Revit 2013 Family Structure & Content

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Hi Blog Readers

No I've not dropped off the universe, just been very busy with family issues as my wife Jennifer was taken into hospital and for a short period was in intensive care. Combine that with work and organising and administration of the LRUG http://www.lrug.co.uk/ March meeting, then editing videos and creating material from the presentation to upload to the LRUG members’ area of the web site there Isn’t very much time for other interests or blogging.

Thankfully we now have Jen home with us again, complete with cylinders of oxygen etc. but she is still with us and hopefully on the road to recovery.

What can I say about RST 2013……

OK as previous years I have been beta testing, but no Bloggers event this year, shame I missed killing the penguins. In reality I would not have had time for it with everything that has been going on.  

The same stupid prat that let the cat out of the bag early last year (who some see as a Revit Evangelist) has done the same this year. I saw a linked-in notification of his posting and was not surprised who it was when I went there to read it.

David Light a fellow founder of LRUG has done his usual excellent review, (Click Here to read) and as the NDA is over I can now Blog legitimately.   

From my point of view, I’m underwhelmed with the lack of development, as I have been the last couple of years. The 2010 and 2011 version saw major advances with the product and real additions halfway during the Autodesk product year at Subscription Advantage Release.

I understand that for most of the world there has been a recession, however looking at press releases about Autodesk profits recently, they need not only to squeeze every ounce of monies out of large corporate companies but to actually use that money in developing the products to give us real tangible benefits.

We are still waiting for many items that have been on the users “Need List” not “Want List” (and there is a distinct difference) for many years now. One prime example that comes up every year is Subscript and Superscript in the text editor. It’s basic and fundamental, and still missing within the Revit 2013 text editor.

OK off soapbox and to some stuff I can share.

Many moons ago, when I was younger, so much younger than today, (sorry I had a Beatles moment) in January 2008 I produced my first Revit Libraries Reference Guide and Autodesk used it to make modification to all the typographical errors and misspellings in the 2010 release the following year.

And it’s since then I have produced a review annually so Click Here for the Revit Structure version for 2013

Best thing I can say is download and read it, some stuff has been moved around and renamed so much I’ve included diagrams like the one below just to sort it out in my own mind.

HOT LINKS

Revit 2013 ~ What's New In Revit 2013 ~ David Light ~ CLICK HERE 

Revit 2013 ~ 30 Day Trial version ~    CLICK HERE

Revit 2013 ~ System requirements ~  CLICK HERE

Revit 2013 ~ Materials ~ CLICK HERE 

Enjoy

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Out of the Box UK Templates ~ Guide to What's Missing

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I reported about the problems with Revit Structure not installing and missing content back on the 15th April - What can best be called a work-a-round from Autodesk was to suggest that UK users install the USA Metric Library and harvest what was missing see my post on the 17th may about Loading Missing Content

This process  does not provide everything, below is a review guide of what you should get and what’s missing once you have downloaded the USA Metric and created what should have been installed in the first place.

The structure below has been based upon :-

What installed in UK RST2012

What installed as a US Metric Library

Cross referenced with what was in RST 2011 UK Install

Click Here if you would like this document as an Adobe pdf

I have fed this information back to Autodesk.

Because of the suites becoming available they are now also looking at the way they install and provide the library when you are installing all three Revits side by side. If you are a regular visitor you would have seen my posting on the 4th June about a Short Family Content Survey this was not open and available for very long.

For those that want a glimpse of the possible futures for Revit families below are some screen shots from the survey



Revit 2012 Text Editor Poll Results

Autodesk are you taking note?

Will anything Happen in 2013?

is this on your

In my posting Subscript - Superscript and Symbols back in November 2009, I talked about the fact that in Revit 2010, we did not have the ability to enter superscript or subscript and special or greek symbols and we use these kind of things all the time.


Area m²
Volume m³
Density kg/m³
Stress N/mm²
Degrees i.e. roof pitch 36°
Tolerance to be ± 5mm, etc
Diameter i.e. 22Ø Bolt

I mused that perhaps the next version of Revit 2011 will give us direct control for superscript, subscript and symbols with text which is something plain old AutoCAD has had for some time.

Improvements were made to the text editor but with everything Autodesk they didn't finish the job properly, Then you hope that it will come in the Subcription Advantage Pack mid 2011, It didn't happen.

Guess what It still has not happened in Revit 2012.

I'm starting a campain to FIX THE BASICS on various social networking platforms, let's get Autodesks attention, it about time they really listerned to their users.

I was 53 this year, will Autodesk have fixed this before I retire or die?

I guess it's a case of which comes first, they are thinking of putting up the retirement age to 70 so if I don't snuff it before that gives Autodesk another 17 years!

Odds please? (Please add comments to this posting) 

WORKAROUND

So for all you young people who don't recall CPM and  MS-DOS machines, and DOS Versions of AutoCAD, here is the workaround again.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is the standard format used for text files within computers and online.


As computers can only understand numbers, the ASCII code is the numerical representation of alphabetic and special characters, such as


155 = ø
157 = Ø
167= º
171 = ½
172 = ¼
241 = ±
243 = ¾
248 = °
251 = ¹
252 = ³
253 = ²

If you know the keystroke value of the special character you want to insert, you can insert the special character directly into your document by using your keyboard.


To do so, open the document and position the cursor where you want the special character to appear. Then, with NUM LOCK on, press and hold the ALT key, and then press the keys on the numeric keypad that represent the keystroke value of the character you want to input.


After you finish typing, release the ALT key, and Windows generates the character you specified.

Railings and Stairs - Usability Study - FIX THE BASICS

Over at Revit OpED Steve Stafford has posted that the Autodesk User Experience team is looking for Architects, Drafters, Designers and CAD Managers who use Revit Architecture or other products to design stairs or railings, to participate in a usability study of some Autodesk software concepts.

These sessions are approximately 90 minutes long.

To get selected you must need to complete a short questionnaire, and select all dates and times that you would be available for a 90 minute time slot on dates between May 16th and May 27th ranging from 8:00a.m. - 4:30 p.m. EST

Participants who are a good match for our study will be contacted within a few days.Your involvement helps make Autodesk products better..........Always true but lets hope that this time they actually do something about it and FIX THE BASICS.

I recall submitting information to Revit Factory regarding stairs in the long distant past

Stairs by Numbers on the 26th July 2010

Name That (Railing) Object on the 2nd April 2010 

Now it has to be said the Stairs Team obviously aren't the quicket team around because they were asking questions a year ago and bugger all happened in Revit 2012 regarding stairs and railings that have need to be fixed for some time

So the Question is are they going to FIX THE BASICS in Revit 2013?
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Plugin of the Month from the Autodesk Developer Network

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Good old Steve Stafford's and his Revit OpEd Blog ~ I now know there is a Plugin of the Month resource.

Steve says "Poking at them, it should have been rolled into 2012 but I'm grateful that it exists and freely so. Check out the Autodesk Labs blog post."

This is a little like the Excitech Revit Toolkit - Coordinate Scheduling that will be three years old, once they get around to updating it to 2012. I'm very thankful to excitech for creating their toolkit, the point is they really should not have too.

As Steve rightly says the above and this includes the excitech toolkit, by now they should have been rolled into Revit already.

Hence the label on this post to Fix_the_Basics .........

Autodesk we do hope you are taking note! or perhaps change the site name to Plugin of the YEAR!
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UK Revit Structure Template Improvements

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Ralph Pullinger ~ Autodesk UK Structural Technical Specialist, requires feedback from Revit Structure users in the UK. He says

“Our Revit Structure development team are currently looking at making improvements to the UK RST Template for the future release of Revit Structure. This will include conventions and standards. Think of it as a wish list of sorts, but not from an application point of view.

Please send your feedback to Ralph using email at Ralph.Pullinger@autodesk.com with the Subject title “RST Template”

This window of opportunity is about to close, please send your requests to Ralph as soon as possible, and before it's too late!
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Wish List / Feedback on the UK Revit Structure Template required!

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I've recieved a request for feedback on the UK Revit Structure Template from Ralph Pullinger so here it is

Ralph Pullinger ~ Autodesk UK Structural Technical Specialist, requires feedback from UK Revit Structure users. Our Revit Structure development team are currently looking at making improvements to the UK RST Template for the future release of Revit Structure. This will include conventions and standards. Think of it as a wish list of sorts, but not from an application point of view.

Please send your feedback to Ralph using email at Ralph.Pullinger@autodesk.com with the Subject title “RST Template”
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Creating Small Movement Joints In Concrete Elements

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Here is a question from a thread on the RST AUGI forum that I answered,and then found one of my guys having the same problem.

Q: So I have a building that requires an expansion joint, between grid lines. So I have one beam canted off of one column, and I have another beam I'm trying to cantilever off the other column.

So here's my question. How the heck do you get them to not join. I've been banging my head against the desk for the last 2 hrs trying to get this to work. As soon as I get within 12" of the other they join. Do I need to tell my Architect that he has to deal with a 12" expansion joint because Revit won't model it right.

A:  Workaround ~ draw a slim column in the location of the movement joint, the one in my example is 20mm wide and the depth is greater than the width of the concrete beam. The I changed the material to glass and connected the beam to the face of the glass column. finally I hid the glass column in the view. Thus 20mm Movement joint and no auto joining.

Revit Factory  

There has to be an easier way of dealing with this....

Wishlist Revit 2012 ~No more gimmicks it's time to "FIX THE BASICS"

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