Ryan wrote a post yesterday at The Revit Clinic describing a couple scenarios that result in borrowing sheet views while keynoting views. These affect versions 2012 and 2013 in particular. If you’ve encountered some quirkiness on your project using keynotes it is worth a read. A subtle point made at the end of the post reveals that 2014 has been tweaked to help resolve these issues. Ryan wrote:

For Revit 2014 keynote and revision functionality has been improved. Sheet view worksets are no longer borrowed during the same process, which should give larger project teams additional flexibility (especially during documentation-heavy project phases).

Btw, Ryan is also one of the author’s of the Revit Essentials book I mentioned the other day.

The collection of Generic Model templates has grown a little bit with this new release, one new template called “Generic Model Two Level Based.rft”.

This application will strip a model down so that just the 3Dness of the model is left. I feel it is a bit too aggressive in that it even removes all floor plans. There are lots of unnecessary views to be sure but having at least one floor plan for each level can be helpful. Also there are many who end up using “By Linked Views” to make sure what they are seeing is the same as whomever provided the model.

I am not convinced that removing views is really worth doing routinely. I’m inclined to think that only the super large projects might warrant resorting to doing so in order to reduce linked file size and loading times.

Odd quirk with the User Interface is the pair of OK buttons.

I hear Pee Wee Herman saying, “Okay okay…”

I took Seth Godin’s recent blog post title and plugged BIM in instead. His post said “Life is Full of Holes“. His perspective and observations are always welcome and happily sometimes (often) they plug right into my own life and work.

In particular these lines resonated with me and what a friend once essentially asked his company during their deliberations regarding “To do Revit or not to do Revit”…

Seth wrote: “I don’t think the right question is, “is the path perfect?” It’s probably, “Is this somewhere I’d like to go?”

In the context of Revit the questions is, “Do we want to continue to work this way or that way”. Do want to keep doing what we already do or see where and how we can benefit from using Revit instead?

The Revit path isn’t perfect, no “path” is… but do we need to keep waiting for it to be perfect, or even have that expectation? Keep in mind it never WILL be perfect…nothing is.

Stop prevaricating about the bush, make a decision!

The release of this book introduces a new team of authors; Tobias Hathorn, Tessa Reist Hathorn and Ryan Duell. They have taken over the book from the team that first introduced it a couple years ago; James Vandezande, Eddy Krygiel, and Phil Read. You are probably already familiar with their other book, “Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 20##”, the bigger brother to Essentials and the “Introducing” book that was discontinued after the 2012 release.

The Wiley site for the book tells us:

Beginners will get comfortable with Revit’s core features and functions. Current users will have a valuable reference to refresh and hone their skills. And everyone can use this practical book to help prepare for the Revit Architecture certification exams. Essentials gets readers up and running on Autodesk Revit Architecture 2014, Autodesk’s industry-leading building information modeling software:

• Explains core Revit tools, features, functionality, real-world workflows, and BIM concepts
• Covers schematic design, modeling, families, views, creating drawing sets, and more
• Features best practices, rendering and visualization, worksharing, documentation, and annotation
• Provides downloadable starting and ending files, so readers can compare their work to that of the pro’s 

Autodesk Revit Architecture 2014 Essentials is your perfect introduction to the powerful industry-leading BIM software.

Useful Links:
Description
Table of Contents
Author Information
Downloads

If you are just getting started out with Revit this book may be just what you need. If you have an office of Revit users it might just be a great addition to your library too!

Congratulations to the new team on the release of their book!

If you are a BIM Manager working on deployments and want to configure the Revit.ini file to turn on or off specific discipline options when you use Revit (not the discipline specific installations like RAC, RST or RME) they’ve provided a User Interface Configuration Calculator.

Check of the things you want and the calculator provides a value that you enter for the DisciplineOption setting in the Revit.ini file. For ex-AutoCAD managers this is similar (eerily) to the numbers that result from different OSNAP settings (and others), remember?? The same “bit” method is probably used to create unique numbers for each possible combination settings.