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.

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?

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.