Creating an elliptical room

We had to draw up a kiosk stall which happened to be elliptical in shape. I was very surprised to see when using the wall tool there is no option of elliptical or spline wall. I know drawing an elliptical or spline based wall is going to be rare, but it came up in one of our projects it is obviously needed.

However there are to workarounds.

1. Create an in-place wall using an extrusion.
2. Create an elliptical mass and apply a wall by face.

Anyway - being able to create an elliptical wall using the Wall Tool is now on my wish list.

Using the Scale Parameter with-in a Family

I’m sure many of you have always wanted to get a Scale Parameter working in some Families. A good example would be a detail component family of a 2D tree (plan or elevation). You may want to insert several instances of the same tree but at slightly different sizes. You would think it should be easy to do.
If you have ever inserted a .dwg (Import Symbol) file, you will notice you have a scale parameter in its type properties. By adding a number parameter in the family file inputting the scale factor in the .dwg (Import symbol) you should be able to make the dwg import symbol whatever size you want. Flexing the parameter and dwg with-in the detail component family works perfectly. However when you load the family into a project it won’t work!
From a post on AUGI back in the start of 2007 this was a know bug with no workaround (i.e. Revit 9.1). We are now in Revit 2010 and we have 2011 coming out in 3 months. What’s the chance it will be fixed in the 2011 release?

Revit 2010 Silhouette Bug

When you have silhouette edges turned on (under Graphic Display options) in a view in Revit 2010, you cannot “Override Graphics in View” by Element or by Filter as you did in Revit 2009. The override ends up being behind the Silhouette rather than overriding it.

What really annoys me about this bug is I have been trying to spend a lot of time ensuring users are producing good looking drawings with appropriate line weights. When using Silhouette you can still individually line work each line, but having the option of using filters or overriding items by element to change line work is very powerful a large repetitive elevations.

Autodesk have been made aware of the problem and have passed it onto their development team.
The best work around is to use the line work tool and specify the desired line style.
Problem exists on Revit 2010, including SP1 and SP2

ACIS (.SAT) files not cutting correctly in Section

It’s been 2 months since by last post. Work has been very busy, I also just started as REVIC chairperson (Revit users group of Victoria Australia) and I’ve been enjoying our nice long Christmas break.
We started to try importing ACIS (SAT) files into Revit from Rino. The reason for going via ACIS was as some of the geometry was curved. You may know, when you try to import a curved dwg file geometry into Revit, it comes in with triangulated faces and thus is very messy when viewed. ACIS can be exported from Rino to avoid this.
The ACIS files did in general export without a problem out of Rino. During the import process the files were imported into an external generic model family (we also tried an in-place family). However when we took a section in one direction It did not cut correctly (I looked like an elevation). Cutting the section in the other direction worked fine. We tried all the various different SAT exports in Rino and tried some different geometry and the same issue happened. Importing using the same method with a dwg file worked fine.
We have made Autodesk aware of the problem which they acknowledge and they are chasing it up with their Revit development team. I have not come across a direct workaround for this problem. My advice, avoid ACIS file imports where you want them to cut in section until Autodesk resolve the issue.

Divide Surface by distance bug

In massing if you select a surface and create a divided surface. Now change the grid spacing to distance. Remove the distance displaying , type in 2 (i.e. 2mm) and do nothing for a few seconds.

You are very likely to get this Revit crash error:

I’ve reported the problem to Autodesk.

The work around is; if you are going to use distance for your grid spacing, select the grid and edit the spacing form the element properties dialogue box, rather than the options bar.