mamali-architect
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?What’s new in Revit 2014
Oh yes, it’s that time again when the red carpet gets deployed. There is frenzy in the Revit community; twitter goes into hyper drive & the bloggers go mad (including me), as Autodesk serve up the latest greatest version of Revit for us to use & abuse on our BIM projects. But before we get into the juicy bits, let’s pause for a second & review some Revit history. Revit 1.0 was released on the 5th of April 2000, so Revit has now been gracing our earth for 13 years. Maybe not as long as that other BIM app which begins with “A”. But Revit has developed into a mature solution which will deliver model based design & can be centroid to the BIM process, but it’s not BIM per say. Some will argue that ArchiCAD is better, Revit is better, blah, blah, I’ve heard it all before. It’s actually a really boring discussion now, what is more important is whether the tools can truly talk to one another, are open & interoperable. ArchiCAD community says Revit sucks at IFC; the Revit community says who gives a stuff when it has the majority of the market share. Passionate users of both camps spend hours defending their beloved solutions on social media like it’s some sort of life or death affair. The reality is that as governments start to push the whole IFC / COBie delivery requirement, all AEC solutions need to start to respect the need for data to be sharable & of an open nature. That is compounded by the recent IFC4 announcement.
[URL=http://upload7.ir/]
[/URL]
Anyway, back to the Revit history lesson. What I do find amusing is in the early days of Revit, the software was initially offered on a monthly rental option. Anyone remember that? Early adopters will. It was one of the reasons; my then boss John Mullan, MD at House Henderson Architects was so interested in the product. Not only did it start to offer the office a quick building modelling system which was faster than CAD, it could be picked up or put down depending on the office’s needs. Why did he consider Revit you may ask? Well John had implemented Rucaps Sonata in the office. It was an expensive system, but it was one of the earliest parametric building modelling systems. The fact that one seat was the price of a good quality family car was beside the point, it was a powerful solution. When John Mullan saw Revit, he could see the same potential at a fraction of the cost of Sonata. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RUCAPS
In those early years, Revit went through a rapid release cycle, even after Autodesk purchased Revit in 2002 there were a vigorous number of point releases until things settled & Revit then went to a yearly release, which is what we now have. But what I would say is where once BIM managers wanted to roll the latest version of Revit out to their staff on projects, they are now taking a more pragmatic approach to deployment & often holding back for 12 months or even skipping a release. There are many reasons this might be happening. Cost of update training? Cost of deployment? Long term projects which have decided to keep with a consistent version? Anyhow, it seems to be more common place.
?What’s new
Revit 2014, what’s new? What’s been improved? So these are the highlights, but like any release of Revit you will find minor tweaks here & there, some which get documented, others that don’t, so be on the look out! I have reviewed the architectural & general platform enhancements, however I have also listed the structural & MEP improvements, but do not go into detail in this review.
Displaced Views
Displaced views are an exciting new feature which literally allows you to rip apart your model as an exploded view. The clever thing here is that any displacement of components is only effected in that view & not the whole model.
The feature works in 3d views & perspective views only, allowing you to create diagrammatic assembly views of how the building goes together. Not this feature also works with assembly views & parts. The concept is very easy to implement. Go to a 3d view, select a few elements, then choose the displacement feature from the modify tab > create. Then in canvas use the 3d widget to drag the components away from the main model, it’s that easy. If you are not happy with their position, a reset button allows you to return the elements back to their original location. The path feature allows you to automatically draw a line from the original position of the elements to its displaced location. You can control the linestyle of this line from objects styles & visibility graphics.
Another thing about the path feature which may not be that obvious, is that there are 2 path style types. A straight line (the default) & a jogged line type, which is useful when you need to drag the elements further away from the model for clarity.
Dockable Windows Framework & Enhancements
When you are using Revit you just can’t get enough screen real estate. You decide to get 2 monitors, but space always seems to be at a premium. I am not sure why, but I guess it’s natural when you have a multi document, multi view application. In previous releases of Revit you could dock the project browser, properties palette, system browser & reconcile hosting browser in different locations but they always docked adjacent to one another or at various positions around the screen. Revit 2014 now allows you to dock each window to combine them as tabs at the bottom of dialog windows. OK, it’s not a massive enhancements & auto-hide would have been a nice addition as well, but this new window framework structure will certainly benefit those that are tight for screen space or utilize a-laptop.
Materials
So after last year’s fiasco with the material UI, Autodesk decided to go back to the drawing board. A good friend of mine & fellow Revit Guru, Aaron Maller literally lost hours of sleep trying to get his head around the Revit 2013 material user interface to make it work like 2012! If you know Aaron, buy him a beer & he will literally rant for hours about the mess which is the Revit 2013 material UI. I am not sure what Autodesk were thinking, but I am so glad to say that the 2014 UI is soooooo much better. Everything is obvious, in a tabbed layout dialog. The UI is easier to navigate making materials easier to locate & select. In 2013 the material browser & editing dialog boxes were separate which was the core issue to the problem! This made the whole process of material editing unbelievably frustrating as workflow process was confusing. With both material browser & editing now merged back into one single common dialog, stability & common sense has returned to the material editing process. Yes!
Non Rectangular Viewports
So non rectangular viewports have been on my Revit wish list for some time. In Revit 2014 we now have this added functionality for view crop regions and callouts. In essence the user can customise the shape of the crop region using Revit sketching tools.
Select the crop region, then choose the Edit Crop tool from the ribbon & sketch away. But before you get too excited, you are still only limited to rectangular shapes, no curves are arcs my friends. This feature will work on any crop region including plans, ceilings plans, elevations, sections, detail & section callout views.
Room Calculation Point
Once you have been using Revit for some time, you recognise that Revit needs to start to think a little smarter; it should know where things are. Whether you think software should be smart, is a debate for another day. But the introductory of a Room calculation point setting for family types which are room aware such as doors, furniture, casework, speciality equipment and generic models starts to help. This new function allows families which are placed in a project to know where they belong.
For instance, sometimes a piece of geometry might be located outside a room or space, which results in no values
being reported to where the element actually is. The new Room calculation point allows the user to specifically move the location of the calculation point to a desired space within a model so that the element then knows where it belongs and can report this when scheduling.
Schedules
Schedules; what would we do without schedules in Revit? They provide us with access to data in a way which was not possible using traditional CAD drafting approaches. I would suggest that anybody who is serious about building information modelling will know the power & possibilities that Revit scheduling functionality offers. Scheduling gives you access to data which you can utilise in many, many ways. We can capture integrated data; we can use schedules to input data. Neither the less, scheduling within Revit was not without its limitations, but Revit 2014 sees a major overhaul of the scheduling functionality. The interface for creating schedules in Revit remains the same, although new categories have been opened up, so we can now schedule architectural columns, detail items, entourage, generic models, grids, levels, pads, roof soffits, structural beam systems, structural area reinforcement, structural path reinforcement and structural fabric area.
Another nice minor enhancement is the ability to schedule phases created & demolished. However, more importantly we are provided with far more control over how we can format schedules. Text styles can be used to control the formatting of titles, headers and data within a schedule. Cells and text appearance can be overridden for cells in titles sections and columns. The Schedules are far more aligned with an Excel type appearance, so what you see is what you get, with more alliance between the schedule view & what you actually place on a sheet. You will find a new ribbon interface allows you to control the appearance of the schedule and if you understand the basics of Excel style column formatting, then this is going to be a total breeze for you to learn and implement.
Selection Enhancements
I believe one of the biggest challenges any new user has when starting to work with Revit is the way you select elements. Those that have been using Revit for some time, have learned to live & adapt to Revit element selection peculiarities. But I have seen countless occasions when Revit newbies select elements & screw things up. No fault of their own, it’s just a different process from what they are normally use to. Yet Revit does not make it easy during the transition process. To improve the way you can access & select elements, Revit 2014 has introduced a few improvements adding to what has always existed. There are now four selection options, which can be accessed via the modify tool or via the status bar. Each options has two states, either active or in-active. The options included Select Links, Select Underlay Elements, Select Elements by face, Drag elements on selection. With the select links function, if this behaviour is not enabled & you use the modify & move tools, this stops you accidentally selecting links or CAD linked files. Select underlay elements, again if this is not enabled, then you can’t select, modify or move underlayed elements.
Select elements by Face, now this is a biggie for me. With this feature enabled you can select a face of an element or by clicking at the edge. This now makes the whole process of editing, say a floor, a lot easier as you can select the face rather than having to grab a bunch of elements & filtering. If you don’t have this feature enabled, then it’s as it was before, you need to click on the edge of element or filter & select. Drag elements on Selection replaces what was press & drag. With the feature enabled, you hover over the element, press down the mouse & drag. Revit will then move the element. If this feature is not enabled. If you hover over a model elements, AC point, callout, grid, section, scope box or detail, pressing and dragging will result in the element NOT moving. It should also be noted that the settings are stored per user in the Revit.ini, so can be set as part of your deployment.
Split Elevations
Not sure this is noteworthy, but we have been able to do split sections for some time. But the functionality has been extended to elevations, allowing us to do split elevations. Now before you get over excited, it’s not what you think it is! It the same as the section tool, that’s it. What would have been very nice to see is the ability to unwrap elevations to create true elevation representations!
Temporary View Properties
Revit 2013 introduced some welcome improvements to view templates; the Temporary View Properties feature on 2014 takes this a little further. In the view control bar you are provided with access to Temporary View Properties. What this feature does is always you to change the view properties of a view without impacting the saved view state. The concept behind this is to potentially reduce the need for working views as you can quickly enable a Temporary View, apply the view template to better understand the impact of the view template without actually having to apply it. You can switch between different view templates which you have created & once you have finished, just select the reset feature to go back to the original state of the view. If you do enable the temp view, it has no bearing on the view for printing & also has no influence on the view when using worksharing.
Perceived Performance
If I had a pound or even a dollar for how many times I’ve heard users complain about how slow Revit is at times, I’d be a very rich man. The reality is, on some tasks Revit can be slow, but then if you consider what is happening under the hood, then maybe you might assess the situation differently. But then again, the reality is we want everything instantly! We want out email now! We want everything on tap, on demand & we no longer accept waiting. Over recent years we have seen multi-threading functionality introduced to some aspects of Revit. Speaking with the development team, it’s not a case of just flicking a few switches & tweaking the code to make Revit suddenly become a super multi-threaded wonder app. It’s a complex problem, due to the way Revit works. Saying that, one area which Revit certainly needed a kick was on screen redraws when zooming, panning & orbiting a model. So the Revit dev team have made some tweaks to improve graphic performance by automatically turning off graphic intensive effects during view navigation. This works in 2d & 3d. What actually happens is that the graphic effects are suspended during camera manipulation & then instantly redrawn to the screen once you finish the operation. It’s a little disconcerting at first, but once you get us to it you will value this improvement, Revit certainly feels quicker.
Multi- selection
A minor enhancement, but a vital one, is the proper implementation of the Bring to Front / Send Back ward tool. This now works as you would expect it. When you select multiple elements, be it detail elements or images you can reorder them correctly.

Oh yes, it’s that time again when the red carpet gets deployed. There is frenzy in the Revit community; twitter goes into hyper drive & the bloggers go mad (including me), as Autodesk serve up the latest greatest version of Revit for us to use & abuse on our BIM projects. But before we get into the juicy bits, let’s pause for a second & review some Revit history. Revit 1.0 was released on the 5th of April 2000, so Revit has now been gracing our earth for 13 years. Maybe not as long as that other BIM app which begins with “A”. But Revit has developed into a mature solution which will deliver model based design & can be centroid to the BIM process, but it’s not BIM per say. Some will argue that ArchiCAD is better, Revit is better, blah, blah, I’ve heard it all before. It’s actually a really boring discussion now, what is more important is whether the tools can truly talk to one another, are open & interoperable. ArchiCAD community says Revit sucks at IFC; the Revit community says who gives a stuff when it has the majority of the market share. Passionate users of both camps spend hours defending their beloved solutions on social media like it’s some sort of life or death affair. The reality is that as governments start to push the whole IFC / COBie delivery requirement, all AEC solutions need to start to respect the need for data to be sharable & of an open nature. That is compounded by the recent IFC4 announcement.
[URL=http://upload7.ir/]

[/URL]
Anyway, back to the Revit history lesson. What I do find amusing is in the early days of Revit, the software was initially offered on a monthly rental option. Anyone remember that? Early adopters will. It was one of the reasons; my then boss John Mullan, MD at House Henderson Architects was so interested in the product. Not only did it start to offer the office a quick building modelling system which was faster than CAD, it could be picked up or put down depending on the office’s needs. Why did he consider Revit you may ask? Well John had implemented Rucaps Sonata in the office. It was an expensive system, but it was one of the earliest parametric building modelling systems. The fact that one seat was the price of a good quality family car was beside the point, it was a powerful solution. When John Mullan saw Revit, he could see the same potential at a fraction of the cost of Sonata. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RUCAPS
In those early years, Revit went through a rapid release cycle, even after Autodesk purchased Revit in 2002 there were a vigorous number of point releases until things settled & Revit then went to a yearly release, which is what we now have. But what I would say is where once BIM managers wanted to roll the latest version of Revit out to their staff on projects, they are now taking a more pragmatic approach to deployment & often holding back for 12 months or even skipping a release. There are many reasons this might be happening. Cost of update training? Cost of deployment? Long term projects which have decided to keep with a consistent version? Anyhow, it seems to be more common place.
?What’s new
Revit 2014, what’s new? What’s been improved? So these are the highlights, but like any release of Revit you will find minor tweaks here & there, some which get documented, others that don’t, so be on the look out! I have reviewed the architectural & general platform enhancements, however I have also listed the structural & MEP improvements, but do not go into detail in this review.
- Displaced Views
- Dockable Windows Framework & Enhancements
- Material UI overhaul
- Non rectangular crop regions
- Room calculation Point
- Schedules
- Selection enhancements
- Split Elevations
- Temporary View Templates
- View navigation performance
- Multi Selection - bring to front & send to back
- Stairs & Railings
- Double click to edit
- Point Clouds
- Multi-Reference Annotations
- Structural Analytical Model Improvements
- Reinforcement Rounding
- Rebar Constraints
- Welded Wire Mesh Constraints
- Enhanced Rebar Shapes
- Rebar Length Calculation for UK Shapes
- CSV File Removal - Ability to embed CSV data into a family.
- Divide System.
- Air Terminals on Duct - Ability to place Air Terminal families directly on Duct segments.
- Plumbing Template
- Cap Open Ends
- Angle Constraints
- Energy Analysis for Architectural Building Elements - Ability to automatically generate an Energy Analysis Model from a typical Revit model made of architectural building elements.
- GBS Analysis App Feature
Displaced Views
Displaced views are an exciting new feature which literally allows you to rip apart your model as an exploded view. The clever thing here is that any displacement of components is only effected in that view & not the whole model.

The feature works in 3d views & perspective views only, allowing you to create diagrammatic assembly views of how the building goes together. Not this feature also works with assembly views & parts. The concept is very easy to implement. Go to a 3d view, select a few elements, then choose the displacement feature from the modify tab > create. Then in canvas use the 3d widget to drag the components away from the main model, it’s that easy. If you are not happy with their position, a reset button allows you to return the elements back to their original location. The path feature allows you to automatically draw a line from the original position of the elements to its displaced location. You can control the linestyle of this line from objects styles & visibility graphics.

Another thing about the path feature which may not be that obvious, is that there are 2 path style types. A straight line (the default) & a jogged line type, which is useful when you need to drag the elements further away from the model for clarity.

Dockable Windows Framework & Enhancements
When you are using Revit you just can’t get enough screen real estate. You decide to get 2 monitors, but space always seems to be at a premium. I am not sure why, but I guess it’s natural when you have a multi document, multi view application. In previous releases of Revit you could dock the project browser, properties palette, system browser & reconcile hosting browser in different locations but they always docked adjacent to one another or at various positions around the screen. Revit 2014 now allows you to dock each window to combine them as tabs at the bottom of dialog windows. OK, it’s not a massive enhancements & auto-hide would have been a nice addition as well, but this new window framework structure will certainly benefit those that are tight for screen space or utilize a-laptop.

Materials
So after last year’s fiasco with the material UI, Autodesk decided to go back to the drawing board. A good friend of mine & fellow Revit Guru, Aaron Maller literally lost hours of sleep trying to get his head around the Revit 2013 material user interface to make it work like 2012! If you know Aaron, buy him a beer & he will literally rant for hours about the mess which is the Revit 2013 material UI. I am not sure what Autodesk were thinking, but I am so glad to say that the 2014 UI is soooooo much better. Everything is obvious, in a tabbed layout dialog. The UI is easier to navigate making materials easier to locate & select. In 2013 the material browser & editing dialog boxes were separate which was the core issue to the problem! This made the whole process of material editing unbelievably frustrating as workflow process was confusing. With both material browser & editing now merged back into one single common dialog, stability & common sense has returned to the material editing process. Yes!

Non Rectangular Viewports
So non rectangular viewports have been on my Revit wish list for some time. In Revit 2014 we now have this added functionality for view crop regions and callouts. In essence the user can customise the shape of the crop region using Revit sketching tools.

Select the crop region, then choose the Edit Crop tool from the ribbon & sketch away. But before you get too excited, you are still only limited to rectangular shapes, no curves are arcs my friends. This feature will work on any crop region including plans, ceilings plans, elevations, sections, detail & section callout views.


Room Calculation Point
Once you have been using Revit for some time, you recognise that Revit needs to start to think a little smarter; it should know where things are. Whether you think software should be smart, is a debate for another day. But the introductory of a Room calculation point setting for family types which are room aware such as doors, furniture, casework, speciality equipment and generic models starts to help. This new function allows families which are placed in a project to know where they belong.

For instance, sometimes a piece of geometry might be located outside a room or space, which results in no values
being reported to where the element actually is. The new Room calculation point allows the user to specifically move the location of the calculation point to a desired space within a model so that the element then knows where it belongs and can report this when scheduling.

Schedules
Schedules; what would we do without schedules in Revit? They provide us with access to data in a way which was not possible using traditional CAD drafting approaches. I would suggest that anybody who is serious about building information modelling will know the power & possibilities that Revit scheduling functionality offers. Scheduling gives you access to data which you can utilise in many, many ways. We can capture integrated data; we can use schedules to input data. Neither the less, scheduling within Revit was not without its limitations, but Revit 2014 sees a major overhaul of the scheduling functionality. The interface for creating schedules in Revit remains the same, although new categories have been opened up, so we can now schedule architectural columns, detail items, entourage, generic models, grids, levels, pads, roof soffits, structural beam systems, structural area reinforcement, structural path reinforcement and structural fabric area.

Another nice minor enhancement is the ability to schedule phases created & demolished. However, more importantly we are provided with far more control over how we can format schedules. Text styles can be used to control the formatting of titles, headers and data within a schedule. Cells and text appearance can be overridden for cells in titles sections and columns. The Schedules are far more aligned with an Excel type appearance, so what you see is what you get, with more alliance between the schedule view & what you actually place on a sheet. You will find a new ribbon interface allows you to control the appearance of the schedule and if you understand the basics of Excel style column formatting, then this is going to be a total breeze for you to learn and implement.

Selection Enhancements
I believe one of the biggest challenges any new user has when starting to work with Revit is the way you select elements. Those that have been using Revit for some time, have learned to live & adapt to Revit element selection peculiarities. But I have seen countless occasions when Revit newbies select elements & screw things up. No fault of their own, it’s just a different process from what they are normally use to. Yet Revit does not make it easy during the transition process. To improve the way you can access & select elements, Revit 2014 has introduced a few improvements adding to what has always existed. There are now four selection options, which can be accessed via the modify tool or via the status bar. Each options has two states, either active or in-active. The options included Select Links, Select Underlay Elements, Select Elements by face, Drag elements on selection. With the select links function, if this behaviour is not enabled & you use the modify & move tools, this stops you accidentally selecting links or CAD linked files. Select underlay elements, again if this is not enabled, then you can’t select, modify or move underlayed elements.

Select elements by Face, now this is a biggie for me. With this feature enabled you can select a face of an element or by clicking at the edge. This now makes the whole process of editing, say a floor, a lot easier as you can select the face rather than having to grab a bunch of elements & filtering. If you don’t have this feature enabled, then it’s as it was before, you need to click on the edge of element or filter & select. Drag elements on Selection replaces what was press & drag. With the feature enabled, you hover over the element, press down the mouse & drag. Revit will then move the element. If this feature is not enabled. If you hover over a model elements, AC point, callout, grid, section, scope box or detail, pressing and dragging will result in the element NOT moving. It should also be noted that the settings are stored per user in the Revit.ini, so can be set as part of your deployment.

Split Elevations
Not sure this is noteworthy, but we have been able to do split sections for some time. But the functionality has been extended to elevations, allowing us to do split elevations. Now before you get over excited, it’s not what you think it is! It the same as the section tool, that’s it. What would have been very nice to see is the ability to unwrap elevations to create true elevation representations!

Temporary View Properties
Revit 2013 introduced some welcome improvements to view templates; the Temporary View Properties feature on 2014 takes this a little further. In the view control bar you are provided with access to Temporary View Properties. What this feature does is always you to change the view properties of a view without impacting the saved view state. The concept behind this is to potentially reduce the need for working views as you can quickly enable a Temporary View, apply the view template to better understand the impact of the view template without actually having to apply it. You can switch between different view templates which you have created & once you have finished, just select the reset feature to go back to the original state of the view. If you do enable the temp view, it has no bearing on the view for printing & also has no influence on the view when using worksharing.
Perceived Performance
If I had a pound or even a dollar for how many times I’ve heard users complain about how slow Revit is at times, I’d be a very rich man. The reality is, on some tasks Revit can be slow, but then if you consider what is happening under the hood, then maybe you might assess the situation differently. But then again, the reality is we want everything instantly! We want out email now! We want everything on tap, on demand & we no longer accept waiting. Over recent years we have seen multi-threading functionality introduced to some aspects of Revit. Speaking with the development team, it’s not a case of just flicking a few switches & tweaking the code to make Revit suddenly become a super multi-threaded wonder app. It’s a complex problem, due to the way Revit works. Saying that, one area which Revit certainly needed a kick was on screen redraws when zooming, panning & orbiting a model. So the Revit dev team have made some tweaks to improve graphic performance by automatically turning off graphic intensive effects during view navigation. This works in 2d & 3d. What actually happens is that the graphic effects are suspended during camera manipulation & then instantly redrawn to the screen once you finish the operation. It’s a little disconcerting at first, but once you get us to it you will value this improvement, Revit certainly feels quicker.
Multi- selection
A minor enhancement, but a vital one, is the proper implementation of the Bring to Front / Send Back ward tool. This now works as you would expect it. When you select multiple elements, be it detail elements or images you can reorder them correctly.

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