Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Plantings, arghhhh!!

When you've been using Revit as long as I have, you start to forget all the wonderful aspects of it and the amazing things it can do easily, and start to dwell on the frustrations and incompetencies of the software. So bear with me if I sometimes VENT about Revit.

I've said it before, but trees and plantings are by far the most frustrating part of Revit. I desire a great presentation tool, not a great rendering tool. It is very nice that Revit incorporated decent rendering capabilities within the program, but who has the time to sit and wait for things to render all the time. Yes, I'm talking about RPC plantings and people. RPC allows these items to look very realistic when rendered, but in all other situations, they look terrible!

These RPC 'paper looking' items cannot be customized. You cannot change the shapes, change the color, or delete that funky looking base. You must start from scratch, and you must use 3D objects rather than planes. All might be okay if there was a tool that created elements similar to these 'paper trees.'

Monday, January 11, 2010

Lineweights in Revit

Are the Revit defaults for lineweights making your building elevations look flat. Well here is how you change them in your whole project:

Type 'vv' or 'vg' for visibility graphics dialogue box. Once open, click 'Object Styles' button. The difference between Object Styles and Visibility Graphics is that visibility graphics applies only to the view you are in, Object Styles applies to the whole project. Make a change and click apply to preview what line weights you are changing, if you don't see any lineweights changing, make sure 'Thin Lines' is not toggled on 'tl'. Thin lines will toggle off lineweights and show all lines as thin lines for practical purposes of designing with Revit. The Thin Lines feature does not change lineweights of print views.