Too Familiar with Revit

Have you found that you are too familiar with Revit now to see all the little things holding you back in the program?

You have done it this way for years now, know the work arounds and the limitations. To quote the 6 Phases of Revit, "You "know" what Revit "likes", and what it "dislikes"" After Rod Howarth's post with the Revit API tic-tac-toe, I have started working on making a Revit Family version in the evenings. I am not new to formula driven families so I thought this would be fun. Click here for a 42 page formula guide.

Instead, this challenge brought to light a whole host of deficiencies because I was trying to design the simplest interface for the game. The key to a complex program is a simple UI and that is the same with a family. Give a user a complex door family with 50 parameters that they can change and they will be crippled not knowing even where to start. Simplify that down to 6 to 12 well named and understandable parameters and they will use it without question.

So, I would start with an input parameter, chose an X or O for a particular box. The first thought would be to just use a text parameter and fill in X or O for each grid box.

Problem - One cannot drive a yes/no parameter from a text parameter and one needs two yes/no parameters to drive the visibility of the X and O. In fact, I do not believe one can drive any parameter type from text and I don't know how it got into our AU handout. This is a huge deficiency that I have come to overlook in Revit. When setting up files for others, if they need text in their schedule but also need to drive visibility, I create two parameters. We find this issue a lot, for example one has a piece of equipment with an optional piece attached to it. You want to catch it in the schedule but you don't want the endless yes, no, no, yes, no, no, no in the schedule. So one has their yes/no parameter to control visibility and ease of selection but then another text parameter that fills out for the schedule. If(YesNo Param, "X", "") I have even done this with bullets on some projects and not the X. While you may say, "see it works fine by just clicking on the yes/no" but the bigger issue comes when red lines are being picked up on a project. You now need two schedules, one with the yes/no parameters and another with the text parameters that goes on a sheet. My wish, is that in the appearance section of the schedule, one would be able to specify what a yes displays as and what a no displays as AND/OR that you could use text parameters in formulas. In the case of tic-tac-toe, it is more than just the one to one relationship between a text and Yes/No parameter since in a perfect world the text parameter would be able to influence two or more Yes/No parameters.

I have numerous other examples for use cases of text parameters influencing other parameters if someone from Autodesk needs examples of how we would actually use access to the text parameters in formulas. It seems like a huge overlook since even the software that the programmers are using typically can utilize text inputs and numerous other programs. There are other formula deficiencies but this post ended up longer than expected so I will cover it next week.

If you have a use case, send me an email or leave a comment.  I will compile a list/report and send it on to Autodesk to see if there is something we can do about this.

#AU2010 Fuzzy Math & Beyond Project Templates for Revit

I enjoyed participating in two sessions this year at Autodesk University and thank all who attended Fuzzy Math for Revit Family Builders, Beyond Project Templates and filled out the surveys.  Both sessions appear to have met the expectations for most of the attendees and I hope to team up again in the future with Kelly Cone, Phil Lazarus, Robert Manna and David Spehar.

Since the presentation of Fuzzy Math, we have been reviewing the feedback as an extended team (including David Baldacchino and Steven Campbell).  We even received feedback live during the session from Steve Stafford where we all received our new names.

I shall now be known as "Count Boolean", Kelly is "Shizzle my Hizzle", David shall still be regarded as "Count Formula" and Phil is the BIM "Troublemaker".

Some of the feedback received is being taken seriously and we are thinking that next year there should be a LAB that covers the basic hands on need that some require for formulas, perhaps a session that needs to keep it simple and another like the one we did this year that pushes the limits and shows one what is possible. What are your thoughts?  Send me your suggestions.

Our goal, as I said, was to show what was possible and provide (for download) some of the most complex families with formulas that some have ever seen.  It is usually easier for one to learn if they can de-construct an actual family that does something similar.  Our handout was 42 pages with instructions that should help even the most novice user get started with formulas.  If you want a copy of the handout, the presentation and the families we showed you can click here for the AU site or here to just download from this site.

One of my favorite comments from the surveys was:

{Will Smith - MIB (non sarcastic)}... The best of the best of the best... SIR!