Load Families

LoadFamilies is a replacement for the inbuilt Load Family mechanism, which only allows you to load one family at a time.

After configuring the LoadFamilies tool to point to your company’s family library, the tool will list all of the subfolders under that directory as categories to the left of screen, and upon clicking on one of these categories, the subfolders, families and types that come under that category will be automatically populated to the right.

The user can navigate through and quickly tick folders, families and types in those families to import. Multiple families across multiple categories can be imported at once.

If the user is unsure of which family to pick, they can see the thumbnails for families by clicking on the text of a folder, family or type and clicking the ‘View Highlighted’ button.

This tool is a great productivity gainer, which saves users time and frustration.

Model Stripper

The Autodesk Revit platform was designed with collaboration in mind, however collaborating with other firms often means sending your large Autodesk Revit model out of the office, along with all of the intellectual property that is unnecessary and still left in there.

Standard procedure for many firms may be to delete a number of different parts of the Autodesk Revit model, such as Views, Filters, Project Parameters and more by hand. However this is a very tedious process, and can take many hours to complete each time a model needs to get sent out.

This is where the Model Stripper comes in. This tool automates the stripping of many parts of the model that do not need to be sent to other firms.

The tool includes safety measures to make sure that a live model is not stripped, if the model is not stored on your local computer, and detached from central, it cannot be stripped. There must also be at least 1 plan view left in the model, as a requirement for when your model is linked into another one, so navigate to the view you wish to keep before running the tool.

When running the tool, you are also prompted with a warning:

Upon clicking Yes, you are displayed with a screen that allows you to choose what it is you would like to remove.

As you can see, Schedules, Filters, Views, Project Parameters, Linked Files and Sheets can be deleted from the document. You can also choose to keep certain views in.

Upon clicking strip, the selected items will be deleted. You should then do a purge (which then removes a lot of detail components which are no longer used in your document) and a final check over the model before sending it out.

This tool has reduced a long tedious process to a matter of minutes, and this means real $$$ savings for your firm.

View Togglers

In Autodesk Revit, the Visibilty and Graphics overrides menu allows you to turn certain categories on and off for the current view. Unfortunately, this is a tedious process that involves clicking and scrolling.

A large percentage of Revit users come from an Autocad background and are used to typing into the command line to turn these things on and off, so the constant interruption of opening the Visibility/Graphics menu was a frustration for many experienced drafters.

Seeing as Revit does not allow you to create a keyboard shortcut to a certain category in that menu, we have utilized the API to allow us to do so. By creating an external command that toggles each category that we regularly use we are then able to create a keyboard shortcut for this.

For instance, here is the list of commands that we have implemented and the keyboard shortcuts attached to them:

• SectionToggle (F2)
• DimensionToggle (SDIM)
• FloorsToggle (SFL)
• SiteToggle (SSITE)
• StructuralTagToggle (STAG)
• StructuralColumnToggle (SCOL)
• StructuralAnalyticalModelToggle (SANL)
• TopographyToggle (STOP)
• WallToggle (SWA)
• GridToggle (SGR)
• LevelToggle (SLV)
• PurlinToggle (SPUR)
• GridLevelToggle (F3)

  
  

Now, by pressing f2, we toggle the sections in the current view on or off. Whilst this saves a small amount of time, it saves this amount of time frequently, helping our drafters to have the power-user level of productivity they had in Autocad.

To assist in the creation of each different toggle, we have a toggle that allows you to enter the categories you wish to toggle, and it will generate the toggle and add it to your Revit.

This allows you to create a vast range of toggles to suit your needs. You can toggle a single category, a sub category, any categories containing 2 different words and also toggle multiple categories at once. A help function is provided which assists you in creating these toggles.

We have found that after using this tool for a length of time it becomes ingrained in how you use Revit, and going back to clicking via mouse is a frustrating experience.

Plan Copier

When setting up the views in a model, we generally start by creating a General Arrangement plan, and then create subsequent views such as the reinforcement plans by doing the following:

Procedure using Standard Revit Tools	Plan Copier Dialogue
Right click on the plan ou wish to copy Click Duplicate Right click on the new view Click rename Type in the name of the new plan (Level name – Plan type), avoid making spelling mistakes Go to the properties window Click Edit Type Select the new type from the drop down list Click OK

This process is repeated for each plan we wish to copy. We saw this as tedious, prone to user error and something that should be automated. As a result, we have created the Plan Copier tool.

 This tool allows you to select what plan to copy, and what types you would like to create using that plan as a base, and it will copy them.

Whilst the screenshot above contains Structural Engineering plans and types that we have loaded into our model, it is not restricted to these, it will automatically detect the different plan types available to you in your model.
With the checking of a couple of checkboxes, and the click of a button it will duplicate the plans, and rename them appropriately for you. No spelling errors, and done in a matter of seconds.

Element Numberer

When creating documentation in Revit, it is common practice to number certain elements and have that number show up on a tag. In general, we number Beams, Columns and Sections sequentially. 5 beams may be numbered B1, B2, B3, B4, B5.

To do this normally would require editing the mark parameter of the element by the properties menu, or by double clicking on each tag, and manually typing the values in. Apart from being tedious, this leaves the possibility of human error wide open, with spelling mistakes, numbering errors. On top of this, if you are re-numbering a set of elements you must be careful not to create duplicate marks.

To solve these issues we have developed our Element Numberer tool. To use this tool all you need to do is enter a starting number and a prefix, select the type of element you wish to number, and then click each element in the order you wish to number it.

As you can see in the above screenshot, when running Revit Structure you are given the option of numbering Sections, Beams of Structural Columns. If there is an element you wish to number that isn’t in that list, you may use the ‘anything I click’ option, which will simply number anything you click on (so you must be careful to only click the element you are after).

When running Revit Architecture you will be presented with a different set of options.

For example, I have a set of beams I wish to number, here is my options I select:

I then click number beams starting at B1 and I am taken to my plan. After clicking on the first 2 beams this is what I see:

B1 and B2 have been numbered; I then continue clicking on each one until the end.

As you can see it has numbered them in order – very quick and very easy.

If while numbering it comes across a duplicate mark value (for example B3 was already somewhere in the document) it will simply rename the other element and alert the user so that they may correct the problem either through the process of numbering the beams, or after the numbering is complete.

When numbering sections, you are also given the option to change the type of the section as you are numbering them. Often when adding sections to plans we found our drafters would place all of the sections, leaving them at their default types, and then go through and number them accordingly, and whilst doing so, they would change the type of the section to be the type they originally intended. Now the extra clicks for each section are removed by the use of this tool.

As you can see, this tool saves a lot of time and tedious clicking, and greatly improves upon the default Revit process.