A million ways to view Revit

Last week this blog reached a big milestone: 

One million views.   

OK, some of those viewings may be bots and a few were admin views, but it is still a big deal for me.  It is great to know that so many people out there are interested enough to look at this blog, and hopefully spend time reading the content.  It is also really rewarding when I meet people at conferences and user group meetings, and they tell me that the blog has helped them out (so they must be reading it).

Top Ten Blog Posts

By far the most popular is the post on stair path arrows in Revit.  What this tells me is that this is still a huge issue for people - ever since Autodesk created the 'New Component Stair' tools, and totally changed the stair path annotation method, it has confused users.  Autodesk have not only confused people, but they have continued to neglect the issue for 7 years (?) and have still not fixed the bug that prevents you from copying and pasting stair path arrows from one view to another - shame on you Autodesk.

In the top ten are five blog posts on stairs and railings - yes it is still a part of Revit that people need a lot of help with.  I hope that my blog posts have made life a little easier for people - although I do need to do some updates for the recent tweaks to the software, such as the new multi-storey stair tool.

Number 2 on the list is Copying Views between Revit projects - the reason this is confusing is that each view type has a different method of copying or transferring views. 

One way to get Autodesk to fix some of these issues is to vote on their Revit Ideas wishlist site.  Here is my list of things that I think should be voted up the list.

Quick-Fix Wonky Rotated Revit Plan Views

Following an earlier post on correcting the rotation of section views in Revit, I recently saved someone lots of time with this simple advice:

Here is a quick fix for accurately rotating plan views where someone has rotated a plan view incorrectly.  It may seem trivial but it is actually important that rotated plan views are at exactly the same angle as the part of the building they are displaying - this is so that the view-based orthogonal directions match the building.  If this is a fraction of a degree out, you will end up with all kinds of tiny but incremental differences that will surely cause problems.

When rotating a view, the simplest method is to make the view crop boundaries visible, then select the boundary and use the rotate command.  If someone types in an angle that is not to a whole degree, it will almost certainly not be the same as the actual rotation of the building elements.  Even if you snap to elements, it is easy to make an error.

Quick Fix

• Go to another view that is correctly rotated ;
• Create a 'Scope box' in that view - it will be perfectly orthogonal to the correct view;

• Go back to the wonky view and change the Scope Box property of that view to the new scope box; 

 

• It will rotate the view perfectly to the scope box (even if it is only a fraction of  a degree);
• It will also re-crop the view to match the scope box - this may not be desirable, but can be fixed easily;

• Delete the scope box if not required for other purposes;
• Otherwise, just set the 'Scope Box' property to None;

• Re-crop the view to what you need.

It may seem obvious but not everyone thinks of simple techniques like this.  I hope this saves someone a few minutes or hours and avoids a lot of pain.