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! 

Seasons Greeting from Phil-osophy in BIM!

I wish all of you to have a Happy Holiday and Happy New Year in 2015!

Divide Path Direction

I have questioned myself the logic when it comes to divide path in conceptual massing environment in the past. Recently I am working on an adaptive component for a panel where it requires a louver as part of the panel. I start with a 2 point adaptive family as a louver blade and nest it to the next family. The next family makes out of a set of reference lines and a frame, I have two edges that I use "Divide" to set up my "array".

I then place the blade family and try to use "Repeat" and lay out a series of blade.

 

It turns out the blade is going wild! At first I thought I have snapped my AC to the wrong node so it behaved unexpectedly.

After some trial and errors, I learn there is something I didn't realize before. For some reasons, when choosing an edge to divide path, one side of the edge has the node sequence backward; thus it results to an unpredictable array.

There is a hidden setting under the path properties. Select the path, check the "Show Node Numbers" and I am able to see the numbers on the path. Obviously they are going different direction.

The fix is quite easy. Check the box "Flip Direction" under the properties, it will set the path to the correct direction.

Try it again with Repeat and this time it works like a charm.

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: