Just another quick one. I found out that you can copy/paste camera's from one project to another. Just show the camera in the view you are in, select it and press +. Switch over to the other project and in Ribbon > Modify > Paste Aligned select Current View (when you are in a 2D-view).

Comes in handy when you are working two options on a project and are using two separate files. (Yes, I could have used the options-tools, but the difference between the two versions was just too big and too involved.)

Ever tried putting a 3D-view of your building onto a sheet and ending up with something like this?
The vertical lines converge somewhere off screen and the whole thing looks very strange.

This has to do with the focal width of the lens. The closer you get to an object, the more distorted the image becomes.

When you move away from the object, the vertical lines become (almost) vertical again. Only... it's a bit small, isn't it?
This is where the focal length of the camera comes into play. Click F8 to open the wheel, click on the littel arrow on the bottom right and select Increase/Decrease Focal Length.
You'll get the ability to "zoom in" without adding the distortion effect:
Now you can make the view as big as you neet on your sheet and still have it look nice.

This method does not allow you to accurately set the focal length of the camera. But then, this is a visual thing anyway and you're much more likely to "play around" until you like the result than enter a fixed length into some parameter field or other. At least, I am.

What a day. I think Revit crashed about 10 times on me within 2 hours. It did not loke me to touch one particular wall that I wanted to shorten. The wall in question was joined to a perpendicular wall on the other side of the hallway, and I wanted to clear that way, because the fire-door I had previously placed here was no longer necessary.

I finally got around the regular crashes by first disallowing the joining (select wall > find the handle at the end of the wall > right click on that handle > select disallow join) of the two walls and then shortening the wall.

Phew. I do not want to be the one support guy reading all my e-mails I sent to Autodesk via the automatic crash report function...

For a project we needed a way to add optional walls into our drawing.

This is what we came up with:

How? Well, we used the phasing feature of Revit, where you can determine at what point in time a part of the building is constructed and/or demolished.

Ribbon > Modify > Phasing:

In the Project Phases tab I added a point in time "optional" before the actual construction time.

In the Graphic Override tab I changed the view-overrides of Existing to the dashed lines I wanted. (And for explanatory purposes I also set the Demolished lines to the same pattern)

I then went to the Instance Properties of the walls in question and set the Phase Created to "Optional".

You can then set the Phase Demolished either to "None" or to your construction time, with the following results:
The connection with the other walls is better when the wall is not demolished.
But on the other hand, rooms are cut off by this wall.

There may be other ways of doing all this, but for us, this provided the quickest and cleanest solution to the problem.

After encountering a few crashes while modifying walls (actually, trying to attach a wall to another wall, resulting in a conflict with a placed window), I sent a report to Autodesk. Turns out there is a hotfix for this.

Just in case you didn't know, here is the download page:

Autodesk Website - Download Area

This was published in August, but I figure, better late than never.

Stairs: Those things that make it possible to reach another floor in a building.

A Flight Of Stairs: An uninterrupted set of stairs.

Stairs With 3 Flights: Does not exist! (at least, according to Revit 2010)

Well, but in the real world, these things do exist. So how to make them?

My first try of drawing three runs and them moving them on top of each other resulted in this:
Interesting stringer there.

On my second attempt I used the same technique, but did not align the 1st and 3rd flight on top of each other:
Still not what I wanted.

So after some more try and error I came up with this:
Success!

How did I do this?

Well, as you can see, these are essentially two stairs instead of one, the second one being placed with an offset from the ground floor:Since I wanted the two landings to be part of the stair I cut the second landing in half and attached the two halfs to the two stairs.

And finally, to clean up the stringer and the railings, I made set the slopes of the flat pieces manually to flat:
Select railing > Edit path > select the flat piece > in the drop-down-menu for Slope select Flat.

And here we go!