The Revit Clinic

Home for the Holidays

I want to aplogize for the lack of posts last week.  I was traveling to Japan and Singapore providing training our Support specialists and meeting with Customers and Partners in the region.  While it was a good trip, it did not leave alot of time for other things. 

   

I managed to have some Pepper Crab in Singapore which was a very interesting and fun meal.  Living in New England has introduced a lot of seafood to me, but this was a first.   

Overall, I enjoy traveling, except for being stuck in the middle section in coach.  I had a number of interesting conversations with customers and partners on the trip and many involving memory usage and Revit. 

Revit is demanding when in comes to memory.  Specifically, for anything related to creating output in the application.  Things like exporting, printing, and rendering use more memory than other tasks.  I have mentioned it before, but please check out the Revit Performance technical note.  It's good bed time reading and worth the time to check it out. 

I will not be posting again till after the New Year (I'll be back in Wisconsin!) so til then, happy Reviting and Happy Holidays!

Sharing from home

Worksharing is a great tool within Revit products for working on a model with multiple users.  It allows individuals to work on files and save those changes back to a central file.  It typically requires two things, a Central file located in a place where all users have access and a local file on your local machine for working in. 

The question is how can someone take a project home and work on it?  While working in Wisconsin, I found a need to be able to take work home with me over the weekend as I am sure a lot of Architects and Engineers have had to do.  With AutoCAD it was easy, just take the files home and work and bring them back Monday and replace the originals.   How does it work with Revit when worksharing is involved?

Well, if you can be on-line at home:

Use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection and Remote Desktop software to remote into a machine in the office and work virtually off of that machine.  This is a nice clean approach that lets you actually work as if you are in the office.  In my mind this is the best approach and has the least amount of chance to cause problems.  I use this approach now, when I need to work from home.  This works great because you can have multiple users remote into the office to get the work done.

It’s a little bit harder if you need to be offline (disconnected from the Internet), but there is a way.  These tips come from the AEC Lounge at AU this year.

1. For just yourself:
   
   • Make sure no one else is working in the file
   • Check out all the Worksets to yourself
   • Work off-line in your local file at home
   • Save to Central when you get back to the office (remember to relinquish all those checked out worksets)
2. For more than one person (trickier, but possible):
   
   • Make the needed worksets editable while still at the office and on the network
   • Be sure to save the Local File before closing it
   • At home, you can work, modify stuff in the editable Worksets, and you can add things to any workset
   • Warning!If you try to edit something in a workset that you don’t have checked out, Revit will warn you that it is only Editable at Risk. Try to avoid this! If someone at the office modifies the same element, you will NOT be able to Save to Central—all of your changes in all worksets will be lost!

Hopefully, you don’t have to work too much from home or on the road, but in the event that you need to, these are some good practices that you can use.  Again, special thanks to the Revit QA team for this tip!

Better late than never...

I am a little late with this post, but I wanted to make sure that you knew.  Web Update 3 Service Pack has been released for Revit Architecture, Structure, and MEP 2009.  The update includes a number of fixes within the product, including some improvements to stability within the Products.

Download the Service Packs here:

Revit Architecture Web Update 3 Service Pack

Revit Structure Web Update 3 Service Pack

Revit MEP Web Update 3 Service Pack

Make sure you check out the Web Update Enhancement List prior to downloading the build. 

Post AU Daze

AU was a very busy, but great week for me.  I apologize for the lack of pasts during the week, but I couldn't seem to find time to write anything live from the event.  My class seemed to go pretty well.  I taught two sessions of the class to full houses, which is always good and I hope that everyone got something out of it. 

One of the best parts of AU for me is always getting a chance to talk directly with customers.  I always like to find out how Revit is being used and utilized and to hear about the variety of challenges that are out there. 

If you were able to attend AU I would love to hear your feedback (especially if you made it to my class!) of the event.  I am already starting to think about what to teach at next years AU. 

Material family frustration

Have you ever been frustrated by the amount of materials available when you are creating a family in Revit? 

If you start a new blank family in Revit (I start with Generic Model family templates first), the materials dialog box is almost empty.

Now you can easily duplicate existing materials in this dialog box and assign different Render Appearances, but if you want to save some time, you can use Transfer Project Standards to transfer additional materials from another proejct, family, or template.

Just make sure to have the other file open and then go to the File pull down menu and choose Transfer Project Standards.  A dialog (below) will appear that lets you select the items you want to copy in.  You will not be able to transfer everything you can transfer from a project to a project, but you can get materials. 

 

Once this is done the materials dialog in the family will be loaded with all the materials from the project. 

A important thing to note with doing this though is that you will add to the file size of your family and decrease its performance in Revit.  I would recommend deleting any Materials that you do not need from the dialog after doing this.