The Revit Clinic

Required Reading (Viewing) for Revit MEP

Hi! My name is Jeremy Smith, one of the MEP Product Support Specialists here at Autodesk.  First off, let me say what an honor it is to be referred to as an “Author” on this site, particularly in view of the fact that I’ve published a grand total of zero books, magazine articles or thesis papers. 

I do recall writing a couple of book reports back in the day.  Remember those?  What fun!  In fact, if it weren’t for the writer’s block and carpal tunnel pain, I might have mistaken writing a report for parasailing in the Caribbean.  The offshoot of the whole thing is that, with practice, I became pretty good at filling a number of pages by the skillful use of triple spacing, compound-complex sentences and an extra large font.  My teachers also used to remark about what a coincidence it was that I completed books much faster right around the time the VCR was introduced.  But, I digress…

Also…[deep breath]….I’ve never “blogged” before.  There, I said it.   I couldn’t bear keeping that a secret anymore.  I’m sensing that many of you may have already seen through my little charade anyway, so at least that’s on the table.  By the way, that reminds me:  out of the blue someone recently asked if I was on Twitter and if I had considered doing some “tweeting”.  Taken by surprise, I remember saying something like, “I can’t.  I have a dentist appointment,” while the only thought swirling around my brain was, ‘Bad old puddy tat!’  (Queue the sound of crickets chirping).  So I'm fairly certain I haven't tweeted yet, either.

Aaaannnyyywho... I am very glad to have an opportunity to share what I’ve learned about Revit MEP, and I am also looking forward to hear your comments, questions and insight.  As you can tell from my silly rant at the outset, I am all about adding levity to this forum, but at the same time I’m very serious about helping our customers better understand Revit MEP and troubleshoot issues that arise.  Please don’t hesitate to submit suggestions about specific features or issues that you’d like to hear more about.

Meanwhile, I am going to break a cardinal rule of blogging, and use my first post to direct you to another site.  (Remember I’m new, so for all I know, there is no such rule).  However, one of the first places to which I always direct new and long-time users of Revit MEP is a series of videos created by the former Revit MEP Product Manager, Kyle Bernhardt.  We have a link to his blog on the left side of the page under 2nd Opinions. The link is called Inside the System.  I consider the videos that Kyle has created to be “required viewing” for anyone learning Revit MEP.  For instance, we receive a number of support requests that deal with the following:

• Spaces and Zones
• Building Performance analysis
• System Configuration
• Connectors and flow propagation

Many of the questions related to these topics can be answered simply by viewing Kyle’s videos.  He does a fantastic job of explaining the principles of Revit MEP and how it all works.  So, in the spirit of providing preventative care on this blog, I urge anyone who hasn’t done so to view these videos.  Then, please come back to this site and feel free to have me expound on any of the points that you’d like more detail about.

I look forward to “speaking” with all of you in the near future.

Now…is there a way to add spacing and double the font size in Typepad?   

"Can't make type..." error when placing joists

Hey everyone! I'm excited about contributing to the Revit Clinic - and happy to be able to get some more Revit Structure content out there!

I'm originally from a suburb on the north shore of Boston, MA. I attended the University of New Hampshire, where I received a degree in Civil Engineering (focusing in Structural Engineering). After college I relocated to California where I worked as Project Coordinator/CAD Designer for an architecture firm. I started at Autodesk in 2005 working mainly with the architectural products, but soon grew into the team expert for Revit Structure. I now live in beautiful Charleston, SC and love every day of my job. Life is good. :) Since I just recapped and spoiled most of my "About the Authors" section, I'll leave you in suspense about what I enjoy outside of work - you can read my bio.

For my first post, I'd like to address a common error you may receive when placing a joist or a beam system of joist members:

“Can't make type ‘LH-Series Bar Joist: 24LH05’” (substitute the particular joist you're adding).

This is due to both family and manufacturer limits. Using the 24LH05 as an example, the shortest valid length is 20'-0". If you try to place one shorter than that, you'll receive the error. This is because in order for the family to be valid, it needs a set of internal panels, and a variable and end panel on each end.

Though the types of panels may differ, this concept applies to all web joist families built with panel arrays/groups: K-Series, LH-Series, SLH-Series, DLH-Series Bar Joists; and Joist Girders.

I hope this clears that error message up! Please feel free to leave feedback if there's anything in particular that you'd like me to post about for Revit Structure, and I'll be happy to try to cover it!

Drawing List Sheet Order Organization

I want to take a second to quickly introduce myself, and pass along my first post and video.
 
I’ve been at Autodesk a little over a year now as a Revit Product Support Specialist.  My background includes a number of years working for an architectural firm in Boston on a large variety of projects.  At the same time I attended and graduated from the Boston Architectural College.  There is some more information about me under the “About the Authors” section…

I wanted to pass along a process to refine drawing list sorting, which I have organized below.  I’ll be aiming for one post per week; I hope this information is helpful for everyone!

By default you can organize a drawing list by areas such as “Sheet Name” and “Sheet Number”.  You may have a situation where an additional sort parameter is necessary.  For example, you want to selectively organize discipline sheets to match the physical printed set order.  By creating a Shared Parameter to organize these disciplines into groups, we can further refine where they appear in the drawing list.  This is helpful where ascending or descending sorting may not apply to your set order, if sheets go S101, E101, L101, A101, P101, etc.

I have included a step by step process video below:

Video

I hope this proves helpful for further organizing a drawing list.

Designing the User Experience at Autodesk

A lot of annoucements lately about pretty cool things.  Today, I have another one.  Another new blog is on the Autodesk scene.  Just Launched was Inside the Factory about designing the Revit User Experience. 

Now we have another blog called Designing the User Experience at Autodesk. 

I encourage you to check out their blog and their welcome post.  According to the authors, "Designing the User Experience at Autodesk provides a venue for the individuals across our global user experience teams—including user researchers, designers, and user assistance professionals—to share insights on methods & practices, innovation, leadership, design’s connection to achieving business objectives, and reflections on topical interests in the design community."

"At Autodesk we create software solutions for the manufacturing, building and construction, and media and entertainment markets.  Our customers span the globe and include architects, engineers, manufacturing designers, television and film professionals, and game designers.  Our customers use our products to visualize, simulate, and analyze their design projects before they are real.  For our customers, and their customers, design has never been more critical to their business success; we like to say design matters.  And as design matters in our customers’ world, design matters in the actual software solutions we provide."

It looks like some very interesting stuff that they are going to be talking about.  Check it out.

Introducing the Guide to Sustainable Design

Autodesk has published a guide that you can read on sustainable design. This guide helps you understand and explore the impact of energy, water, materials, and land in the building lifecycle.  Sustainable Design is such a hot topic these days for Architects and this is a nice little guide where you are learn more information about Sustainable Design.  I would encourage you to check it out.

    

Guide to Sustainable Design For Architecture, Engineering & Construction

Welcome new Bloggers to the Revit Clinic!

I would like to welcome three new bloggers to the Revit Clinic.  Ryan Duell, Kathryn Poulos, and Jeremy Smith will be providing their prespective on the Revit products.  They are all members of Autodesk's Americas Product Support team helping customers solve and prevent Revit problems. 

Ryan Duell works primarily with Revit Architecture, Kathryn is our Revit Structure expert, and Jeremy is our resident Revit MEP guru. 

I've asked them to join the team here at the Clinic to help cover all the Revit products a little better.  They will bring their expertise here and help you to prevent and solve Revit problems.  Think of them as a few new doctors on staff!

Ryan has already contributed ideas for posts the last few months and Katie and Jeremy have a lot of good information to share about Structure and MEP.

Check out their bios and pictures to learn more about each of them.  I hope you are as exicted as I am about them joining the team.  Join me in welcoming them to the Revit Clinic!

Revit 2010 UI Video

This video was just posted on Inside the Factory.  It does a good job of explaining the new Revit user interface and highlighting the new functionality. 

A Journal file story, Part 4

This will be my last post for now on journal files.  In parts 1, 2, and 3, I talked about the Revit build number, Hardware, and memory usage within a journal. 

In this part I will take a look at error messages within a journal file.  Journal files record every error message or warning that appears within the File.

 

This information can be used to find out what happened before the error message that may help to troubleshoot the problem.  It also displays memory information in the file and helps to show if the message is related to memory usage.

I like using Notepad to look through a journal and simply use the Find tool to look for words like Warning or Error to see if I can find a message.  There are also a number of third party free tools that you can use to make viewing a journal file a little easier.  Tools like BareTail can help you to color code specific lines in a journal file to make it easier to read.

There is a lot of information stored in a journal file that can be useful.  Through these four parts I have only shown a small portion of the information stored.  These four primary things are the items that Product Support uses to help troubleshoot issues.  You can use them as well.  We request journal files to help us understand more about your problem and make it easier for you, instead of having to spend a lot more time and energy gathering all this information by other means.

I am often asked if you can use journal files to automate tasks or recover data.  Unfortunately, this is not the best approach.  Journal files are designed for troubleshooting, not for automation or creating data, thus there are a lot of problems that can occur.  There are a lot of factors that go into this, but it is not something that Product Support would recommend.  There are too many opportunities for creating additional problems then solving one. The Revit API and VSTA environment are much better tools to create geometry and creating automation.  I highly recommend that you check out the another Autodesk blog The Building Coder that focus on the blogging about the Revit API from Jeremy Tammik if you are interested in this.  Journal files are great for seeing what happened in a session of Revit so next time you have a problem, I encourage you to look at the journal file and see if you can find out what may be happening.

A Journal file story, Part 3

In part 1 of this series we looked at where Revit stores the version (build) number of the Revit product within a journal file.  In part 2, we looked at where Hardware information is stored in a journal file.

In this part of this series we will look at where Revit Products capture Memory usage information during a session of Revit.

This information is scattered throughout the file in different places.  It is captured at different times within the application. 

VM Delta tells you the amount of memory that is available since the last time the item was recorded in the journal file.  Basically, it lets you know how you are doing in relation to memory usage within Revit.  The System (Kb) section tells you how much memory is available out of the total available system memory (that is available to Revit).  The numbers are in KB so they are a little hard to read, but you don't want to see your available memory dip below 100 MB, this is where you will start to see problems. 

The way product support uses this information is to find any error messages (we will talk about that in the next part) and then to see how Revit is doing with memory usage.  We use this information to help to understand if Revit starting to run out of memory while trying to performance a task. 

Next time, error messages in a journal file.

Welcome a New Revit blog!

Hi Everyone,

I would like to welcome a new Revit blog by some Autodeskers.

 

This one has a bit of a unique perspective, though: that of “inside” the Factory. Tom Vollaro and his colleagues in the AEC User Experience design team will be blogging about how the entire Revit user experience is designed, implemented and documented. They also want to establish a conversation with users, so they can gather input that will help them to improve the user experience. They are just getting it rolling, but the discourse should be interesting…

I highly encourage you to go check it out!