It’s curious that Revit hides its coordinate system. When you look at the properties of a line in AutoCAD, the X,Y,Z coordinates of its endpoints are right there.
But in Revit, objects don’t know their own coordinates. So you can’t tag or schedule them. And you can’t use coordinates to drive object properties (other than via the API).
So we have some windposts in the masonry wall. They’re just RHS sections.
But do we model them as structural framing, or as some kind of custom-made generic model?
Logic says they’re a length of RHS with structural properties, so they’re structural framing. But logic also says they’re wall-based.
How would it be if you could embed a piece of RHS structural framing inside a wall-based family? Just like you can embed a shared window or door. Then the family could be both structural framing and wall-based at the same time: The structural framing element would give you all the structural properties, and the wall-based wrapper would give you the sticks-to-the-wall feature.
So your plan of Level 1 is called Level 1, but the two values aren’t parametrically connected.
And there’s no way to have the views of Phase 2 named ‘Phase2’ automatically.
How would it be if the names of views were like labels, so they could be driven by the view’s own parameters?
AutoCAD has Quick Select, which lets you select objects by their properties.
It would be useful to have similar functionality in Revit:
“Select all the walls of <this type> in <this workset> created in <this phase>, where the base of the wall is below 56.060m and the top is Unconnected.”
Something for the API? A generalised SQL-for-Revit implementation? Perhaps.
Worksets were a wonderful idea back in the day. You could partition the project up into chunks (‘worksets’), and several people could work in the same file at the same time (‘worksharing’) as long as they all worked in different chunks. Great feature.
Now that Revit has element borrowing, worksets are hardly ever needed for worksharing.
But that hasn’t stopped us press-ganging them into use for all sorts of other purposes:
Such a wide range of misuses, showing such ingenuity. But all would be better served by purpose-designed features rather than by the poor abused workset.
You can link Revit projects and CAD files, but you can’t link families.
We break our larger projects into separate files to keep them fast.
But that makes it tedious to maintain a common set of families. Every time you edit a family, you have to open each of the projects and load in the changed family.
Wouldn’t it be better if you could link the families from a project library and update them in just one place?
Railings (fences) need gates, just like curtain walls need doors.
If railings had the same default + overrides behaviour as curtain walls, gates would be easy.
