Revit: Please enter some other value than what you just entered.

Editing arrowheads I got this error message. It would be even more helpful if it told me what values are allowed.

By testing I concluded that arrowheads can't have an arrow angle more than 90 degrees. I guess I should settle with my 90 degree stair arrow then, although it's not exactly how I want it:

Revit: online help not very helpful

While copying windows along a wall I got a rogue "can't cut instance out of Wall" error, and decided to try my luck with the promising "More Info" button in the error message window.

Well, turns out the info that button provides is not very helpful:

The button leads to an online help page, and lands on a nonexistent page. This isn't an isolated problem: I tried hitting F1 in a few other dialogs, and most of the time that led me to a similar missing page. The issue is not unique to Autodesk products, either: there's a growing trend to move from an offline help document bundled with a software product into an online help site, wiki, or forum. This wouldn't actually be that bad if the online help was kept up to date and the software links pointing to the site weren't broken; unfortunately, in my experience, this is not the case most of the time. At least an offline PDF is reliable and offers actual help, even if that help isn't always up to date!

Revit: Ramp Rants

We all love ramps, right? At least, we have to tolerate them when designing buildings that have ramps for one reason or another. Let's now ignore, for a moment, the usual issues about the nonfunctional up arrows and the lacking ability to join walls to ramps; I've got something even better this time.

Let's say I want to model a ramp leading down into a parking garage. I model the ramp with some additional walls next to it, and a cellar wall under it. All looks fine in the 3D view:

But what happens when we look at the ramp in the plan view? It's not a pleasant sight:

The ramp isn't properly rendered in plan views; in fact, it's rendered as a flat slab lying slightly above the bottom constraint specified in the ramp's properties (you can see that the ramp edge casts a shadow even though the lighting settings have a ground plane specified at the bottom level). Additionally, the wall that should be obscured under the ramp is now completely visible on top of the ramp-slab.

Use tilted Floors instead, you say. Seems that's the only option for acceptable graphical representation, and it's not like the ramp up arrow works anyway. This time I'm lucky, but next I'm going to have to model a curving ramp...

Revit: Bad UI design

Revit is full of dialog boxes which the user can't resize. One of the most annoying ones is the main menu. You have to hit a couple pixels high button to scroll up and down even when half of the screen height is not being used. And you can't even use the mouse wheel to scroll this menu.

Revit: Can't load linked file

With 19 linked Revit-models and 26 linked dwg-files it might be easier to investigate the problems if you would tell me which files the errors are in.

Revit: Please enter a value less than an arbitrary limit.

OK.

Revit: Don't rotate sloped glazings!

So, I need to model a simple, rectangular glazed canopy for a project. I already have a few reference planes to determine the shape and size of the canopy, so let's start drawing our sloped glazing!

I draw the footprint following the reference planes, finish the sketch and...

...Not quite what I was looking for. Let's try it again, maybe it works better if I just draw the sketch as a rectangle oriented to the view axes, and then rotate the finished roof.

Alright, this is looking great! Then just rotate it and...

D'oh! Any more ideas..?

Setting an angle in the grid pattern properties is not only inaccurate but it also doesn't align with the edges. Maybe I'll ditch the type-driven gridlines completely and draw my own ones manually instead...

They snap nicely to the sloped glazing edges! Victory is mine, finally! Now I can change the panels to my own custom curtain panel family that has a customizable gap in between panels. So I edit the sloped glazing type properties, select the panel and...

...and admit defeat. Suddenly my 1000.0000mm x 4000.0000mm panels are apparently no longer rectangular and I can't use any custom panel families on them.

The lesson: don't rotate sloped glazings in odd angles... ever? You can't use custom panels unless the sloped glazing grid is both rectangular and aligned to the coordinate axes.

ArchiCAD: different versions of elevations

In many situations different versions of the same elevation are needed, e.g. one without shadows, one with shadows and one with colours. Since any number of views may be created from each elevation, worksheet, detail drawing etc., one would think that only one elevation would suffice and the views based on it could have different display settings. However, this is not the case. If I have sixteen elevations and I need versions with and without shadows, I need to copy the markers and, as a result, I get 32 elevations. The problem becomes worse if e.g. dimension markers have been added to the drawings; I have to manually keep up-to-date two sets of markers and other 2D elements.

Revit: Disclaimer: Overrides may actually not override in some situations.

Due to Revit's limited functionality regarding bitmap images (there are no decent transparency options for one), I often have to resort to some trickery to get my bitmaps showing properly.

In this instance I had modeled an existing building roughly and wanted to display the original hand-drawn floor plan overlaid on the mass model. I had to place the bitmap drawing on the background of my plan view so that its white background wouldn't obstruct my Revit-modeled floor plan (here's where some more advanced transparency settings would go a long way). Since the mass model now obstructed the drawing, I figured I could simply override the mass model's display settings to show only edges. Luckily overriding display settings such as transparency is made simple in Revit!

The setting worked nicely, and I now had the plan drawing showing right through the mass model.

 On the sheet view all looked good still...

 ...but the Print Preview window showed the ugly truth. The transparency override actually doesn't print at all, at least not in this particular case.

In another project I had successfully overridden the transparency of some objects, but it was a 3D camera view, not an orthographic projection. Maybe transparency just can't work in plan or elevation views, for reasons yet undisclosed?

ArchiCAD: parallelizing drawing generation

Why not generate more than one drawing at the same time?

ArchiCAD: vague error messages

Oh come on.

ArchiCAD: always readable text not always readable

Actually we don't write upside down in Finland.

Autocad: Names of viewport sets

All right, I know this is kinda small thing, but it's telling something about, how poor the design of some details in these programs can be. I'm talking about the viewport configurations names in Autocad.

There's names like "Two: Vertical" and "Four: Equal" and those are pretty straight forward. They look like this:

But then there's these: "Three: Left", "Three: Right", "Four: Left" and "Four: Right". They look like this:

Seriously, where's the logic?? How hard can it be?
And I'm not even going to rant about the "feature" that you can't change the sizes of those viewports.

Revit: Grey filled regions

Even though a filled regions' colour is set as black in the properties, revit sometimes colours it grey depending on the view scale and the density of the pattern. This should not happen.

Revit: Dots in line patterns

A dot in a line pattern should be drawn as a dot with a diameter of the linewidth and not a 1.5pt long dash.

Revit: Vector shadows

It should be possible to print views with shading and/or shadows as vectors.

Rasterized prints from Revit are not of a very good quality. The user has for example no control over dpi-settings and thus prints are not good enough quality for post-processing.

Revit: Snap to section lines

It would be nice if it was possible to snap to section (and elevation) lines.

This is a problem because it is not possible to rotate or move a section line to be perpendicular to a model object. Also it prevents a user from creating a section exactly at a specific location (eg. property or grid line) after it has been created.

Note: when drawing the section line it snaps to reference planes, but this relation is lost after the section is moved or the reference plane deleted.