Thursday, February 26, 2009

Delete a curtain grid

To delete a curtain grid, all one has to do is to select the grid line (by TABbing) and then press delete.

If the grid line is pinned, you have to unpin before deleting.

image

If the grid is part of the “type driven curtain wall”, Revit does not allow you to delete the grid line and does not give any warnings nor indication. (However, if you select the gridline and the mullions along the gridline of the “type driven curtain wall” and try to delete them, Revit gives this warning. )

image

You can use the ‘Add or remove segments’ in the option bar, after selecting the grid line, to remove segments of the grid line.

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If you try to delete all the segments, using this command, Revit gives a warning:

image 

The resultant curtain wall has split mullions because of the existence of the ghost grid line like:

image

Sometimes this split mullions can create cleanup issues in the elevation. This can be solved only by deleting the grid line. To do this, select the CW and change its type to “Curtain Wall: Curtain Wall 1”

image 

This is a default CW type that is fully customizable and does not have many ‘type driven values”. After you change the type, Revit gives this warning:

image

Press OK. (If you select “Delete Gridline” Revit will remove your existing grid lines and mullions!) You should not see much changes in your CW. Now the CW is not a type driven element and so, Revit will allow you to delete the ghost grid line.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Exporting data from DWG or RVT to PPT

Update:

There is an easy way to bring vector data to PPT.

1. Export to PDF or DWF from CAD or Revit.

2. In PowerPoint, go to Insert menu and select "Object.." and then select the PDF or DWF.

Thanks to Johann H. for this tip. More info: here at Shaan's blog

Previous not so correct post:

There is no easy method to bring vector data from DWG or RVT to Powerpoint. There are many ways to bring data as a raster image. The following methodology seems to work the best:

  1. Export from CAD or Revit to PDF. You can use the Adobe PDF writer or PDF995, etc. to do this. To get a consistent image size in PPT, it is better to create the PDF to scale and to a fixed size sheet. (11x17 or 36x48; etc.)
  2. Open the PDF in Adobe Reader or Acrobat. (The following screenshots are from the Reader.)
  3. Go to Tools menu > select & zoom > Snap shot tool
    clip_image002
  4. Draw a rectangle to select a rectangular portion of the PDF or you can select the whole page. The selected area is copied to clipboard. Typically the copied data is in low resolution.
  5. To get a higher resolution image: without changing anything, enter 200 (or your calculated value – see next step) in the zoom percentage box and press enter.
    clip_image004
  6. (The rule of thumb to calculate the needed resolution: If the PPT is 11x17 and the PDF is 11x17 then set the zoom percentage to be 200 to 250 percent.)
  7. Go to Edit menu > copy. (If this gives a memory error, you have to experiment with a lower zoom percentage in the previous step.)
  8. Open Powerpoint and paste it there. (Edit menu > Paste)

Friday, February 6, 2009

Walls to the underside of the ceiling in RCP

By default the cut plane is 7’6” for the RCP. Because of this, the walls that go to the soffit of the ceiling (at 8’) are cut and shown as such.

image

Theoretically this is right but confuses the contractors who dont understand the ceiling is continuous. The ceiling seems to be terminated by these “walls in section”.

To make the graphics look “correct”, we:

  1. Created a filter to segregate these walls.
  2. Applied it to a RCP view and tweaked the display to be dashed and transparent.
  3. Created a View template based of this view.
  4. Applied this template to all the other 20 RCPs.

In detail:

  1. Create a filter (settings menu > Filter) for all walls that have the letter “g” in the value of their Type Mark parameter. (We used the type mark for our wall tags, eg. B3g, which indicated that the partition stopped at the underside of the ceiling.)
    image
  2. Apply this filter to a RCP view in its visibility graphics dialog box. Change the cut lines to be dashed and filter to be Transparent.
     image 
  3. Create a view template based on this view. (View menu > Create a view template from view). Uncheck all the parameters in the ‘include’ column except the VG Overrides Filter.
    image
  4. Select all the RCP views in the project browser, right click and select “Apply View Template…” 
    image
    and apply the newly created view template.
  5. (If you have already created a View Template for all your RCP views, and have applied it as the default view template for RCP views,  you dont want to  apply this truncated View Template. Instead you can edit your existing RCP view template to include the new filter and then “Apply Default View Template” command in the previous step)