AC Quirkiness Part 4 - Create Similar Command

There is a comment made recently about my previous post on another odd behavior about adaptive component. I thought I would share it on this post.

"Create Similar" is one of my favorite commands in Revit. It is also one command that I use almost every day. I could create a lot of things quickly by selecting an existing elements around the space and keep building it.

Create similar is accessible both in project environment as well as family environment. In a project, you could literally select anything 2D or 3D, then go to your option under "Modify" tab and click the icon "Create Similar"

Or you can access it via "right click" and choose from the pop-up.

How about in Family? You can pretty much do the same; however, it only applies to traditional family.

Select the geometry, go to the option, click "create similar".

Or just "right click" after you have selected the geometry. 

**The only thing I found in family that does not allow you to use "create similar" are model line and symbolic line. For some reasons, they just don't work with create similar.**

When it comes to adaptive component (or conceptual mass), once again, Revit just disable this nice feature from this type of family. If you "right click" by selecting the geometry, you actually get the same option from the pop-up window but it is grayed out. I suppose there is no time saving using "create similar" in adaptive component!?

AC Quirkiness Part 3 - Adaptive Component Visibility Setting

For those of you who have experience creating families, one can always overwrite the visibility of any geometry in the family (to set it to any detail level from Coarse, Medium or Fine; and whether to have the geometry to display in different view like Plan/RCP, Front/Back and Left/Right)

When it comes to Adaptive Component, such settings remained the same in the AC family. However, this dialog box shows it in a subtle way and you just have to know how to get to it. 

In the Adaptive Component (AC) environment, when you select the solid form, the only option that shows up are displayed in the image below. You just don't see anything that says "Visibility Settings"

If you check the Properties of the solid, it doesn't give you much of an option either. 

Look closer:

Clicking the Visibility/Graphic Overrides (VG), and this will take you directly to the Visibility Settings. 

**This is actually the same way on how traditional family works.**

You can also do the same by selecting the geometry, "right click" and choose "Visibility".

Tim Waldock from RevitCat has briefly mentioned this inconsistent setting about adaptive component.

Well, nested family, on the other hand, works differently in AC environment. You actually get this nice option just like the traditional family by selecting the nested family. The icon will present itself.

I would hope Autodesk can resolve this inconsistent setting in the family environment in the future release. As I suspect Adaptive Component is gaining more use in the project now, I can imagine more people are going to run into this issue with this behavior.

Mind Those Reference Planes!

It has been a few months since my last post about some quirkiness on adaptive components. I have this project using adaptive component to populate the building facade which posed some challenge not only with divide path direction; I stumped upon another unusual behavior with adaptive component and thought to write about this as part 2 on my blog.

For this building facade, we are using adaptive component to set up the window wall system module for number of reasons. One particular reason is that this facade has a sloping wall plane. As you might know, traditional curtain wall system doesn't work on non-vertical wall surface at all. One can try to use curtain system but it just doesn't work. Therefore, adaptive component with conceptual massing seems to be the answer for this question.

From the above image, each unit is composed by an adaptive component, there are a few different types of configuration in the facade. As we have modeled the whole facade, I notice something strange happening. Whenever I am trying to use dimension or align tool, these random "axis" started to show up. There are just so many of these axis no matter how many times you hit "tab" key to try to cycle through to something orthogonal to snap to.

I had no clue at first and thought Revit was going crazy on me. Then, I started examining the adaptive panel family and the answer was there.

Adaptive component (AC), just like any traditional family has two default reference planes, called Center (Front/Back) and Center (Left/Right). And by default, they are considered as "Strong reference" once the family is loaded to a project. However, reference planes in AC family do not serve any real purpose since "adaptive points" are taking their place on driving the geometry behavior. Unfortunately, those little reference planes are still pretty "snappy" in the project; and obviously, those reference planes become selectable more often than you expect and they appear at different angles depend on how they interact with the adaptive points as well as the massing.

Well, all you need to do is open the family (in my case, I have a handful of different type of families), select the Center (Front/Back) reference plane, and set it to "Not a Reference". Select the other one "Center (Left/Right)" ref plane and do the same, then you are good to go. Load it back to project and they are not snappy anymore! 

Solving the Mystery - Revit Linked File Disappearing

Our office use linked file to link the site topo surface as a separated model from the building. This process has served us with an advantage when we constantly move the building on site during the design process. However, I have come across a few projects that the topo stops showing up in certain views with no logic.

When cutting through a section view (or sometimes elevation views), the topo from the linked file disappeared.

However, the topo showed perfectly fine in other views

I checked all the possible causes like VG (Visibility Graphic) setting, workset or even element hide. Nothing seems to be the culprit of this issue. I ended up stumbling a very subtle setting that caused this issue. It had to do with the Far Clipping setting from the view properties. Turns out if the Far Clipping was to set to "Clip with line", the linked file would disappear.

Switching it to "Clip without line" or "No clip" will return to normal. What bothers me is this is totally random. The best way is to set all the views to "Clip without line" and have the setting included in View Template.

If you are not sure what this setting does to your view, Autodesk Help page (see below) has a good image to show the differences between these "Far Clipping" settings:

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.