“Change” room phase in Revit

The video shows how you can create new rooms based on existing rooms, that belong to different phase. The process is not fully automated – you would need to delete old rooms and update room numbers manually.

Edit: Apparently there’s even easier way to do this:

• instead of copy-ing the room, you can Cut it
• next you delete all unplaced rooms
• activate view with phase where you want to place the rooms and Paste

The fastest way to start applications

I call this tool windows Start button killer – here’s how I start my browser

NOTE: if you don’t like to type, this is not for you… 🙂

You can download Launchy from the following link:

http://www.launchy.net/

Map folder as drive

For anyone who hates drilling down the folders to find the file you are looking for:

http://www.wikihow.com/Map-a-Folder-to-a-Drive-Letter-in-Windows

Version management

If you are developing software and you are not using some sort of version control, you are bound to have problems at some point. The same could be said, when it comes to BIM Management and Revit Family creation, more so if you are developing families in team (I intentionally used word development here).

I’ve been using different SCM‘s in the past and I find Git as the best one:

• command line or GUI
• no need to set up the server, every folder can be Git folder
• very fast
• it’s free and open source
• …

Personally I prefer command line interface, since it allows you to work faster, but if you don’t like it, you can use many of free and open source tools to manage your files & versions. I use Tortoise Git as a backup, mainly for checking file history.

Change log for Revit family.

My set-up is not classical SCM, but more like version management. The only thing I am missing is ability to merge two versions of the same file.This is why I have taken different approach and I tend to develop nested families – in this case version management is of great help.

If you would like to try Git, you can download it from msysgit and for start I also recommend Tortoise Git. After installing it, you can use any folder to initialize version management.

Initializing Git from command line.

Another nice feature is ability to exclude certain files (e.g. backup files) by adding .gitignore file in the folder. Here is what I have in .gitignore – download it:

*.0*.rfa
*.0*.rvt

Delete backup files

Backup files are generally good thing, except when it comes to HDD space. Imagine you end up with multiple directories that look like this and you are using  SSD disk:

Revit backup files in a folder.

I am always short on HDD space and time, so I use this script to delete all backup files in current folder and subfolders (Revit and AutoCAD):

@ECHO OFF

:choice
set /P c=Are you sure you want to delete backup files[Y/N]?
if /I "%c%" EQU "Y" goto :delete_bak
if /I "%c%" EQU "N" goto :dont_delete_bak
goto :choice

:delete_bak
del /s /F *.0*.rfa
del /s /F *.0*.rvt
del /s /F *.0*.bak
pause
exit

:dont_delete_bak
echo "No files were removed."
pause
exit

I have saved code aboce to _DEL.BAT file.  “_” at the beginning means Explorer will show the file at the beginning of the list.

When you run the file, you get nice report:

Executing script to delete backup files.

Hello World!

I am starting this blog for my own knowledge reference. In the past I’ve been using different tools to save what I found out about Revit from tools like TreeDBNotes, Evernote to storing TXT files on Dropbox. Latest thing is Markdown which I find really intuitive and fast to use.

I can’t help it but to think about something similar to Markdown for Revit. Man would I like to do something like:

# REF_PLANE; Left; [5m,0,0]; [5m,10m,0]
# REF_PLANE; Right;[-5m,0,0]; [-5m,10m,0]
# EXTRUSION; <By Category>; 2
- LINE; [-5,0,0]; [5,0,0]
- LINE; [5,0,0]; [5,10,0]
- LINE; [5,10,0]; [-5,10,0]
- LINE; [-5,10,0]; [-5,0,0]

As you already noticed, I will extensively write about productivity tools, that might help you with your work.