Visibility of Revit Families from 3D ACAD

Revit families are becoming more common and easier to stumble across.  Website such as Autodesk Seek and Revit City have a great collection of families, and many manufacturers are starting to create their own families for their products.  So what happens after you exhaust all these options, but still the only thing you can find is a 3D ACAD family?

The power of Sub-Categories

Sometimes overlooked are the subcategories within each category.  Categories give you control over the visibility of objects in your views, but subcategories can take this even further.

Breaking and Squishing a Section

Ever have a giant section? Ever want to squish it  and only show the top and bottom, but don't care what is in between?  Well it is possible with Revit.  Usually by just breaking a section, you see the top, and you see the bottom, and a big space of white in between, not too practical if you want to put it on a sheet.

AUGI World December is out

AUGI World December is now out.  Check it out here:
http://www.augi.com/augiworld/current-issue/

Visibility Settings in Families

One of my favorite ways to explain visibility settings:  "You can model a chair, have it show up in plan as a chair, front elevation as a smiley face, and side elevation as a frowny face".

How do you accomplish this? With visibility settings for lines as well as solid objects.  A simple yet powerful tool that can let you control exactly how something looks in every view that it will show up in, as well as with every detail level.  Here is a recent example, a fin tube grill in the top of a solid surface under a curtain wall.

View Templates

Use view templates to control your views? No? Well, you should, especailly if you have more than two elevations and three floor plans.  Here is a great tip origionally posted by a peer (the Revit Kid)that I felt important enough to pass on.

Mayan Calendar

BIMandments

Spreading like wildfire, the BIMandments thread on twitter is a user submitted list of best practices and rules related working in and creating Revit models.

Side effects of using out of the box door families

Many of the families that come with Revit by default out of the box are very nice, basic and do what you need them to do in your project.  Unfortunately, the doors are not one of those, at least not for the kind of projects that most of us usually do (non-residential).

When and How to Upgrade

With my firm having recently installed and provided us with Revit 2012 (finally, only 7 months after it was released) much excitment has followed with everyone wishing to get their hand on the new software and rushing into upgrading their projects.