The Building Coder

Mirroring in a New Family and Changing Active View

I spent the past weekend in the desert outside Las Vegas climbing in the daytime and watching the beautiful waning and still powerful half moon and lots of stars at night. I also saw a couple of shooting stars, and surprised some wild burros in the dark as well. I was lucky enough to meet a very nice couple, Joachim and Kathleen. We did some climbs together on Oasis, then the multi-pitch Cat in a Hat on Mescalito in freezing... Read more →

Pattern for Semi-Asynchronous Idling API Access

Here is another wonderful contribution from Daren Thomas: A Pattern for Asynchronously Updating Revit Documents. As an attentive reader of this blog, you will certainly remember one of my favourite and most powerful recent projects, the modeless loose connector navigator. It retrieves and displays a list of unconnected MEP connectors in a modeless dialogue box. Being modeless, the dialogue is not within the context of a Revit external command Execute method, nor any other Revit API call-back, and thus has... Read more →

Ray Tracing to Place Family Instance

Jeremiah Farmer of Land F/X recently presented his solution for placing a site component on a topo surface. One important issue in addition to the information presented there is that the family instance insertion point needs to be located on the surface. One way to find a suitable point is to use the Revit API method FindReferencesByDirection to shoot a ray through the model to determine a suitable point, i.e. the intersection point between the ray and the surface. If... Read more →

C# and .NET Little Wonders

I arrived safely in Las Vegas after my various travel snafus. Checking email before bed, I discovered a wonderful new post of Kean's that I like so much I will simply go ahead and reproduce it in its entirety: James Michael Hare has published a great series entitled "C#/.NET Little Wonders": C#/.NET Five Little Wonders (part 1) The Null Coalescing Operator ?? The As Cast Auto-Properties The Stopwatch Class TimeSpan factory methods C#/.NET Five More Little Wonders (part 2) string.IsNullOrEmpty()... Read more →

Failure API Take Two

Before I get into today's topic, let me lament a bit about my Wednesday morning. Travel Woes I am flying to Las Vegas today in order to have time for last-minute AU preparations and acclimatise properly there. For reasons unknown to me, my travel agent (who shall remain unnamed here in public) booked me a flight leaving at seven in the morning from Switzerland to London, and a continuation from London to Las Vegas with an eight hour wait in... Read more →

Project Vasari API

I mentioned the Autodesk Project Vasari last week, and the first question from Fernando Malard was whether it also provides an API. The question makes a lot of sense on this blog, since everything we discuss here is related to the Revit API. I thought Vasari would be an exception. Surprisingly, this is not the case. Ritchie Jackson asked the same thing, and received the following very satisfying reply from Matt Jezyk: Question: Vasari has the potential to be a... Read more →

Connector Direction and CreateAirHandler Sample

Here is an update to the CreateAirHandler SDK sample provided by my colleague Greg Wesner together with an interesting analysis of MEP connector directions. We looked at various aspects of MEP connectors several times in the past: The difference between the family connector elements and the project connector class. Enhancing RevitLookup for MEP, previously known as RvtMgdDbg. Connector orientation. Retrieving MEP elements and connectors. Modeless loose connector navigator. The CreateAirHandler SDK sample shows how to create an MEP air handling... Read more →

Autodesk Project Vasari

Autodesk Project Vasari is an easy-to-use, standalone design tool with analysis capabilities available via the cloud, built on the same technology as Revit, aimed at architectural designers and building energy analysts. It is focused on conceptual building design using both geometric and parametric modelling and supports performance-based design via integrated energy modelling and analysis features. It is compatible with Revit in that files created with it can be opened using Revit 2011, and vice versa. There are some limitations in... Read more →

Complexity versus Constructability

Here is another contribution from Ritchie Jackson of the Adaptive Architecture and Computation programme at UCL, the University College London, who recently showed us his code and results working with blends, Hermite splines and derivatives. This time Ritchie addresses the theme of how to ensure and demonstrate the constructability of complex doubly curved shapes: With contemporary international focus on the design of complex, double-curved forms I thought I'd use the API to try and rationalise the process as an aid... Read more →

Launching a Revit Command

One question that I frequently hear is how to launch a built-in Revit command programmatically. We recently discussed a specific case related to this issue in some depth, how to close the active document and especially pointed out why this is risky, undesirable and not supported. To close the active document, we used the SendKeys.SendWait method provided in the .NET framework System.Windows.Forms namespace. Many of the other attempts that I have seen in the past to launch a Revit command... Read more →

Autodesk University 2010 Class Materials

I submitted the materials for my three Autodesk University classes yesterday. I checked the enrollment numbers at the same time and was a bit surprised: CP228-2 Optimal Use of New Autodesk Revit 2011 Programming Features, on Revit 2011 API features in general and the Idling event in particular: 154. CP234-2 Exactly What You Want and Faster: Autodesk Revit 2011 Programming Optimization, on optimisation and benchmarking, especially filtering: 135. CP316-3U All Systems Go in Autodesk Revit MEP Programming, an 'Unconference' together... Read more →

Read DWG Settings and Content Location from INI File

Autumn is here in full now, grey and wet outside. The beautiful yellow leaves are turning brown and soggy. We had a wonderful sunny weekend, though, and I lay on the grass in the sunshine watching the distant mountains yesterday... In a completely different vein, today is the final day for submitting the Autodesk University material! I'm still not completely done... Meanwhile, here are two quick cases handled by Joe Ye quite a while back which both ended up resorting... Read more →

Purge Unused Text Note Types

Chuck Dodson of Scott&Goble Architects and my colleague Katsuaki Takamizawa came up with a question on how to purge unused elements from the Revit database, and Harry Mattison from the Revit API development team provides a partial answer: Question: I would like to purge unused elements from the Revit project, such as line types, materials, fonts, etc., especially those imported from AutoCAD. The AutoCAD API provides an IsUsed property for layers and other elements. I have not found any Revit... Read more →

Place Furniture Instance

The discussion on placing family instances and proper usage of the various overloads of the NewFamilyInstance method continues. After looking at the use of PromptForFamilyInstancePlacement, placing detail instances in 2D, and site components on a topo surface, we now turn to the everyday task of placing a furniture family instance, e.g. a chair into a room. This furniture insertion question was raised by Kristoffer Kvello of Selvaag in Norway. He also asks about the reference direction, i.e. the rotation of... Read more →

Setting Text Width Requires Regen

I presented a general introduction to the topic of regeneration in the discussion of my first Revit 2011 add-in, the pipe to conduit converter, and in Kevin Vandecar's performance tips and tricks. We discussed the danger of lacking regeneration calls, best regen practices and some performance issues quite a while ago, and an example of problems resulting from accessing stale data in the location curve of a newly inserted family instance. Here is another interesting and very clear little example... Read more →

Unit Testing in Revit

Rod Howarth just pointed out an interesting AUGI thread on unit testing in Revit. I asked Daren Thomas, author of the Python Shell, for his view, which I find illuminating, and which you can enjoy now as well: Unit Testing Revit Plugins. Read more →

Blends, Hermite Splines and Derivatives

Here are some pretty exciting observations by Ritchie Jackson of the Adaptive Architecture and Computation programme at UCL, the University College London, on blends and Hermite splines: Blends, Hermite Splines & Derivatives: Some Observations Thanks for all the helpful code on your site – as I'm teaching myself to use the Revit API I've found the information invaluable. I'm doing an MSc. Adaptive Architecture and Computation at UCL, London and will be using Revit for my dissertation. The discussion of... Read more →

Place Site Component

After several discussions on placing family instances, such as the use of PromptForFamilyInstancePlacement and placing detail instances in 2D, here is a another question in a similar vein on placing trees and site components from Jeremiah Farmer of Land F/X. And by the way, I am hoping (ever so slightly) that this discussion and the tools presented below may help Kristoffer with his furniture insertion problem as well. Question: I am trying to automate the placement of trees into the... Read more →

NewBlend Sample

Until now, The Building Coder included no example at all of using the NewBlend method. A developer ran into an issue using it, and my colleague Joe Ye created an external command to resolve the issue, so I took and added it. Here is the issue that prompted this: Question: I am trying to create a blend with two circular profiles, but it is not working. Can you please provide some solution for us? Answer: After several tests, I found... Read more →

Bienvenue à StructureBIM

A new French language Structural Engineering BIM blog is born: StructureBIM. It is mainly focused on Autodesk Revit Structure, Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis, AutoCAD Structural Detailing, and authored by Alexandre Mihalache, Olivier Bayle, Stéphane Balmain and Emmanuel Lagardette. Welcome to the Revit blogosphere! Read more →

Creating a Solid

Here is question that crops up from time to time and requires pretty special treatment in Revit: Question: Is it possible to build 3D solids in Revit like we can in AutoCAD? For instance, when you have a bunch of points and you wish to make a mass object similar to an extrusion? Answer: The very words "as in AutoCAD" are extremely dangerous to utter or even think when using the Revit API, so for your own sake and sanity,... Read more →

Refresh Referencing Sheet Parameter Display

Here is question and solution by Piotr Zurek on the problem of the stale data displayed by the "Referencing Sheet" parameter value in a section head: Question: Is it possible to refresh the "Referencing Sheet" parameter value displayed in a section head programmatically? I have a section viewport inserted in a sheet. The parameter in question shows the no. of the first sheet with a view that shows the section head for that section. Now, this section head is hidden... Read more →