a double-click. After that the next click would be the start point of rotation as usual.

[www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmgZbAI6ZYIfszFhwqIro-voqDQnXvXRa8]

Also I'd like rotate short cut similar to the Select CTRL and Drag that creates copies of objects. Maybe Select Shift & Drag could spin the object around it’s centroid?

[bt]

The worst part of the default behavior is that the Roatation Origin Point will be off screen if you are zoomed in on a view, as it will default to the 'centroid' of the group of objects.

It took me a long time to figure that out.