The Return of the Superb Guide to Easy Revit

RINA SAHAY: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our-- this is the wrong slide deck. Nauman, This is the wrong slide deck.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: No, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. I thought we were talking Pink Panther.

RINA SAHAY: No, we're not.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh.

RINA SAHAY: That looks so much better. Yes, we're talking about the Return of the Superb Guide to Easy Revit. My name is Rena. And my partner is Nauman Mysorewala, you'd know him better as Dr. Revit, or the BIMologist. So remember last year? Last year we had come to AU with the Superb Guide to Easy Revit and we went back with a top rated class award. You know what guys? This award belongs to everybody who was at home connecting in remotely and listening to our presentation. It was something like between 8 and 900 people. You know what guys? The award belongs to you.

So this year, we're going to be looking back for a few minutes. We're going to encounter some blast from the past. But our conversation is going to be a thing. We're going to be talking about removing your fear of big bad Revit, we're going to introduce some new tricks and treats, a lot of war stories. A lot of explosive tips. And at the end, you will be able to be forever a Revit legend.

Yeah, I think there are better ways to introduce this. Nauman? Everybody knows all this about us. So you know what? Can you step in and tell us your favorite thing to do?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: My favorite thing to do is basically go ahead and when I create a central file, I always go about and set it to specify, because I want to make sure that I don't waste time loading links, that I don't need to by closing off the work sets. That means that you have to manage the links and put them on the correct work set.

You can also do as manually as well afterwards. You can click specify and go from there. But it speeds up the load times of files tremendously.

RINA SAHAY: What about with cloud shared projects?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: With the cloud shared product, all you got to do is just save the file locally, with the specify option. Then cloudshare it.

RINA SAHAY: All right, here's my favorite thing to do. One of my biggest frustrations is the fact that when I have to edit a family, I cannot edit it within the context of the project. So here's how I work around it. I create an in place model. And while I'm in the model in place mode, I window select all of the geometry, Control C, and then I Control V to place the geometry in a family created with the appropriate template. I added constraints. I added parameters. I end up with an absolutely wonderful family, which does just what I want. And I place it in the project. There are no ill effects from the in-place geometry.

All right, so to go on. What are we going to talk about today? Let's take a look. These are the official objectives. You've already read those, right? You already read those when you signed up to watch our presentation. Let's talk about some superb objectives.

We're going to be talking about superb tips, time saver alerts, and some out of the box tips. By the way, great icon Nauman. Love the Pink Panther coming out of the box. To speak of favorites, and we're going to have some really explosive bits of news. And all of this is with the objective of removing any fear of Revit, to dial up your productivity, to leverage the capabilities of the software, introduce you to some basic model troubleshooting, some nontraditional out-of-the-box solutions to modeling challenges.

We're going to talk about managing and creating views, families, annotation. We're going to be talking about software interoperability and introduce some helpful apps. Most of them would be free apps, most of them would be examples, where you could possibly come up with a similar app that does similar things. All right, Nauman, can you take it with learning objective one?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh that's-- I can do that, definitely. So let's talk about the quickest and easiest workflows to expedite our repetitive tasks. It's constantly dealing with all this work. But the best thing is to make sure that the ground is set up correctly. And then but first let's talk about some last questions from last year.

RINA SAHAY: Yes. So.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: There are a number of limitations on number of works that's in a project. I don't know why somebody even asked that. I'm sorry, but there should be limited amount of work that's in the project. The most I do is make sure that all the links are on the right work set, separately. That way we don't have to-- we can use our specify option to not load them. Another question was to how to deal with the Revit model that does not open that was created in an older version, you recovered it from archive and stuff.

Well, Autodesk does give you some versions back. I think five now. So you can get that through the AVA, which is the virtual assistant on Autodesk side, as well or you can also send in a tech support ticket, and they will be able to assist you with that to recover the file as well for you. And another one was, can set error has to default when you load a tag. Set that up in template. I know it's a very strong thing that's missing, but I would highly recommend you add that idea on the forum, or if there is an idea, then upload it as well to participate in the Revit preview, so you can hopefully influence the upcoming changes.

What's the best way to set up a 2D detail library? Rena? Can you take that one please?

RINA SAHAY: Absolutely, absolutely. Here are some of my favorite things to do. Look around at old projects, if there are any interesting, suitable, reusable 2D details that can be harvested, harvest them out. And I pull them into a container file.

Now I am talking about 2D drafting views. I am not talking about live details. So I go ahead, I compile the 2D drafting views into a container file, and I organize them into categories so that I can scroll through each category, and look at the details that I want. So I would have a head details in their own category, jam details in their own category. So they're all nice and organized over there. It's easy for me to go in and standardize all the graphics, line weights, text, and fun stuff like that.

And also what I like to do is, I like to create a view list, place it on the splash screen of the container file, and that makes it so much easier for me to scroll right through and search for the details that I want. Back to you, Nauman.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: So with that, I mean it's important that you have a good template set up. I mean the units, making sure that the round off numbers are set up correctly. I usually keep mine at 1 over 256, or 0.0001 millimeters. Like why would I want to do that? It helps me identify issues with the model, especially if it's a rectilinear model.

Another one is basically all the Project Standards. Make sure that some of the views that are set up, diagnostic views, coordination views, and your company has a certain standard of view templates with it as well as those views. A lot of the annotation families that are standard with that discipline you should load them in. Title blocks, of course. And parameters, shared parameters, global parameters, will talk all about those.

But the other part of it is that, somebody had asked about how to create a project with the preset works session. Well, you can't transfer them or between templates, but or files, easily but you can always create a project file, which is RET instead of RTE. Just open the file detached, and go from there.

RINA SAHAY: Absolutely. And as a matter of fact, when you're creating title blocks, try starting with a generic annotation template, because over there you will have access to more reference links than what you would have in a type of block template, and then just switch categories, also something that's really, really important and something which I've seen happen a lot, where every year when the software is updated, all that is done is that the old template is taken, saved in the new version, and that's it.

And what that does is that leads you to a document save history that looks like this. We don't want to see this. We don't want to see such a long history happening with the template. So always, always, always start with a new clean file from the current version, and then use transfer Project Standards, use insert from file to get sheets, and things like that. Recreate the new template from scratch, ideally with every update.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah, the reason is because also that there are new feature sets that get upgraded, and some items lose that, especially when we went from railings and stuff like that. So let's talk about another favorite of mine, and the template these days we are collaborating on a cloud, or uploading models manually. How about setting those up upfront, and make sure that the views that are in the file are always available when you upload the file, or collaborate in the cloud. I might do basically my 3D views with just the model only, with the links, just my play and plan views for True North, Project North, just so that I have a setup upfront before I start the project.

Another tip here would be is I also do is create model coordination views with view templates where I am only showing specific discipline, specific discipline breakdowns, meaning I only want just the supply docs, or some return docs, walls only, ceilings, things like that. Allows you to manage and do model coordination online effectively, upfront.

RINA SAHAY: And also, this is really, really helpful. This tip is really helpful when you're creating a dedicated view. Let's say to Export, to Enscape, or to export to Navisworks, or it's something that's required by other disciplines. Maybe it's what Civil wants, for instance. And so having a coordination view dedicated to each of those uses would be very, very helpful.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah, so and the other part of it is, we always have issues with aligning general nodes, floorplans, things like that. You can use a guide grid, and you can have multiple guide grids in the project. You cannot assign multiple at the same time. But you can switch to one, drag and drop the element, align it, and then basically switch it to a different one and do the next step.

There is another thing about the grid. I need to do a, what's it called, an idea upload, which is basically the grid. Spacing is only one dimensional. I wish they had a double x and y, and you can snap to it with even.

RINA SAHAY: Right, that would really be helpful. And of course, if the guide grids do not fulfill whatever it is that you need, then there is, again, a free add in called align. We've got the QR code over there to help you to acquire it.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: It's not just Revit tweaks. I prefer to do Windows tweak up front so people are using the computer and performance. So the basic way to do it is basically make sure you type in performance in the Start menu, and by default, the Windows like to do eye candy a lot, and then fading, and whatnot. What I typically do is turn all that off, yeah, and then also I do is just check on smooth edges of screen fonts. If you are remote desktop, make sure that is turned off, because it does improve-- reduces the performance of the system.

RINA SAHAY: For our next topic, let's talk about navigating around the project browser. There is a lot of exciting stuff going on with the project browser. Hey, we've got we've got an explosion happening over here. I wonder what that could be? Now just look at this project browser. Just how different is this?

Story for you. I was invited to participate in Autodesk research. And while they were talking about other things to me, I was looking at the project browser, and I saw these icons. And I finally asked them, which version of Revit is this? Was before 2023, and they said, this is coming out for 2023, but right now you're under NDA. It was awful. I had to keep my mouth shut. I could not talk about this to anybody. But now it's all out to anybody.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: That would be a tough thing for you.

RINA SAHAY: Oh, very.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Sorry.

RINA SAHAY: Absolutely awful. I had to keep my mouth shut. But yeah, just look at this. I don't need to set up a sheet list anymore. To show me which views are sheeted, which are unsheeted, which need to be removed, things like that. This is such a tremendous timesaver for me. In addition, there are tools, other tools in the project browser. So you know what? I can duplicate sheets now.

This is an old friend. It has been around since Revit 2022. I no longer have to install identification tools to use the clone command. I can duplicate empty sheets. I can duplicate a sheet with detailing, which would include schedules and legends. I could duplicate with views. And this is what is really thrilling, because Revit will take the sheet with live views on it, and duplicate not only the sheet, but the views as well.

So if you've got a sheet with floorplan one on it. The duplicate will be sheet two with floorplan two on it. So you do need to be a little careful about that, because once you're done, you do need to be alert enough to clear away any redundant duplicates. Because otherwise you may just bloat your model with duplicate views.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: And also nest duplicates. So all the call outs can get duplicated too. So you want to make sure.

RINA SAHAY: You do need to be very, very aware of the duplicates in your model, and clean them up. All right, hey, this is one of my favorites. The open sheet command. Right click on the view. And Revit will open the related sheet. Find referring views will open up any view that has elements in this particular view that you've right clicked on.

Another one of my favorites, you're in a view, it does what you want. Click on Create view template from view. And finally, I don't know why you would use this. Why would you want to turn these lovely icons off and go back to the old project browser? But it's there. Yeah.

Hey, another explosion. That this should kind of lift my spirits up from the last command. Hey, more view tools. Apply dependent views. Wow, and you know what? When we do this, I can go to apply dependent views, and look at this. I have got a floorplan. I have got two dependent views on it. This is for level one. And right now Revit is prompting me to take these dependent views and drop them into level two.

What this does is it creates the dependent views for level two with the same crop regions, the same cropping, the same scope boxes, everything. You don't have to go in and do that yourself. So now level one and level two have got similarly set up dependent views associated with them. That is--

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: You know what, Rina?

RINA SAHAY: Yes.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: It's saved me hours worth of work. Recently I was doing some elevation and section dependent views. It works beautifully.

RINA SAHAY: Wow. And there you go. Now you've got it from the master himself. Let's look at some more view tools where I can take a dependent view and convert it to an independent view. In addition, and this is something that has saved me a lot of time, finding project browser. Here I am, I'm on a roll, I'm creating views. I'm doing stuff, and then I look at the project browser, and I can't find the view. Just because my project browser is really, really customized. We'll be talking about customizing the project browser in a bit.

So here's what I do. I'm in the view. I right click Find and project browser. And this highlights the view wherever it is on the project browser. Really see.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: And just one other thing though. You can basically click on any element, even a load double family, and you right click and say find in project browser, it will take you to the families. It will also take you to the-- if you select a view tag, like an elevation view, section tag, right click, say find in project browser, boom, right there. Take you there right away. It's amazing. I love it.

RINA SAHAY: It's amazing how much time and frustration it can save you. Wow. OK so just I just mentioned customizing the project browser. If you go in the View tab and user interface, you can customize a project browser. You can filter views, you can filter sheets, you can group them, and you can even do that with phase and phase filter. And finally you can sort all of the views or all of the sheets or even all the schedules by certain criteria.

Not only that, in addition to all of these categories, you can create your own custom parameter. I have got-- this is my custom parameter here. I have created a custom parameter that I can use to do filter, and group, and sort sheets and views the way that I think. Whoa. What is that?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Hey sorry. I had to add that in. I love Star Wars. I mean Pink Panther is my favorite, but I had to do this one too though.

RINA SAHAY: Oh my god. I need some time to recover. So go on with the phases.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Move on. So but let's talk about some more questions from last year. Thank you so much for those questions. It gives us a lot of material for this year too. Somebody asked that, hey, is there a way quick way to change it all new construction elements to an existing? Opened up an older project, you want to use that and renovate it further, all you have to do is highlight that new construction phase, and click on combine with previous. Then you will only have one phase left, which is all existing. Go ahead and click insert after. And create the new construction phase again. And voila.

So another one is this-- when you have files from consultants or other disciplines within the same office, or they have multiple phases and you only have one or two or three phases. You want to make sure that you want to align the new construction with new construction. However, everything from before new construction want it to be existing, all you have to do is just map the existing to like in this case phase 3, and what, that will be everything will be existing before new construction from that link.

So another thing is about temporary elements. I mean with phases. I mean, I haven't seen a lot of people use it. But it's a very powerful command. If you don't have some-- if you have temporary partitions, if you have four walkways, while you are constructing, or construction walls that are going to get put up within the phase and demolished within the same phase, temporary is what that is, basically. An element that is created in that phase, and demolished in the same phase. So that's a powerful tool.

RINA SAHAY: Yes it is, but and just a word for all of you. Do not set up a phase for demolition. I have seen situations where a phase called demolition has been created. Please don't do that. Because demolition is an activity in the current phase.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: And there are many other things that we could not categorize sometimes. So we just kind of trying to lump those in somewhere. Selection set, we had a lot of material for this. We'll add some in the handout, but just wanted to make sure that you were aware that now you can select a lot more categories for visible in view, and in the entire project as well. Check the help QR code, and select all instances, enhancement information.

My favorite has been the detail lines. Right click, Select All detail lines just in case I have to swap them out from one type to another very quickly. That's a great one to have now. So another favorite of mine is copying legends between projects. It's been always a problem.

I did not know I can just do it in the Revit out of the box without realizing it much as one they added the functionality of copying legends between sheets, well, the nice thing is you can just copy them and put them on the sheet. Copy that sheet. Go to your other project. And all you have to do is paste it into that destination project, and that sheet will bring in all the legends with it in the destination. Yep. No plug-ins are required at all. I know, Rina, you love pyRevit, but this is OPB now.

RINA SAHAY: I could not resist this, because Revit does have a whole toolbox of tools for legends, and yep, copy legends to other documents. That's how I create my templates.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: You love pyRevit, it looks like.

RINA SAHAY: I married part of it.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh, geez, the song is taken. I think. Anyways, but the other new thing that 23 added was I always had a hard time trying to organize the sheet set when I play it in a combined set is how to organize it. I want the G sheets at top, A sheet at the bottom, and then you cannot do that before. Now you can edit the print order of it. So it's very powerful.

The other powerful thing is you can do it by browser organization as well. Or so that's the awesome part of it. However not only that, it is also possible now to basically bulk rename those exported PDFs. Well, not rename them, but name them appropriately the first time. So if you export out a separate files, or you can create a rule and just say, hey, sheet number and sheet name with a hyphen in the middle, all the sheets will be outputted just like that. That's so cool.

RINA SAHAY: That most certainly is. Especially in my organization, our-- we have a convention where the outputted PDFs are just project number, just sheet number and project number. That's it. With an underscore between them. And Revit exports our PDFs with a whole with the super long names, and it's just an exercise to rename the files. This functionality would be such a timesaver. Wow. All right, let's take a look at what we want to see.

Yeah. It's one of my favorite things about Revit is the ability to control views. You've got view templates, you've got categories, and there's so many ways to override and control the views. But let's take a look at some questions, first of all. Is there a workaround to display ceiling projection lines in the floor plans?

Yes there is. First of all, start with setting up an underlay. Once the underlay is set up, then you would-- the underlay setup. You can see the ceiling, and then you would go into the line work tool, place overhead lines where they need to be. And once that is done, just remove the underlay. And you have got the graphic that you need.

Another question, in this question-- this answer is courtesy my old friend and guru [INAUDIBLE] and most of what I've learned. I've learned from him. No offense, Nauman, I've learned a lot from you too, but Tony--

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: I know, I did too.

RINA SAHAY: So how would you show stairs in a ceiling or ceiling plan. Ceiling a lighting plan. Now for this two main keys, start with a plan region, and then you are going to edit the view range. Do set up an upside down view range. What do I mean by that? Your primary range is going to have the top at the bottom of the stairs. Cut plane is going to be below stairs. The bottom is going to be the same as the cut plane. The view depth is going to be above the top of the stairs.

So you have got this planned region that has got an upside down view range. And yes, you will see the stair in your ceiling plan. Another really thrilling thing. That started very, very recently, and that is the ability to create exploded views in Revit. Of course in Revit they're not called exploded views, they're called display elements.

What happens is that you click on the element that you want, go to the Display elements tool, Revit will give you this little gizmo, similar to what you see in 3DS Max. You can click and drag the gizmo, and drag the element out in the direction that you want it to be. Which is really super cool. So I can do that with the roof. I can pull out the wall, I can take a really nice look at what is going on inside. Of course I could be precise and enter exact values in the displacement set, but.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: The nice thing is you're not modifying the model at all. It's just in this view only.

RINA SAHAY: And you know what's even better? You can displace parts. If you have the element, you've converted into parts, you get displaced parts. You can displace elements even in 2D, and that is with effect from Revit 2023. And once that is we can even tag the displaced elements. And you know what? When you take a displaced element and you move it in the displaced view, the tags will also move along. The possibilities are endless. Can you imagine how impressive those graphics will be that you present to your clients?

Right, now creating view filters. Last year we had talked a lot about selection sets. What can we do with selection sets? One of the ways out will be to create a view filter. You could go to the manage tab, you could go to-- you could select all the objects, going to multiply out. You're going to modify. And you can save, you can save and rename. You can load the selection filter, and you can edit them.

When you edit the selection filter, you can add or remove from the selection. True story, we had a floor plan with keynotes. At different stages of project different keynotes needed to be visible. For that a selection filter was set up. So at one printing appointment, all the tags with the numbers 2, 18, and 21 were hidden, at the next printing appointment all the tags with the numbers 1, 5, and 9 were hidden. It worked really nicely.

All right, let's talk about the cool 3D cutaway views. We're talking graphics now. The first step to take is to go into a 3D view. Take the Select the section box, tweak the section box to cut through the desired area of the model in the 3D view. Make sure the right angle. Locked the 3D view, name it, and then right click on the View cube. Once you've clicked on the View cube, go into the perspective mode.

And now you have got a cutaway view, you're looking into the view, and you can do it all. After that, the world is your oyster. You can do all kinds of stuff to the cutaway view. You can just have a simple hidden line view. You can add in shadows. You can tweak the graphic display options. You can add in sketchy lines. You can make it into a realistic view. And you can have all the fun that you want-- this is total fun, and the go figure. You can also displace the views. This looks kind of scary though, I mean, I wouldn't like to look at the building with the roof flying above it, but that's what the space view is meant for, right?

Actual problem that happened. I got this call for help in the floor plan, the elevation tags were upside down. My first questions were, was the craft region or scope box ever rotated? Was the model ever rotated? You know what? It happens all the time. Things change, you are required to rotate the model, maybe because project North has changed, things like that. And it's a lot easier at the beginning phases of the project, where you don't have annotations and views and notes already set up. So rotating the project in the model may not be as big of an issue.

But if you have a very advanced project and you've got the model and you've got views and tags and annotations already set up, and you have to rotate it, those elevations are toast. Because you've got annotations, annotations host to a particular plane. And once you have changed the plane, those annotations are gone. And normally that is when something like this would happen. Do the elevation tags.

In a previous life what I did was I created a whole new set of elevation types, and those elevation types had an upside down tag. So when I put them in, I created views, the tags came in the right side up. I have not even tried to think about why that happened. But this is a quicker way.

But a really quick solution would be start off with a new elevation and create the elevation tag referencing another view. Select the original view. In that case, the tag actually does come in the right side up, and then you can hide the original tag.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: You can do hide it by right click the Hide and view elements, correct?

RINA SAHAY: Yes, you can.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: No, don't, please don't. This is like my pet peeve when people do that.

RINA SAHAY: No, I mean, that is something which has to be used with great--

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Sparingly.

RINA SAHAY: Very sparingly. Great discretion. If you've got one or two items, yes. But if you're going to try to hide a gazillion items in the view, then that is when things really go crazy. And no that is definitely a pet peeve.

All right, now talking about this particular pet peeve. Another story that came up. All the elevations and all of our projects had existing elements coming in full tone, which should not be the case. Existing should always be half tone. And so we had people right clicking and editing, overriding stuff in view, and until somebody actually thought to ask me what is going on. This was a template I had inherited.

So I started off with the usual filters, view templates, phases, phase filters, phase overrides, nothing worked. Until I went into the graphic display options and guess what? Silhouettes were set to a nice bold thick line. If you move the line, all the elevations work correctly. So hey, after these sad stories, a nice-- you've got something exciting happening. Let's look at that.

A wish list item that has come true. We have-- it has been granted to us. We can now filter elements by phase. How thrilling is that? Of course, last year, there was another question about an easy way to show previous phases with different line weights. You know what? This question requires a whole slide, a whole class on its own. What you need to do is you need to create filters for elements on each phase, and each filter will then override the elements on each phase. But only to a point.

Remember, that is something that you do need to be very, very careful about. So hey, another explosion. This is another tool, which is one of the top of the pops for me in Revit 2023. On a sheet, select the view, and then you can swap it out with any of the options that are available to you in the dropdown. Really nice. It saves you from the agony of removing the view, and re-adding it, so on and so forth. Nauman, learning objective 2 is yours.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: You know Revit does have its challenges. So let's talk about see how we can overcome some of them. So let's see. But I love sneaky workarounds. I love doing this, it's trying to find workarounds. But one thing that I love about is the schedules that we can do so much with.

Well, there is another superb tip here with an explosion here. Now in 2023 you can filter by sheet. Isn't that so cool? So you can just create room views, and just say filter by sheet, and I'll give you all the equipment just in that room. That's so cool.

We talked about templates. But here's another item that you should have in your template as a view schedule, where you can manage all the views, where you can assign view templates, check which views have view templates assigned on a sheet, not on a sheet, things like that. This is a one stop control for all the views in the model, and same thing you can do for sheets as well, of course. You should have a working sheet list, with a index sheet list that goes onto a sheet as well. So well in order. You want to talk about that one, because it is your fave.

RINA SAHAY: Of course, pyRevit will compile a revised sheet set for you. Because the sheet list as it is will only pick up revisions that have been placed on the sheet. Right now on the example that you see there are no revisions created. So you don't see anything on the sheet. Instead of creating a sheet list in Revit, you can use pyRevit to compile a revised sheet set, and that would allow you to actually print the sheets that are included in that particular revision for bulletin's agenda.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Here's an old one, but I love this. I still want to mention it. You can shift and select multiple rows, or you can drag select, and then but the problem is you can do it only in sequence. All you got to do is just select them, highlighted model, it'll open up the view, and in the view you can edit the properties. For instance, properties of that, and they will update those instance properties for all of the items that once.

RINA SAHAY: One of the superb tips from Dave Butts, and this is something that he uses a lot in MFP schedules. Where you can change a custom value to say varies using the multiple values indications. And that addresses multiple sizes in a schedule. So that way you do not end up with an empty cell in the schedule, where multiple instances of that element have got different values.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: So this is my favorite. This was an answer to my prayer about key schedules having shared parameters. I've been wanting this for the longest time. Finally got it last year on '22, which basically allows me to have a code analysis template views for a schedule view, and an area plan or a room plan with tags showing the numbers. Before you had to type in manually and whatnot, or things like that. This way I can control the tag, and the schedule with the same key schedule and the parameters inside them.

I'll show you a quick video of that, how it's done. And the video, you'll see how I go about doing that is by basically copying the code schedule. So all I did was basically took that key schedule from a table, 10 zero 4.5 from the code, current code. And type that it-- or well I didn't type it in. I just did use Excel to bring this in for my project. And I assigned the shared parameters. Once you do that, you can create an area, and place that area.

You can control that, show the tag. But right now the tag shows empty. It doesn't have anything in it because I haven't assigned it a function for the schedule-- from in the schedule, which is from the Key schedule. So what I need to do I can do it at the schedule, or I can do it in the properties as well. And once it is assigned, you can move on and the tags will automatically fill in as such. And let's see, I can do that. Business areas. And voila, automatically the information is filled in.

Same thing you can do that with the tags as well. I'll just show you very quickly, and we'll do the next item. Just basically select the label, and all you have to do is create a function. And create the formula. Base the same formula that is in the schedule as well. So that's all I had to show that. But once you do that, it will automatically show the right values itself. So.

RINA SAHAY: That is absolutely awesome. That's a great tip. Tip to share. Because code analysis has always been a challenge. But now that key schedules can also use shared parameters, that just opens up a whole new world for us. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Let's take a look at some of my favorite things, super family tricks.

But what about what are the questions we have from last year? After families created, how do you determine the template that was used to create it? You must go into family categories and parameters. You can see the category, you can see the whole state of the family. It will not tell you that it was created with family x, y, z, it's not going to tell you that. But you will get to know the category as well as the hosting of the family. That's all you need to know.

This is a really sneaky one. That can we changed the tag justification for leaders to top left or top right, instead of by center. All right, let's take a look at this example. I have got a fairly nasty looking tag over here. The important thing about this tag is it's got four labels. By default Revit will take the leader and center it at this position.

However, if I draw an invisible line from the origin, and I mirror over an identical invisible line, I just make sure the original invisible line covers the labels that I have. Now what I've done is I have fooled Revit into believing that this is now the center of the tag, and it will place the leaders right then.

Another situation that you may encounter, that say could be in lab. And lab designs, or it could be in the design of billiard rooms, where you are required to compute net room area. This happened to me with creating drawings for billiard rooms. Originally what was being done was that the billiard tables were placed, and then room separation lines were placed around them, which was absolutely painful.

Here's what I did. I took the billiard table family, changed the category over to something room bounding, in this case, it columns, and since columns recognize the column families only recognize geometry that touches the levels to compute area, I also placed a phantom extrusion equal to the size of the tabletop on the level, and I hid it in all views. It worked beautifully.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: That's cool.

RINA SAHAY: Yeah, the room to--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

RINA SAHAY: You don't have to pull out your calculators for that and you don't have to do room separation lines. And this is a completely random tip. Would you believe it, this is one door family with three opening cuts, and the door family only schedules as one. This came about with designing a-- designing an aluminum door with a transom. The transom was a nested family in the door family. And instead of constraining the opening cut to accommodate the transom and the door family, I used two opening cuts.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Wow, I didn't know that you can do that. That's so cool.

RINA SAHAY: It worked really nicely. Not only that, if let's say you want to show these openings as kind of being closed, you can take the opening cuts and make them transparent, or you could make them not transparent. What you need. Completely out of the box.

Some tips. Last year we were asked a question about tips to flex and satisfy constraints always use the correct template, always use reference planes, always constraint reference planes, never do geometry. Always use named reference planes. Avoid important drawings. Only use them as a reference in modeling. Once you're done, throw them away. You don't need them anymore.

Use type values, always try to create types with type dimension values. Only model features that are available. When you're creating a chair family, you do not need to model every single screw, nut, and bolt that there is in the chair.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: There is a caution for that. When you download manufactured families, they have been converted from solid work models. Please do not-- make sure you simplify them.

RINA SAHAY: Absolutely. Those can really, really bog down your model. All right, now whenever you see these constraints related errors in Revit and Revit families, just cut and paste the geometry the same place. That will remove the constraints. Also, and this one is totally cool. A cool tip that comes from Nauman where ceiling hosted families create the reference plains from right to left, positive or face down. I would not have thought about that.

All right, parameters. Another one of my favorite things. A real problem that comes up a lot. We're in the title block, people are trying to edit the title block. Why? Why can't they? Why do they just get this silly question mark?

In order to remedy this, you add a shared parameter to the project. Now the same parameter is living there in the title block family. You must bring in the same shared parameter into the project. You must associate it with sheets, and what that does is that allows you to edit the value on each sheet. But what if you want to do a global edit to all the sheets? In that case, what you need to do is instead of associating the parameter to sheets, you want to associate the parameter with project information. And that will allow you to globally edit the value over all the sheets in the project.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Hey, Nina. Just a quick tip, if you want to transfer shared parameters from one project to another, sometimes I avoid doing project parameters, project transfer. It will bring in all the stuff. What I do is I just create a schedule with those parameters, a multi category schedule or a sheet schedule, with the shared parameters, copy that schedule, paste it into the other project. It'll bring in all the associations as long as the elements appear in that schedule.