Missing Your Project Info !?

Got this weird bug a few days ago for the first time. Someone reached out to me and said the "Project Info" button is greyed out that you can't even click on it.

Turns out this has been a known issue for many versions. I was able to find a workaround solution through a numbers of forum posts.

Here's how you fix it:

In the same Revit session, start a new project. 

Switch back to your issued project file, go to Manage tab > Transfer Project Standards

Scroll down to “Project Info” and click ok to transfer the setting.

That’s it. Now the Project Information icon will become available and you can modify the info in your project. 

Quirkiness with Revit Titleblock Family

I recently ran into a very strange issue with printing sheets in one project. A user reported the sheet views have been blocked by some very large object stretch a mile or so while he was trying to print.

I look into the issue and it appears to be that giant thing or whatever it maybe comes from the titleblock family. After opening the family and it looks perfectly normal at first. However, I notice something quite unusual from the project browser.

There are wall types, curtain panel and mullions listed on the browser. Typically, the only thing that can be nested within titleblock family are 2D families like annotations. If you try to load/nest other 3D families and Revit would simply reject that. In this case, walls, curtain panel and mullion, which are system families, are impossible to come in to the titleblock anyway. They could only exist and be created in the project environment.

What I find it even harder to believe is Revit was able to show those elements that are in use by using "Select All Instance" from the type.

The thing is I can't even see these elements as the titleblock doesn't have a 3D view nor you can create one. All I could do is to delete them.

After I got rid of all the possible 3D elements, I was hoping to purge them out for good. I got another warning again about "Last type in system family cannot be deleted".

I have no choice but to leave the types in the titleblock and load it back to the project. This is definitely the first time I came across with this bug in titleblock family but at least it works now. All the sheets are back to "normal" and they print just fine.

I have no idea how the curtain wall and its sub component got into the family in the first place, but sure I will look out to this behavior in the future.

More on Love/Hate Relationship with Worksharing Monitor

We recently update our office suite product to new Office 365. While I am enjoying and learning all the new features from this latest version, I notice something was acting up with my Revit (version 2014) at the same time. Without trying too hard to find out why my worksharing monitor (WSM) isn't working again (also see previous post) this time, it is Lync from the office suite.

Lync, in a nutshell, is another web conference, web based collaboration tool. I haven't fully known the potential of using it yet but I will definitely plan on exploring it more down the road. It seems like it is very easy to use.

Back to the issue, the "fix" isn't hard. Just "exit" your Lync, re-run your WSM and you are back in business.

You can log in back to Lync afterwards. What bothers me now is it seems like there are more of these web based tools that are conflicting each other. Steve Stafford just wrote one today about a file opening issue in Revit with i-Tunes. My wish is having the WSM as part of Revit standard tool just like anything else would fix many of these issues.

Love/Hate Relationship with Worksharing Monitor

"Worksharing Monitor" has been around for many versions in Revit. I love using it and always recommend people using it whenever they are on a large team working on worksharing file. It is helpful to see who's in the model and who is synchronizing with Central (SWC) to avoid chaos.

Up until now, this tool is still written as an addin. For one who needs to use it, you have to install this addin, then the tool can be found via the Addin tab. Revit 2014 made a nice improvement, worksharing monitor (WSM) finally gets its own icon in the Addin Tab.

I have a number of users who complain about WSM not being able to open in Revit 2014. I have seen this problem in the past; often times it requires Revit to restart in order to resolve this issue. This time, however, is different, no matter how many times they restart Revit, WSM is still off. After some investigation and tests with IT, we were able to identify the blame. The user was streaming "Spotify" in their workstations while trying to run WSM. After closing Spotify and re-run WSM, they are able to open WSM without any issue. **Note: You can continue to use Spotify after launching WSM.

I have heard other people from the RFO that WSM can be blocked with other software. As it turns out, many streaming sites change port configurations on the users' computers to optimize the use of them. I wish Autodesk can integrate this very useful tool into Revit in the future version. In the mean time, if you run into a similar problem, maybe you could try closing Spotify or other software and run WSM again.

Plan Region and View Range Bug in Floor Plan

I came across this weird behavior in Revit today and thought to write a quick post about it. I have this project in Revit 2014 and a number of the windows had a higher sill height on the wall.

 

 

By default, this window is not likely to show up on plan since the defaulted view range is set to cut at 4'-0" above finish floor.

 

 

 

So immediately I used "plan region" and set it on plan and thought that would fix it.

 

 

 

 

 

However, for some reasons, it didn't work no matter how I set the view range height within the "plan region" settings...

 

 

 

After going for the next 30 mins of trouble-shooting, I was able to figure out the issue and "fix" it. I had to locate my "plan region" completely away from the window and the wall in order for Revit to recognize it. As it may sound totally crazy and irrational to me, it somehow worked...

 

 

 

I still can't explain why this works since the plan region would work on a normal situation. I guess this is one of those weird behaviors that does it.