Revit View Templates

Erik at Inside the Factory had a post on View Templates

He asked the question, "When creating new views how do you desire to specify the view settings?"

This is a difficult question to accurately respond to without fully thinking through how it would be to use the suggestions.  At first, and this was actually the first responses on his post, is that one is asked for a view template assignment on view creation.  If one would think through this though, it would probably prove to be very annoying.  Think of a user cutting a quick section so see how a wall is meeting a ceiling.  All he wants is to quickly see the situation but he gets a pop-up dialog box with a question on what view template he wants to assign.  This reminds me of the automatic save notices that pop-up at the beginning of a command. Why add something that users might find annoying?

So, how do we make it better but not add an annoyance?  There are a few things that could drastically help make view templates use better. 

• Add the ability to push changes from the view templates settings to all views that have that view template assigned.  I see this as something similar to Adobe Indesign or Powerpoint where the master template can be pushed out to the pages that have that master assigned.  This is important since one cannot see if each view that has that view template assigned is currently up-to-date.
• Apply Automatically to new views of same type - Nobody really knows how this is controlled and thus cannot be trusted in the view of many.  If I have six detail view templates, which is actually used and how is it determined?  This needs to be redesigned or reworked, see next.
• How about a way to add a default view template to the parameters of a callout?  For example: We have six basic different elevation tags (Exterior Full, Exterior Part, Exterior Enlarged, Interior Full, Interior Part and Interior Room)  Being able to assign a default view template to the different elevation types would allow us to pre-assign without any annoyance.
• Since a new floor plan or ceiling plan would not have a type on creation, I can see the pop-up for assignment to be important for this view type only.
• Duplicating any type of view should retain the original view's default view template.

Just my 2 cents...  You should go to the link above to post your own thoughts.  Don't forget, your voice does count.

AUGI Revit Wishlist

It is that time again to vote on what you thing Autodesk should focus on the most as they continually develop the software.  Click here for the ballot.

One of the things that I wish could be resolved is the semi-development of the "Leader Arrowhead Line Weight".  It is an option in the Spot Coordinates and Spot Slopes but it only appears to work in one instance.  Since this is an option that seems feasible, it would be great if it was available to text leaders also.

This is something I noticed again while rebuilding our template for Revit 2011.  Some of the other options that you will see (New to 2011) with text/leaders is the ability to have a box around the text and the ability to control the distance from the end of the leader line and the start of the text.  Both nice improvements.