A blog dedicated to tidbits of software information related to the AEC industry. Most tips and tricks are roughly 60 seconds because, "Hey who doesn't have 60 seconds".
*The views and opinions expressed in this blog do not reflect those of my employer.

Monday, April 6, 2015

Assign Arrowheads Across Whole Revit Project

Every now and then I will jump into a developed model and notice that users have created custom text types or keynote tags, Often times these text types and keynote tags will not be using the standard arrowhead type we use at our company.
There are several reasons this could happen,(copying details, to add something to the keynote tag, different text style, etc).
In Revit, the arrowhead style is a type parameter which is both a good and bad thing. If you have a very developed model with a bunch of different types, this could take what seems like forever.
Thankfully we have Dynamo to save us. See below for a video of the first Rhythm tool in action.

In the video I illustrate that all the text and keynotes are different types. Select the types to exclude (important if you need specific arrowhead types), and select the arrowhead type for Dynamo to apply after it selects all of them for the whole model.



-JohnP

Rhythm.Tools for DynamoBIM

This week I will have a few posts regarding some new tool nodes for DynamoBIM. These tools have a heavy focus on documentation tasks and will be presented to 505BUG on Thursday.

Here are the tools I will be explaining over the next few days.

2015-04-06_07h43_47Arrowhead Assigner

2015-04-06_07h46_47 

Upper Case Text for Everything

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Sheet Dash Remover (previously discussed here)

2015-04-06_07h58_03

Automate your graphic scale on viewports!

stay tuned..

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

ʎɐp slooɟ lᴉɹdɐ

In the spirit of today, I published a new node in Rhythm called String.FlipReverse.

This node will take strings as input and make them appear upside down. This works best on Dynamo 0.8.0 because they added unicode support with this release. It also doesn’t function for every punctuation character at this point.

2015-04-01_13h48_07

You can find this on the package manager, and below is an animation showing it in action as well. 

04-01-15

Have fun!

-JohnP 

Monday, March 30, 2015

Revit- Generic Annotations, Get a grip!

If you have ever worked in the family editor in Revit, you have probably became aware that all family templates and types are not created equal.

This post will specifically cover the category of generic annotation. Often times we add stretch handles to our families to allow them to flex and shape, unfortunately that is not the case with generic annotations (symbols).

If you have ever tried to copy a reference plane into a generic annotation it simply does not work. You are greeted with the following message.

2015-03-30_07h35_57After some trial and error, I have finally found the family that does allow you to copy reference planes. This is the view title family!

In the video below, I demonstrate how this process works. (Currently the grip handles only work properly in “paper space”. I believe when used in the live views it multiplies the length by the scale factor.)

Friday, March 27, 2015

Dynamo- Number Revit Sheets Identically

Or seemingly identical.

Currently in Revit you are not able to number two sheets with the same number. This is regardless of phase, building or any other modifier. You typically have to add something to the number and it then becomes difficult to manage in callouts and other items.

There have been discussions around for utilizing unicode characters to solve this problem (a simple google search will show this). There are two problems with this though.

  • It is time consuming. Right click> insert> select character
  • It is hidden so other users have no clue!

 

Once again here is where dynamo comes to save the day.

My graph that I demonstrate below will renumber the sheets that are named with an asterisk (*) in front to insert this hidden character. After you plot or whatever you can then name it back to the asterisk. This makes it easier to manage and explain to users.

Rather than showing them a potentially harmful process of inserting a unicode character, you are just saying,”Insert an asterisk in front of that sheet number and I got the rest.”

The video below shows this in action and I included the link for the graph. You have to install Rhythm from the package manager for the graph to work. (Updated 03/27/15)

Number Revit Sheets Identically