The Superb Guide To Easy Revit Strikes Again

RINA SAHAY: Nauman, it's the wrong slide deck.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Aw, man. No, no, no, hold on, hold on. I didn't say do something different. So sorry, just a second. Let me check. Let me check.

RINA SAHAY: Oh look, look, look, look, look. Oh, it's the right one. OK. I'm sorry.

So ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third installment of the superb guide to easy Revit. Now remember the last two years? Those were two really fun years, weren't they? What a blast we had. And that brought us a top-rated class award for both years. Wow! So thank you. Thank you, audience. More than us, this award belongs to all of you.

But you know what? This time is not a repeat of last year. We have a lot of new material to share with you. So here's some more good stuff.

If you've followed us for the past two years, then you wouldn't be still afraid of big, bad Revit. But just to help you overcome any remnants of fear, we've got some war stories for you. We've got some really freaky, wild, out-of-the-box tips. And at the end of it, you know what? You're going to agree with us that Revit, no one cares what it is that you think.

So today, let's take a look at today's objectives. Just what is it that we're going to be talking about? These are the official objectives, which you saw when you signed up for the class. But you know, you've already seen all that, right? Let's take a look at the real objectives for today.

Our superb objectives. We're going to present to you a feast of information, a collection of superb tips, time saver alerts, speaker favorites, freaky tips. We're going to be talking a lot about best practices, things that we do and have worked for us in the past. And you know what? What's worked for us in the past may or may not work for you in your situation.

So we're going to address a lot of ways to think out-of-the-box, how it is that you can overcome Revit and become an expert.

Who's the superb team? No, that's not the superb team. So yeah, let's take a look at who's the superb team. But you know what? You know all of this about us, right? You can always connect with us on LinkedIn.

Let's ask about the things that matter. Nauman, what's your favorite war story?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: This is a good one, and I always get amazed by it, how people don't think about some of the items, why the elevation is transparent. I mean, this came up recently, and it's just crazy, where you could see the elements are-- we check all types of settings. I mean, graphics settings, everything was checked. Nothing, no way we could figure out what it was.

But then I remembered my good old days of Code Blue, Dr. Revit! days, and it was a CAD drawing that once I turned it off, guess what? It fixed itself. So that was the part I hate about CAD drawings in Revit.

RINA SAHAY: Oh my goodness. They do get in the way, don't they? All right, so let's take a look at my war story. You remember a few months ago, I had called you up in the afternoon, and I was fit to be tied about a door family I was trying to fix?

Now, here's a story about that door family, which I inherited. The door family was built using nested panel and frame families. The frame families used voids to cut the host. And since the nested families were being swapped out using family type parameters, they could be combined to create any number of combinations of doors. In principle, that was a great concept. In practice, the door families used voids to cut the openings.

And guess what happened with the voids? The doors with the voids would only-- would not cut correctly through the stacked walls. They would not cut correctly through joined walls. Whereas when I took just a regular out-of-the-box door, it would cut through the stacked wall correctly, and it would cut through the joint walls correctly. So you know, Revit has a perfectly good Opening Cut feature. Why would we use anything else?

The solution was to copy opening cuts between the actual family and the out of the box family. I opened both families in two different windows. All I did was copy the opening cut from the out of the box family, over to the library family. And as you can see, that cut and paste happened pretty seamlessly.

Not only that, the cut and paste that has been performed, the way that the Opening Cut works, it works even when it lives in a nested family. So the opening cut that lived in the frame family cut our door openings out perfectly. Nauman, I'm kind of out of breath.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: So let's talk about some startup stuff. For me, performance is absolutely critical. But some of the new stuff that is in Revit '24, with the Help. So what's new with the Help?

Well, they added a chat bot. And you know you've been using all kinds of chat bots online on the websites. And I bet you hate it as much as you can, because they don't give you the right answer most of the time. So here's another one that you can curse at sometimes.

The other part is, you can get some insights on your home screen, where it can tell you what you have been doing for a while. It doesn't report it to Autodesk, so there is some privacy concerns for people. But it doesn't mean they have some stuff there. But the other part is is these efficiency boosters that they have in there, where you can-- they do have some really good tips, actually.

I was intere-- I learned something was-- come on. So it was good. But anyways, if you want to turn off Insights and edit the Revit.ini file and say, DisableMyInsights from 0 to 1, and that will take care of it easily.

Startup-- well, let's see what we do. I always go for Windows performance first, and that's where it starts. My effect is the Visual Effects where you have the menu fading in and out, and then it slows down the system. Well, trust me, it does. There is a huge difference when you right-click and stuff. There is a delay in there.

Anyways, if you go to your Appearance settings, you can turn off everything except the Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts. People like that turned on. But if you're on a VDI, I would not recommend having it turned on. Everything should be turned off in that case.

The other part is, clearly in Windows. I'd say, I always have my mouse pointer larger, as well as change the color. Getting old. I have to have the bigger mouse pointers and the colors to kind of scream at me to be able to see where it is. And when I'm teaching classes, it's a great help. So that's another tip.

The other part is, in Windows, they have some color vision deficient-friendly settings. So if you have some issues with that, please explore the Windows Color system. Definitely, it can help you.

Another thing is every single time I will ask Tech Support at Autodesk, they will say empty your temp. Empty your temp. Well, why not let Windows do it, because Windows has a built-in now called Storage Sense in Windows 10. I set mine to turn on, but I also set it to run every week for temporary files.

As well as, if you notice that with the Autodesk Docs, now Autodesk Docs with the desktop connector 16, it automatically works just like OneDrive. So you can control OneDrive to empty out the free space. You can do that with Autodesk Docs now. As well. Yeah, that's the great part with it.

And also, the other part is with this Desktop Connector Cache, you can relocate it, too. This can also help you with point clouds and things that don't have Autodesk Docs linking system. If you are cloud sharing, this can really help you out. You can move it to either a different drive. It's a little convoluted process, where it's under Help.

It's just-- not a convoluted process. Just hidden under Help. Which, I don't get it. But there are QR codes that you can get and look at it. The other part you can also do is the cloud models now in '24 can be relocated, too. So that's another one, too.

So you can put it on a different drive of stuff. So that way, you can keep your main drive clean. So the other part, customize options in Revit, definitely. Rina, we forgot to put in my pet peeve, the work sharing frequency

RINA SAHAY: Oh.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: I always put it on manual. So journal files--

RINA SAHAY: No, you can tell them about it.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: That's my fault. I should have caught it before. But anyway, the other part is the Structural Analysis tools. Well, in Structural Analysis tools, keep it turned off if you are not using them. If you are not using any of the system stuff, you can turn them off, too, so your ribbon is not cluttered as is. So that's another option.

But this is a performance enhancement. So even if you are a structural engineer, if you're not using Analysis tools, turn that off. A few other things that you can also-- keyboard shortcuts, definitely. I always modify my double-click options. The root path or point clouds, we'll talk about it a little bit. But this was the cloud cache that you can do and relocate it somewhere else.

Now, also, the Dark Mode. I love Dark Mode. As you can see, some of my screenshots have Dark Mode in it already. Autodesk now has a-- finally, they built a real Dark Mode system in '24, where you can turn it on.

Sometimes people like the canvas to be dark but the UI to be still not dark. That way, you can also control that by having the interface non-dark, and then just the Canvas being dark itself. So that's a cool thing that I love.

RINA SAHAY: That's the way that I like it. I like to see the-- I like to use Canvas theme. I like to keep the UI light and just the editing window, that should be dark.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: That's cool. Yeah. I love it. So the INI file, DynamoSettings. I would say customize it. And you should be able to customize it after you install it. And what I do is, I upload it to the deployment online, and it takes in the Revit.ini and DynamoSettings so you can just deploy it, either as an installer--

You can send it to your colleague that is offsite and they can install Revit with all the settings that you have. You can also add disabled settings and stuff. The other part there is some people that was saying, like in 2022, that there were no EnableHeatingAndCoolingLoads.

They changed the methodology of using it. But if you want the old stuff back, people from Ripple HVAC has a tip that you can add it to the INI file under Miscellaneous, where you can enable those settings. And there, there is a free, also, load calculation toolkit in the App Store. And it's free. That's awesome. Thank you.

Now, perfect project. There are a lot of things that you have to keep current in terms of standards, some people call it. Well, I typically like to call them current best practices, because they are always evolving. Every new version, I have to change something different, because there are different things that we can leverage, more so. But naming conventions.

I typically have a page or two where the naming conventions are in the template. Project setup, you can do a quick setup with using Dynamo. And there are other methodologies to do it. There are other add-ins that can help you with it. Rina, you want to tell us about the mockups?

RINA SAHAY: Yeah. Now, this is a solution that came in response to a request from my team. They wanted to have a means to make notes on sheets and views in the model itself, but with the ability to get rid of those notes when it's time to print. What you see over here is a generic annotation family, text-based parameters.

A sample is placed in the model for the team to copy and use. And this is controlled by a global parameter. When they need to print, then all they would need to do would be to go to the global parameter and turn off the Internal Notes parameter. And that works well for them. Now that we are done getting all started and set up, let's take a look at some unbelievably helpful features on Revit.

More new features in the project browser. We can actually zoom in and out. Wow. Isn't that a concept.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Hey, this helps with my old eyesight, too.

RINA SAHAY: [LAUGHS] Tell me about it.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: They know. Come on. You've got bigger stuff to do.

RINA SAHAY: I can put off this eye appointment.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah.

RINA SAHAY: However, now that the eyes are getting some help, my fingers could use a little more help, too. So I really wish that we could have a tab project browser, and I'm not scrolling through dozens and dozens and dozens of views and sheets.

Multistoreyed stairs-- you can tab, click, do a tag flights and/or runs of multistoreyed stairs. Now, you can only tag the stair run in its originating position. None of the replicated stories can be tagged or scheduled. So if this has happened to you, that's just what Revit does.

Some wishlist items from me, that railings could be assigned to subcategories. And finally, that I could just right-click on a level in a section or elevation view, generate a floor plan. Remember the wi--

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Rina, one thing on that. You can use dimensions and have calculated dimensions-- you can combine your dimension to use dimension and say 18 risers at this feet, also. That's another cool feature, too. That has been there for a while, so--

RINA SAHAY: That has been. Definitely has been. These are just regular stair tags. All right, so to go back to the worksharing monitor. Remember that from the days when we were collaborating over servers? Well, guess what? It still has some use. Click on it. Go to System Performance.

This gives you this lovely window. You can set it to be transparent. It can sit right on top of your Revit view. It can sit on whichever monitor you have it on. I've got three monitors. I can move it anywhere. And while I'm working, it can stay up there, active. And it can show me all the information that I would have gotten by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del and going to the Task Manager. It's right there. It's right in front of me, and it's easy to access.

This is a long story. This is a very, very long story where we had a project. It was very equipment-heavy. All the equipment was isolated in an equipment model, linked into the architectural model. A lot of interior elevations had to be generated and all the equipment had to be tagged in the interior elevations.

Well, when the interior elevations were generated in the architectural model and the equipment was tagged, when the link was reloaded, the tags would lose their host. Immediate solution was to reverse the process, where now we were generating the interior elevations in the equipment model. That led to another problem, because we had our elevation tags in the equipment model. It was linked into the architectural model. We could not see the elevation tags.

First solution, use dummy tags. But that led to a lot of manual coordination that was required. The second solution, which actually worked for us, use view references. So here's what we did. Started with live elevations. And I went ahead, filtered them out, made them pink. You could make them orange or green or whatever you want them to be.

Then I created a view reference family. I just took our elevation pointers, changed the category, copied parameters over. I ended up with five view reference families which are assembled together. And now I could get all five of these entities to talk to a sheet or a view as I needed to. Created a view with just the view references on it.

All the live elevation tags were filtered out. And that view was then linked into my architectural model, into my A101 plan. And you know what? This actually worked. This worked really nicely for us.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Cool.

RINA SAHAY: Something else that's unbelievable-- yeah, it took a bit of doing. Something else that was unbelievable. Watch what happens when I just right-click. I'm right-clicking. It's just a random right-click. I can open a sheet right from a view. Talk about a time saver. Wow.

Now, this was in response to a trouble ticket. Somebody was curious about this Show Opening Height parameter in the properties of doors and windows. And this is what I discovered, that this is a quirk in dimension styles. And this quirk only occurs in families which have a built-in Opening Height parameter, which means doors and windows.

When I click to activate this and then I dimension the door, I see the door width. And below that, I will see the opening height. Frankly, I've never seen this being used. But you know what? Maybe somebody could use it. Who knows.

A real time saver is the ability now to publish without links. Previously, you had to unload the links before publishing. Now, the links can stay right where they are on the Revit home screen. If you right-click on the ellipses, you can publish the latest without links. What a time saver.

One of my favorites. Previously, schedules-- though the height of schedule rows was driven by the height of the font that you were using, not anymore. We can actually go into the Schedule Properties, we can tell Revit to resize all rows, and we can give Revit a height of the rows. And as a matter, we can even rotate the schedule on the sheet. But that's a different story entirely.

We can also add multiple views to a sheet. We can use the Shift key. We can Shift-click to select, and we can drag our multiple views onto the sheet. So right now, you see that I've dropped some schedules onto the sheet. And look at that. They're all lined up pretty nicely. And nothing is trying to ride over each other.

They're lined up. They look pretty systematic. Watch what happens when four plans come right in. So what this does is, this removes the immediate necessity to move and arrange views, make the sheet look pretty. Because as it is, these views do look kind of pretty.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah Cool.

RINA SAHAY: We've got a new addition to selecting multiple categories of elements, and this is in entire project, including legends. Guess how that helps us. With this now, when we go ahead and we select text objects to run spell check.

Now we can also run spell check in legends, too. However, schedules. Those poor little schedules are still left out in the cold. I really wish that schedules could also get the super power. Would make life and spell check so much easier for us.

The scope box in Revit 2024 now, it has an actual height parameter. Previously, when we placed scope boxes in Revit, we would set up the height right on the status bar. Now, the height parameter is there in the properties palette. We can set this up really, really precisely, as opposed to what we did previously, when we just grabbed the grip and dragged the scope box up or down as was needed.

Another superb tip. I think this one is absolutely amazing. If you want to speed up your views or renderings, use scope boxes. Because scope boxes will limit the extents of reference planes, grids, and levels. Ladies and gentlemen, section boxes will not offer you these capabilities. Only scope boxes, that are just so helpful.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Those are not just rendering views, but regular views, too. Yeah, we have been using it for consistent plotting and stuff. That does help, as well, in speed.

RINA SAHAY: It does. It makes sure that all the views are cropped uniformly. It's one less thing to do. It's perfectly awesome.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yep.

RINA SAHAY: Now, another question from my team. Why are the bubbles already blue? All right, let's take a look at the blue bubbles. Let's see what they're all about.

Levels-- a blue level is associated to a floor plan. The black levels are not. When I click on a blue level, I can actually open another floor plan. What about sections?

On the screen, the head is always blue, but the tail can be any color. Now, a lot of times, standards will require that all linework shows up in black and white. And the blue bubbles were getting in the way.

And here is where the blue bubbles actually help us. When we double-click on the blue Callout heads, we can open the associated view. Frankly, I didn't know that, because I've always right-clicked on the cut plane and opened up the view. And that was two mouse clicks, when I could have gotten by with one. Go figure.

Here's a freaky tip from my esteemed senior colleague, ToanDN. He says that when you're setting up the section type, you can swap out the head family for a tail and the tail family for a head. So basically, your section object is in reverse. So that way, the bubble is forced to be black. And you can force the tail to be black, as well. Yeah, that's a little--

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: My first--

RINA SAHAY: Yeah, the backwards section. That's too freaky for my taste. So here's what we do. We just set things up in print options and get the job done.

Copy/monitor mysteries. This is something that a lot of people have had questions about. In copy monitors monitoring, you can set up options. Under the options, you can tell each type, out of five categories, whether they stay the original type or whether they need to switch over to another type. Under coordination settings, you can enable individual copies. You can enable batch copies.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Hey, Rina, what's the thing with copy/monitor. You're allowed-- basically, you have created an easy mapping system, basically. What I would not recommend, in this case, is the setting it automatically to copy automatically in this, definitely. Otherwise, you're going to keep getting errors like crazy. So just be careful on that.

RINA SAHAY: Yes. And that's pretty much what our colleague, Dave Butts, also recommends. He does not recommend not be-- he recommends being selective about copying elements. Otherwise, you're going to get a whole bunch of duplicates, and that can cause performance issues in a region and loads in your models.

And here's a secret about copy/monitor. You don't need to copy to monitor. You really don't. So here in my example, I've got two steel columns, and this column has been told to monitor the other one.

Now, when one out of this pair moves, this column has moved. Now this column realizes that the other column has moved. When I go into a coordination review, I see a warning about the relative position. And now I can-- I'm given a list of actions which I can take to accept.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Rina, very quickly. So this is-- that's what you use it for, the current model. Because I always wondered what the current model is, when you sele-- always do copy/monitor, it always asks you, current model or linked model? So this is in the current model. That's all--

RINA SAHAY: That is correct.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: It has been a mystery to me for the longest time. Now I understand clearly. Because I just didn't hit the F1 key, or maybe I can ask the bot, you know?

RINA SAHAY: Again, this is definitely a mystery. So you know what? You don't need links.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah.

RINA SAHAY: You don't need links. You can copy/monitor stuff in whichever unlinked model that you are in. Hey, Nauman, are you going to share with us the new features in Revit?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh, more? OK. Yeah, sure. Definitely. So the parameter service-- well, there is a horror story. Or I should say, a war story, that Rina likes to call it.

RINA SAHAY: [LAUGHS]

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: The parameter service is awesome, but it is a lot of stuff that needs to happen in it before we can let it loose. But you can manage the shared parameters. The nice thing is is that the Revit parameter file does not allow for whether it's an instance or type, or whether it is-- which categories it applies to.

This allows you to do that. But there is a huge, huge caveat. Basically, when you upload it, either you can do it from the file. But it's recommended to do it from the project, because it associates the categories it applies to.

And it can be disabled or enabled for the users through the Revit.ini file by enable parameter service from under Miscellaneous. I'm all about Revit.ini file, too. So the levels it is first, the account administrator has to enable the service. And the account administrator can manage the list online. It is a very manual process if you have to-- there is no batch editing or anything like that, at all. And there is a horror story there.

What happened was we thought that the account administrator would be the only one that can have rights to editing the online service. Well, we had a project administrator in one of the projects, and he decides to test it out and upload about 1,000-plus parameters from that file. I don't know why they had 1,000-plus parameters in there, but--

RINA SAHAY: Wow.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: He had to go in and manually delete every one of them. And Autodesk was no help in that. They said--

RINA SAHAY: That sounds agonizing.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: That's all manual. You do it yourself. Figure it out. So the other part is, it's good, but just be careful of that. I wish there was a separate permission level. There is a-- sorry, I forgot to mention that there is a discussion page that they are looking for feedback. And I did give my feedback in it, and so did many other people.

RINA SAHAY: I did, too.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: So there are some new tools in the Project Browser, of course. My favorite is the Find Referring Views. And the other part, well, they added the View Placement on sheet. It's just too bulky for me, that icon. I don't know why, but maybe they could have just changed the color or something. They had some studies on it. It used to be a dot at one point, but I remember from beta days.

But anyways, those are that. And a lot of other items are there, where you can just go to a view very quickly, where they are visible. The new Search capability in the Project Browser, of course, is there. But the nice thing about it is, it acts just like the Type Selector, where you can partially type things, rather than just a static value that if it exists, then and then it only finds it.

This is a partial search. You can also move things aligned. That's Rina's favorite, Move Aligned to Sheet. All these views. The other couple other items, new views aligned between sheets.

That was the one thing. The Aligns to Center of Center, or the Origin of the Viewport. It works on live views, basic plans, elevations, section, 3D views. You can easily swap them out or align them. And drafting views, too, as well.

And you can swap them. That's the other benefit of this. That's the great part, where I want it in that place, but I want to swap it out. I couldn't do it. I had to delete the view and put a new view in, just in case I had to do that. This is great.

And also, works on legends. However, legends can only be swapped out with another legend. This capability does not work with schedules, though. So hopefully, soon it'll come. The other one, Set Revisions to Multiple Sheets.

Yeah, there are a lot of utilities that did that. But now, it is built into it. You can just select multiple sheets, edit the revisions very easily, and voila. You can just select the revision that you want. I don't know why they didn't have it for the longest time. But hey, we have it.

RINA SAHAY: Now we have it, and we can control it.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah. This is another one that force relinquish. So remember in the old days with the central file, we could change our username and relinquish and all that kind of good stuff? Well, for cloud-shared files, there was ways you could do it, but it was through the project admin and it was just very slow process to open it up.

And if you had multiple projects, it just is slow. So now you can just basically go to the home screen and click on the ellipsis and relinquish. Boom. Just be careful. Very, very careful that you are releasing, because you have a lot of power there.

RINA SAHAY: Yes. With great power comes great responsibility.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Make sure you assume the responsibility.

RINA SAHAY: We needed some Spider-Man over there.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: So new Revit 20 24.1, though, is that they added another good feature where you could export the pattern files, fill patterns. There were other utilities that did that. I think pyRevit did it or so. But--

And actually, the Revit, if you exported a drawing out it, used to create these temporary patch files, by the way, which you can put it on a OneDrive. And go back and say undelete those files and you can access those. But now it's all built into it, so if you're wanting to do it in an older version, that's one way to do it.

The pyRevit Make Pattern is great tool to have. There is a great video of it, so please look out for it. Now, the Revision Clouds I talked about-- sorry. The [? mist. ?] But the really nice part is, now you can schedule revisions. That is very powerful.

The one that is confusing part was I was looking at it and it's like, oh, it just shows me the revision. Where is the other settings, like current revision, this and that? Oh, you have to switch the type right here for revision, right there.

And then under the sheets, you can also get more parameters. Under revision, you get more parameters as well. So that is an awesome, awesome addition. Even pull from project information. So you can edit a lot of things with it. So that was--

Now, Toposolids. What are Toposolids? Yeah, that's a new thing. Well, yeah, they have tested it out in the past as beta tests and whatnot. So I will talk about some other items where you can get involved with those testing.

You always wanted to know what it was? Well, Toposolids are kind of a Toposurface, AKA, now, Floors, if you want to call it now a little bit more than a Floor, because they can work a little bit better in terms of Floors. Basically, if you upgrade a file, the old Toposurfaces remain as is, unless and until you want to convert them. If you want to modify them, you just have to convert them at that point.

The old Toposurface will remain in the file if you want to keep it, or delete it. I would say purge it out if you don't need it. Building Points, Pads are retired. Use Waveforms to cut. Split Surfaces are gone. You have to use Split Tool to do it. Sub-Regions are gone.

There are other ways to do that merge. Use Join instead. Site Settings and stuff, edit it in the element Type. That's the one part that is really powerful, where every Toposolid type can have a different contour display and things like that.

So what references Toposolid when you are editing it? Project base point, survey point, or internal origin. All three available. Before, it was very hard to edit Toposurfaces, because I had only one reference was, I don't know, the internal origin only, which was annoying to me, at least. It was very hard to work with them.

A couple other-- what's the name? I will basically explain it, where "imagine a Floor and a Toposurface fell in love and had a baby" type thing. It's just--

RINA SAHAY: That's quite an analogy.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah. I would say that's what it is. How you--

RINA SAHAY: All right. So Nauman, now let me take over and tell our audience what it is that we do, and what are the special Rina and Nauman things that are actually done. How to sketch on an inclined sketch plane.

So here's what we do. We start off with an inclined reference plane. We give it a name. You must you must remember to name the reference plane so that when you actually set work planes, then those are remembered. Place a section. Align the section to the reference plane. And then guess what?

When we go to that section view, we have a true size and true shape plane that we can actually sketch on, so we can sketch for extrusions on that plane. We can even sketch for sweeps on that plane. It works absolutely beautifully. If you do not want to do the section, an alternative to the section technique would be to right-click on the View cube.

In addition, when you sketch on a reference plane, then you are actually hosting the sweep or the extrusion to that reference plane. Once again, when you are hosting to a reference plane, that reference plane must be named so that you can set it. You sketch on that.

And as you can see right now, that I've selected my superb reference plane to host the extrusion to. Once the extrusion has been created. It's going to follow that reference plane around like Mary's little lamb. You can move it and the extrusion will move along with it, or the sweep.

Have you ever seen this, where you have placed a family instance and the preview in the Properties palette is backwards? The easiest way to get around that is to select the geometry and flip it. So that instead of facing down, the casework or the furniture or whatever it is, faces up.

You can also carry that same change down to the template level, where you open up a family with the template, you reverse, you flip the reference planes, and then you can save the family. Go into Windows and change the extension from RFA to RFT. So that--

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: That's not simple. Trust me. That takes a lot. It just kind of makes it everything bass-ackwards. Just come on. Fix it, Autodesk, somehow.

RINA SAHAY: I support that.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: And this casework, typically, that gets affected by it.

RINA SAHAY: It is convoluted. It's beyond convoluted. But anyhow, so going on with this approach. This means that the front view has become the back view. The back view has become the front view. Those need to be flipped over, using the View cube.

And you know what? Rather than take all the trouble, just use the Preview Image Generator. It's a free app. Why not?

Another question that came in from somebody who was very, very concerned about the confidentiality of their intellectual property of their families. "How can we create a super-duper-ultra-secret-mondo-uneditable family?" Here's how you do it.

You create the family and then you rename. You change the extension to FRT. You open that RFT as an RFA and save it. Believe me, there is no power on Earth that can edit that family. However, just think in terms of the big picture. Is all of that trouble worth it? Is it all worth that bother?

Other ways to protect your material would be a text-based custom parameter. Lock it with a formula. You know the formula with the two quotes at the beginning and end. But you know what? Anybody who knows their way around a family can get around it. So my next question is, why take the trouble?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: [LAUGHS]

RINA SAHAY: Nauman, this is one of your favorite tips.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Yeah. Publish sets. I am a-- this is one of the things that I do it in templates now. I create predefined views for model coordination, because we are using the cloud workshared models a lot at Gannett Fleming.

So I went ahead and created 3D views, just to curate just the architecture with the links, without the links views, as well as in MEP views with plumbing or HVAC separately, and 3D views. And then publish them to AACDocs. Make sure you publish the sheets, too, because now you can have a side-by-side view where you can click on a sheet in ACC and boom, it opens it up in the 3D view.

Awesome. And then you can get all the properties in the 2D view, too, through the sheets. And you can even align some of the details to the 3D views, too. That's another awesome feature. So control, basically. That's how I do it with model coordination. Definitely.

RINA SAHAY: So now, to go on to embedded schedules. This is a feature which I have not seen being used. However, an embedded schedule is a schedule within a schedule. There are some categories which will give you the option to create an embedded schedule. So let's just look at this example.

This is a case work schedule which shows the case work in their rooms. When you look at the header, the header has got two lines on it, because we have got room schedule and then we have got case work schedule. And just by some creative sorting, we now see the room name and the case work below it and all sorts of other information about the case work in the room.

This has the disadvantage of looking a little confusing. The only reason why the header has some clarity to it is because I used the shading capability to shade the room headers. But if you think that you can have a nice, organized schedule with rooms to the left and case work to the right, that's not going to happen. You will end up with this kind of a jumble that you see over here.

However, this brings me to the next freaky tip. If I go under formatting and I just leave the heading blank, I can actually have blank headers. Never thought of it that way. All right, let's take a look at visibility in Revit.

Please don't underestimate View Templates. Keep them as few as possible. Please do not have a View Template for the quarter scale plan, the 1/8 scale plan, the 1/16 scale plan. Please, please, please do not, do not, do not do that. Please keep some parameters editable, so when you check the checkbox, you make these parameters uneditable, and you are forcing the view to accept them.

You can assign View Templates to all views. To schedules, to legends, to drafting views. All of them can be controlled by a View Template. Please, please, please use filters. My personal favorites, Phase Created, Family, and Type.

Do not be afraid of filters. I have run into this a lot where I talk about filters and I just get this glazed deer in the headlight kind of look. Filters are your friend.

And here is a freaky tip. Ensure that your phases display correctly. In the view template, make sure that silhouettes are turned off. Otherwise, if silhouettes are turned on, then your existing geometry will not be half-toned. You don't want that to happen.

View Filter Rules and Sets. You can add a rule. The rules will be and/or rules. You can also add in a set of different rules. So basically, that would be a filter within a filter. This is a great way to create a very, very complex filter, and it's created very easily.

You can use these techniques to filter out mechanical, because mechanical drawings are generally done, system drawings are generally done with colored line work. You can use a filter to convert the colored line work into black and white or half-toned. You can create a--

You can set a pivot point. So if you're using the navigation wheel, you Control-click on Orbit. You can actually place a pivot, turn this around as opposed to just selecting an element and pivoting the object around.

Now, watch what else happens when we bring the navigation wheel around. Click on Rewind. Rewind will actually show you stations during the orbit. And you can actually go back, rewind back, to those stations. You can also right-click on the View cube to switch between perspective and orthographic projections.

This is my personal favorite, how to undo deleted views. Right now, up till Revit 2022, what's been happening has been that you delete a view and then you will have to close out. If you want that view back, you will have to close the model. You can't undo that.

Now, I can right-click on the view. I can make the work set editable, and then Revit will give me a warning. But you know what? I'm just going to accept the warning, and I am going to delete the call out views, or do whatever it is that I need to do. And when I hit Undo, it will actually come back, which is perfectly awesome. Let's talk about modeling some perfection.

Nauman, this tip has come from our mutual friend, Suresh. And you know what? Suresh is the journal king. Everything he says comes with a journal. He did not ask for a journal to give us this tip. Now, in this tip, we are modifying subelements on a Floor.

The difference in this tip between what we normally do-- normally, I have just edited my Floors in a plan view. Suresh has gone to a 3D view. This allows you to get a really nice view of the edges and the points that you're trying to modify. However, the object that he came up with was good for a ramp. So if you want to have a Floor with varying thickness, but with a nice, flat surface to it, you'd be better off modeling an extrusion in place.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: You know, Rina, it was funny, though. You asked me about something about journal and I didn't know. And you said you asked Suresh. And Suresh says, go ask Nauman. So that was kind of a--