Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Referencing Detail and Referencing Sheet

Some of our government clients wants us to show the referencing sheet and detail numbers in the View title like:

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Revit has this nice feature too!

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Basically, these parameters show the sheet number and the detail number where this particular detail is referenced. This works perfect in most of the cases. However, sometimes the detail is referenced in more than one view (and so in different sheets). This can happen because of many reasons – dependent views or ‘show in – intersecting views’ parameter, etc.

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In such cases, unfortunately, there are more than one referencing sheet that refer the detail in a drawing set. It looks like Revit shows the first sheet it comes across (per alphabetical order?) in the drawing set for this referencing sheet / detail parameter. It is read only and so, we cannot change it.

The workarounds is to manipulate the referencing sheet parameter by renaming / renumbering the sheet (not good) or to hide the unwanted callout / section / view tag category in the visibility graphics (not good again). (Just hiding the unwanted view tag using the View > Hide in view > elements option does NOT work!)

I think Autodesk should make this read only parameter a drop down menu where we could choose our preferred sheet from a list of available sheets…

If you like this option, please submit a support request with Autodesk.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Export to DWG from Revit issues

Even though Autodesk owns both AutoCAD and Revit, it is quite ironic that the export to CAD command does not work properly. There are so many issues outlined even in 2006, and most of them are still resolved.

The most irritating is the one related to the dimensions. When I export a sheet like:

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with dimensions and if I choose any option other than the “overrides BYENTITY” in the CAD Export Format dialog box:

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It results in out of scale dims like:

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Not good.

Page setups are not similar in Revit and AutoCAD. So those don't get transferred too.

AutoCAD has a ‘nice’ printer called ‘None’ which has all the page sizes. Revit should retain the paper size from the title block and use the None printer while exporting sheets. This will not give a ‘printer missing’ error message in AutoCAD (when the DWG file is being opened), but still give the user an option to select an appropriate printer from the user’s network to print to the correct size.