Showing elements from a ceiling plan in a floor plan

From time to time it’s nice to see overhead items in a Revit floor plan. Dropped ceilings, soffits, light fixtures, etc. are all useful to see in plan view, especially when arranging furniture and such.

Here’s a great and incredibly simple technique to show these items in plan using whatever line style you choose, while still maintaining the connection to the actual ceiling elements. I’ve found some designers simply using drafting lines to create these items in plan, but this is a non-BIM way of doing things, since there is no real connection between the items in plan and the elements in the RCP. Sure, you could constrain and lock them, but the following method is much simpler.

What’s the trick? Well, it makes use of Underlay, setting the orientation to Reflected Ceiling Plan, then using the Linework tool. The slick thing is that once you’ve overridden the line style, you can shut off the underlay and the lines you’ve modified are still visible. Nice, right?

I’m sure that’s enough to get a lot of you going, but here are the step by step details in a quick Revit tutorial.

Revit Tutorial – Show Elements from a Ceiling Plan in a Floor Plan View

Revit - Standard Reflected Ceiling Plan View

Here is a standard Revit reflected ceiling plan. We’ve got an acoustic tile ceiling with an overhead lighting fixture in the conference room.

Revit - Standard Floor Plan

As you know, by default in a Revit floor plan view, no ceiling items are shown.

Revit - Turn on Underlay with RCP Orientation

Set Underlay to Level 1 (same level) and make sure the Underlay Orientation is set to Reflected Ceiling Plan

Revit - Linework Tool

Use the Line Work tool from the Modify panel of the Ribbon to change the appearance of the edge of elements you’d like to be visible in the floor plan. You’ll notice that there is an Overhead style that exists for this very purpose.

Revit - Overhead Line Style

Piece of cake, right? Simple choose ‘Overhead’ from the Line Style drop down (or whatever line style you prefer) then click the edge of the element you want to be visible. You’ll see the line change from halftone (underlay style) to a dark line with whatever line style you choose.

Revit - Ceiling Elements in Floor Plan

Here’s the finishing touch! Turn off Underlay in the View Properties. Presto! The lines that we modified with the Line Work tool are still visible. Sweet, right?

Control visibility of masking region linework in Revit

While creating a custom office furniture family set for a client a while back, I had the need to control the appearance of boundary lines in a Revit masking region.

On the surface, it seemed like something pretty easy to do. While in Sketch Mode for the masking region, you can select the boundary line you want to paramaterize to control its visibility and add a Yes/No field to it. You can check out the accompanying image to see how I attempted this. Seems like it would do the trick, right?

The problem is that it just flat doesn’t work. For some reason, the Visibility parameter doesn’t apply to masking region boundaries. I fought with the masking region a bit before eventually, I figured out a pretty easy work around. It was one of those things I figured out while deep in the middle of a family creation project that saved the day, but I didn’t take the time to put together a blog post or video to share it with my fellow Reviteers.

Well, Jose over at Andekan has created a great (while lengthy) video showing the problem and the work around. Check it out, after this brief description of the solution. Here’s the trick:

You can’t control the visibility of a Revit masking region boundary with a parameter.

Instead, change the linework of the boundary lines that you need to control to ‘Invisible’. Now they will never be seen. Exit sketch mode for the masking region.

Next, draw new Symbolic Lines over the top of them. Guess what? Symbolic Lines CAN have a parameter that controls their visibility!

You should be able to take it from there. If you want to see a great step by step, check out the video from Andekan. Also, be sure to check out their high quality custom Revit families. These guys do a great job of creating powerful and parametric Revit content.

Revit Families – Endless combinations with nested families and the Family Type parameter

Have you ever created a Revit family that had several nested families in it that you wanted a simple drop down menu to give you the chance to choose which nested family you wanted? Well, here’s a brilliant method for creating powerful nested families that seems to be difficult to find solid documentation on. I’d like to thank Bob for reminding me about this easy to use yet dynamic technique for controlling the visibility of nested families.

Here’s the scenario:

Let’s say you have a family (we’ll refer to this as the parent family) that contains several nested families that are possible options within it. For example, you might have a door family that consists of the frame and the opening, but that has several panel families nested into it. One panel might be a typical flush door panel, another is a panel with glass, another is a panel with louvers, etc.

We want to make it easy for users to insert the door family, then choose the type of panel they want. Now the way I’ve seen this documented the most often is to use the Visibility control tied to a Yes/No parameter that controls whether Panel 1 is visible or not, Panel 2 , Panel 3, etc.

This method works ok, but has some potential problems. You end up inserting all the families into the parent family, then having to align and constrain each one, then you have to set up a bunch of Types in the family that in turn have those Visibility Yes/No parameters set correctly. Still following me? One of the problems we’ve run into is that the user now has to create their own types, or manually run through those parameters and make sure that the panel that they wanted is turned on and all the others are off. If they make a mistake, it’s possible that they have more than one panel turned on and all sorts of craziness can ensue.

Also, if you have quite a few nested family options, this list of parameters can get to be pretty unwieldy and difficult to set correctly.

What would be great is to simply have a dropdown parameter in Element Properties that shows all the nested family options and just lets you pick it, having it swap out the appropriate nested family. Well, with the technique we’ll show here, you can do exactly that.

The Solution – Create a Family Type parameter and use it to drive your family Label

After you’ve created your parent family, load up all the nested families that represent the options you want to have available. It’s important that these families be as identical as possible. They won’t be completely identical, of course, but you should create them from each other, keeping the reference lines in the same place to ensure that when one family gets swapped out for the other, things don’t jump around on you and constraints don’t break.

The next step is to create a new Parameter that is configured as a “Family Type” parameter.

Here I’ve named it “Door Panel Type”. You then need to choose which Category of families you want to be available to that Parameter. We’ve created our panels as Generic Models, so I choose this category.

Note that all families that are assigned to that category will be shown in the drop down for that parameter, so make sure you aren’t cramming too much into one family. For instance, if I also had a bunch of families nested in that represented door hardware – knobs, pulls, etc. and they were assigned to the Generic Model category, our drop down for the panels is going to be really confusing, because you’ll see families for both panels and hardware.

Now here comes the little trick that brings it all together: insert one nested family and position it correctly.

You don’t need to insert all of the nested families and go through the trouble of aligning them and constraining them. All the nested families have to be loaded into the main family, but not inserted. Now select the nested family and go to its Element Properties. At the bottom you’ll see Label. Set this value to use the parameter you created earlier (the Family Type parameter) so that this family instance will be driven by it.

That’s all there is to it! Now, when you change the parameter for Family Type, it will swap out this instance with the appropriate family. Brilliant!

In the example at the top of this post, we’ve got two instances of a nested door family that allows endless combinations. Each side of the door can have unlimited family options. This door has 7 panels for each door, giving us a LOT of possibilities.

Displaying the Classic Toolbars in 2010 Products

Recently we have had a few customer support request on how to display their “classic toolbars” in Autocad 2010 as well as the vertical products like Architecture, Civil 3D… and so. Yes, there is an AutoCAD Classic Workspace available out of the box, but only for the platform software and not the verticals. Even though I whole heartedly support the use of the Ribbon; sometimes you have older customization in a toolbar or you just want to use both the toolbars and the Ribbon to ease into the transition. In this blog I want to show you 3 simple ways on how easy it is to still be able to redisplay that hidden content.

First let’s look at the platform product, AutoCAD and its different ways of displaying toolbars.
1.The easiest way is if you liked the old look and feel of AutoCAD prior to the Ribbon then just change the Workspace to AutoCAD Classic and presto and it will have that old appearance that has been around for many versions.
  a. Workspace button located on the Status bar at the bottom of the screen. Just click the dropdown arrow and change it to AutoCAD Classic.

  b. By default the Ribbon is not displayed in this workspace. (Remember that does NOT mean you can’t take advantage of the Ribbon in this old look; if you want to add it also… At the command line just type RIBBON and it will display. When you want to hide it again type: RIBBONCLOSE and it will disappear again.

2. Another way in AutoCAD Platform is to go through the old Menu Bar that used to be the Pull down menus that were replaced by the Ribbon. Aww Yes; you can even reload your old pull downs, but for now we are just showing how to display it so we can get to the Toolbars section through inside it.
  a. The first step is to display the Menu Bar by going to the dropdown options in the Quick Access Toolbar. (Note: the Quick Access Toolbar is not the same as the regular toolbars; it is a whole different menu area and for the most part is always displayed and can either at the top of the AutoCAD Screen or below the Ribbon only. You can Also display the Menu Bars in the Veridical Products; remember they don’t have the Tools pull-down menu that you will need in the next step.

  b. Next you will see the Menu Bar appear above the Ribbon tabs. Go to the Tools pulldown and than Toolbars -> AutoCAD -> (then pick which toolbar you want to display first.

  c. In this example the Draw Toolbar will then display where it was last displayed.  Now here is the good part you only need one Toolbar displayed in order to access the rest the way you used to turn on and off the display of all the other Toolbars. To do so just (right-click) any icon on the toolbar and you will see a list of the rest of the Toolbars in the shortcut menu, just pick the ones you want to display like you have done in the past versions.

3. The Last way is the best way to display a Toolbar, because it works in both; platform or vertical products through the command line.
  a. At the command line type:
      Command: -toolbar
      Enter toolbar name or [ALL]: layers
      Enter an option [Show/Hide/Left/Right/Top/Bottom/Float] <Show>: Show
 
This dash in front of the command name suppress the CUI dialog box and allows you to just type in the name of the toolbar you want. Once you have the first toolbar displayed; refer to step 2c above to display any other desired toolbar you desire.

I hope this helps; Thank you for your time and if you have suggestions for future Blogs that you would like to see? Please feel free to email me at isaac.harper@cadsoft-consult.com.

Vote for your Favorite Autodesk University 2009 proposals

Yes, I got a little carried away this year. I enjoyed presenting last year and got so much great feedback from attendees that I wanted to make sure I had some top notch classes in this year’s event.  I went through a bunch of my notes and projects this past year and tried to craft some topics that dealt with specific issues that I, clients, or colleagues ran into or topics that I defined a useful workflow for.  I plan on sharing some very valuable tips to make your job easier!

To vote for sessions, go to the Autodesk University Session Selection page and log in using your AU Online username and password. If you do not have an AU Online account, it only takes 15 seconds to register as an AU Online member . Once you’re logged in, just click the links below to vote or search by speaker ‘Patrick Villella’. Note that the search lists speakers by First Name.  Be sure to check out the other great courses by other CADsoft Consulting technical specialists; Ron Couillard, Isaac Harper, David Metcalf, Chris Perry, & Jerry Levy!

Worried that you may not be able to attend AU this year, due to the slow economy? Or maybe you are trying to make yourself more marketable in a competitive workplace? You can’t afford to miss one of my favorite classes to put together: Stimulus Maximus – Growing your AEC business with Social Networking Tools and Web 2.0 Learn how to really harness the power of these tools to get the job you are really after, or bring your company more business.

1. Log in
2. Find the course you want to vote – searching by speaker, topic, or clicking a link below.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Vote button. Easy!

Vote for your Favorite Autodesk University 2009 Courses!

1. Revit in the Real World – Real Lessons Learned & Real Tips for Successful Revit Projects
2. Rev-IT:Tools and Techniques for IT & CAD/BIM Managers that support Revit
3. Real World BIM Workflow – an In-depth Multidiscipline Approach with the 2010 Software Lineup
4. I Feel the Need…the Need for LEED! – 10 Easy Ways to Score Additional LEED Credits with Autodesk Software
5. Stimulus Maximus – Growing your AEC business with Social Networking Tools and Web 2.0
6. A Concise Rendering Workflow from Revit to 3ds Max: for Designers – Not ‘Specialists’!
7. Revit Modeling Techniques for Construction and 4D Analysis
8. Priceless Tips from the BIM Managers Bible
9. Revit and Civil 3D Come Together for Site Design – Introducing the ADSK File Format
10. Content Master – Best Practices for Creating BIM Content for a Wide Audience
11. Artists Gone Mental – Harnessing Mental Ray for Vray Users
12. Green Your Design with Ecotect and Revit
13. A Bridge to Anywhere — How to use the Revit Structure Bridge Toolkit
14. Save Time and Prevent Mistakes with the Power of Revit Schedules
15. Mmmm…Triple Filtered Revit! — Create Clear and Appealing Wall Type, Area, and Code Data Plans using Filters and View Templates
16. Yeah! That’s How I Like It!– Improving the Look of your finished Revit Sheets

Civil 3D Presentations:

1. Style-O-Matic 2010 – “Set It and Forget It!: Making AutoCAD® Civil 3D® Work The Way You Want It to Work (encore of last y ear’s well attended class)
2. Style-O-Matic PowerUser Edition’ – “Set It and Forget It! : Making AutoCAD® Civil 3D® Work The Way You Want It to Work (enhanced and indepth version of last year’s class, specifically for advanced users)