Well, here we are in 2021 and I am still finding some work, albeit a bit spotty, hence I have the day off today. As well as the last 5 days.
Elevation Markers
On one of my jobs, the Licensed Building Professional who gets to sign off my work (I live in New Zealand and you cannot submit work unless you are a Licensed Building Professional) wanted me to change my elevation marker from the Revit out of the box one, namely:
Because I felt under pressure to get stuff out, I fired back a message saying it could possibly be changed, but I would take and hour just to figure out how to change it, and could we please leave it as it is?
His reply:
" I've noticed similar limitations with ArchiCad and other programs used in my old office - that one is limited in terms of notes, detail tags etc & drawing presentation is dictated by the program itself which is why prefer to stick to Autocad for drafting - if i can't get my plans to look the way i want them then who controls who - a program controls me or I control the program?
You can see my point?
These flash programs are def good for 3Ds and animation but i'm still not convinced when it comes to consent plans & working drawings which is why I stubbornly stick to good old Autocad"
So with some spare time, I tried to modify an apparently simple little item.
After some nasty warning dialog boxes as I moved down a track that Revit obviously disapproved of, I saved the drawing under a new name that had "test" in it!
It turns out that the marker is composed of two pieces:
1. The body, ie the circle
2. The pointer, which is a separate file.
You can modify both, just save them under new names.
My mistake was to try and rearrange the item number in the arrow family so it might turn up in the right place. Wrong! The correct plan is to delete the number off the arrow completely.
Then in the body, add this as a label so it displays above the sheet number, which you move down and put in a line to separate the two.
Which is great, except that now for some reason the arrow is not filled. After much puzzlement and looking, the solution to that was to go into the family, and delete the existing filled region, and draw in a new one. Go figure!
Here we are, success at last:
On another job, another different architect had already drawn his development of 14 homes on one property. This was split into two buildings, one of 4 apartments and the other of 10.
The 10 unit block was on 3 different levels and the 4 apartments on yet another set of levels.
All I had to do was a few sections and a few details so he will be able put it in to Council for Building Consent. A typical Bill estimate would have been 40 hours.
Ever heard of the Bill factor? If Bill says it will take 4 hours, to get the actual time taken, multiply this by the Bill factor, usually 5, so in this example, it would be 4x5=20 hours.
He wisely never asked me how long I might take!. Well, 2/3 done at the moment, and nearly 100 hours have gone by. Part of this is my fault: I have modeled every stick of wood in the roof of the 4 unit block. A mistake I will not make for the larger block.
I found much of my time wasted tripping over the levels of the other block. This is a bit of a dilemma: do you split such a development into two separate projects, making mixing of levels not an issue? Then how to join them up together again, with details etc being common across the two projects? Then printing out two separate files and joining the pdfs together?
Another hassle was Key Notes. I had not used these before, but I can see they are definitely a wonderful thing. The idea is you have a text file, kept separate but in the same directory as the drawing This is a tab delimited file containing all your Key Notes. Great idea, just not that much fun formatting the bits as they arrive in your sheet. Yes, you can split them so they can be spread across your page, but the final format looks a bit clunky.
The architect has seen them and is not accepting of their formatting. They will have to be redone as pieces of text.
Not only that, but it seems you cannot (at least as far as I can find) use these in conjunction with detail views. No doubt on the Revit Kid's wish list?
Another fun, time consuming rabbit hole was trying to do the sanitary piping, which required the old dog to learn the new trick of Revit piping. A quite impressive part of Revit, it just needs a lot of fiddling around loading plumbing fittings.
Yet another mad item was bracing grid lines. I thought, why don't I use the grid item to do
these? WRONG! Every plan view I had (and there were lots) , sprouted these durn grid lines.
The only way out was to hide items in the views. Hours later....
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