Managing Room Separation Lines

For many of the users I teach Revit to the first time, the inevitable questions arise when we discuss Room Separation Lines…

“Do they print?”

Yes, yes they do.

“How do we get them not to print?”

You can turn them off in Visibility Graphics. 

“But then do we have to keep turning them on/off every time we need to add or manipulate them?” 

Yep, pretty much.

Then I usually get the disappointed look.  But then I go over this little way of being able to have them hidden on the “printed” plan and still be able to add/remove (manage) the Room Separation Lines.

Duplicate your Floor Plan View/Views that you need to use Room Separation Lines on. You don’t need to Duplicate with Detail, just Duplicate it. I usually will go with an Overall Plan if you’re using Area Plans/Matchlines.  (By Area Plans, I mean Area A, Area B, etc.)  Then, go into Visibility Graphics for that Duplicated View.  Navigate to the Room Separation Lines (Model Categories, Lines) and change the Room Separation Lines Projection (the only thing you can change) to be something like Red with a lineweight of 6. This will show those bad-boys nice and bright on your floor plan. You can then keep the Room Separation Lines turned off in your “printed” Floor Plan views.  Anytime you need to manipulate, add, remove, etc. your Room Separation Lines, just flip over to the “Floor Plan – Room Separation” (that’s what I tend to call it, call it whatever you want) view and do your work on the Room Separation Lines there.

Flipping Stairs Flips Stringer Side

Little something I ran across during a class a couple weeks ago.  When working with Stairs in Revit 2013, someone asked about having a stringer on one side and not the other.  No problem with Component Stairs in Revit 2013. 

Then I went to show how you can change the “direction” of the stair by using the Flip Direction arrow at the top of the stair….and this happened:

Notice how the stringers also flipped sides, which is not the outcome that someone would want.  Sure, we can go in and remove/add the stringers to be on the appropriate side, but that’s just extra work!  Besides the fact that the stringers aren’t continuous …there’s a piece of stringer missing on one side of the landing (in the 2nd image).

Just a little something to be aware of when flipping stairs.  And it doesn’t even pertain to one sided stringers…it also pertains to each side having a separate profile being used!

Revit Architecture 2013

Well, the first few months of 2012 have been busy, which I guess is a good thing!  Since the 2013 products were introduced on March 27, I’m not going to repurpose the what’s new features for 2013….I’ll simply point you in the direction of David Light.  He’s always got a very good summary of the tools.

Here’s a few little things that I’ve run across that you probably won’t see in the What’s New Feature list…

1 – The Home tab in the Ribbon in Revit Architecture is now called Architecture.  This is more than likely to keep the naming convention consistent with the introduction of the Revit 2013 product that will be included for those that will be getting/have the Building Design Suite Premium or Ultimate 2013.  (In case you weren’t aware, the Suite products will have 1 Revit product that will have tools for all 3 disciplines)

1a – The layout of the Architecture tab vs the Home tab has changed slightly from 2012…

2 – When you create a New Project, you now get a drop-down list to choose which template you would like to start with, Architectural or Construction.  You can still browse to choose a different template.  (I’ll have a separate post about what you can do to Customize this as well)

 

3 – If you’re working with Navisworks or need to produce NWC files for Navisworks, you can now access the NWC Export tool via the Export within the Application Menu.  The NWC Export is still available via the Add-Ins Ribbon tab.  Just remember, you need to have either Navisworks (Manage or Simulate) or the NWC Export Utility installed to get the NWC Export ability.

As I run across more, I’ll report back