The Building Coder

Family Instance Z Coordinate Lost

Here is another contribution by Rudolf Honke of acadGraph CADstudio GmbH. He says: I am working with the placement of family instances on a TopographySurface to represent objects such as arrays of trees, traffic lights, RPC figures etc. I made use of your discussions on placing furniture and detail family instances and created a Revit add-in providing family instance placement functionality: During the development, we faced some problems similar to those treated in the two blog posts. There are these... Read more →

Material Assets and FBX

Last year, we discussed analysing the FBX files exported by Revit to access the texture data UV coordinates and other material and rendering information. However, even something as simple as retrieving the material name from the FBX file is apparently no longer possible. This has led to several questions such as the following: Question: When using either the FBX SDK version 2010.2 or 2011.3.1, I can no longer read the material attached to an object from an FBX file exported... Read more →

Unit Conversion and New Blogs

Quite a while back, I published a unit conversion utility for Revit 2010. Let's take a fresh look at that, and also at a couple of new Revit blogs. We discussed a couple of other issues related to units since then, such as the unit suffix and ProjectUnit SDK sample and a look at voltage units. The latter also includes an overview of some other unit related posts. Anyway, Rod Howarth picked up on the unit converter utility and ported... Read more →

Family Instance Missing Level Property

Here is another contribution by Rudolf Honke of acadGraph CADstudio GmbH. He says: "And now for something completely different" ... after all the UI Automation topics: I often need to collect all items on a specific level, for instance window family instances, and use a method like the following to do so: List GetWindowsByLevel( Document doc, Level level ) { List elementList = new List(); FilteredElementCollector collector = new FilteredElementCollector( doc ) .OfCategory( BuiltInCategory.OST_Windows ); ParameterValueProvider provider = new ParameterValueProvider(... Read more →

NewFamilyInstance Overloads

We have discussed a number of issues with finding the right one of the numerous overloads of the NewFamilyInstance method for placing instances of a specific family. Here is another question on this, which provides a welcome opportunity to summarise what we have looked at so far: Question: I have a case where I want to insert a series of families with a statement like this: FamilyInstance instance = documentProject.Create.NewFamilyInstance( location, symbol, StructuralType.NonStructural ); This works fine as long as... Read more →

Automate DesignOption and 64 Bit Add-In Templates

Let's start off the week with another idea from Rudolf Honke of acadGraph CADstudio GmbH. He recently presented his results of exploring the Revit ribbon internals using UISpy, driving Revit using UI Automation, subscribing to UI Automation events, and switching between different projects and views. Here is another of his ideas of making use of UI Automation: This screen snapshot shows the design options dropdown list: When showing elements programmatically using the app.ActiveUIDocument.ShowElements( elementSet ) method, it might occur that... Read more →

Managed Windows API

This useful library was pointed out by Augusto Gonçalves to Kean and by Kean on his blog, and seems too good to be missed, so I'll reproduce the pointer here as well: The Managed Windows API library: Here are excerpts from this site regarding the problem: If you want use Windows functionality in a .NET application which is not covered by the .NET framework (there is no "managed API" available for it), you usually have to use PInvoke, an interface... Read more →

Using Vault with Revit

I recently made a brief mention of the Navisworks product and how a native Navisworks file can be created from within a Revit add-in. Today, let's have a look at another Autodesk product, Vault, and how that can be used in conjunction with Revit. In case you do not know Vault, it is an Autodesk data management product and has a public API. Here are links to the Autodesk Vault product page describing the software and its capabilities and the... Read more →

Joined Beam Geometry Access

We have already discussed situations where an element's geometry needs to be accessed in various ways depending on the circumstances, such as the retrieval of unmodified element geometry or the different approaches required to access column and stair geometry, depending on whether the element has its own solid definition or is reusing the solid defined by the symbol it references. Here is a similar solution to obtain the geometry of a beam joined with columns from my colleagues Katsuaki Takamizawa... Read more →

Setting Duct Width and Height Requires Regeneration

Whenever you have a problem modifying or querying the model with your Revit plug-in, one of the first things to check is always your regeneration mode. If you are using the manual regeneration option, you need to check whether you possibly omitted a required intermediate regeneration call. It seems that there can never be enough reminders of this. Here is another case at hand: Question: I am sizing rectangular duct fittings through the API, and I noticed that the different... Read more →

Create a Navisworks File from Revit

In case you do not know Navisworks, it is an Autodesk product which provides a flexible platform for integrating multiple CAD formats to create a compound model from multiple sources and provide specialised viewing and analysis of large projects. It allows you to combine models from AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, and many more. Here is the blurb from the Autodesk Navisworks product page: Autodesk Navisworks products deliver project review software for 3D coordination, 4D planning, photorealistic visualization, dynamic simulation, and accurate... Read more →

Further Ideas for Using UI Automation and Galileo

Rudolf Honke of acadGraph CADstudio GmbH recently presented his results of exploring the Revit ribbon internals using UISpy, driving Revit using UI Automation, and subscribing to UI Automation events. Here is another of his ideas of what can be achieved using this technique, plus some thoughts on the Galileo project that I mentioned on Friday: Automating Switch Windows This screen snapshot shows the list of opened Revit files and views in the 'Switch Windows' dropdown list: You could easily use... Read more →

BIM Apps, Project Galileo, and Piotr's Plug-In

Here are a couple of interesting news items that cropped up in the past few days: Introducing BIM Apps Emile Kfouri used to lead the Revit API development team and is now the Autodesk BIM Application Development Manager. Emile started up a new blog, BIM Apps, devoted to API applications for Autodesk's BIM tools. He is starting a two month trial period to 'test the waters' and determine whether or not the BIM community would value a blog devoted to... Read more →

Access to Shared Family Parameter GUID

Here is a question that came up several times. It also demonstrates a neat (if somewhat time consuming) use of Reflection to access a property that otherwise would be inaccessible. Here is the original question: Question: How can I reliably tell whether a parameter on a family document is a shared parameter, or is actually a family parameter? If it is a shared parameter, how can I retrieve its original GUID as it was when it was originally added to... Read more →

Subscribing to UI Automation Events

Rudolf Honke of acadGraph CADstudio GmbH recently presented his results of exploring the Revit ribbon internals using UISpy and driving Revit using UI Automation. He sent an additional note to point out that this rapidly leads to many other very interesting possibilities, such as the following: Subscribing to UI Automation events could easily enable an application to be notified whenever a user... Creates a new Wall, Room, etc. Picks into the property list Hits the ribbon bar Is about to... Read more →

Type Filter Benchmark Update

We have come to trust the Revit 2011 API filters to really be the most performant approach to retrieve sets of database elements fulfilling a complex combination of criteria. To reinforce that message, here is another benchmark by Piotr Zurek, who says: While searching for some answers in your blog I have stumbled across an old post where Guy Robinson compared the performance of the Revit 2010 API class filter vs an anonymous method. I found the result really intriguing... Read more →

Language Independent Subcategory Creation

Here is a snapshot of a lengthy conversation that I have been leading with Gregory Mertens of mertens3d.com for a while, starting out with a language independence issue and touching on other topics such as category and subcategory creation, use of built-in parameters, use of debug assertions and exception handling. We looked at a couple of category related issues in the past: Category comparison Family categories Categories and parameter bindings System versus user defined categories Complete list of categories We... Read more →

84 Second Product Support Overview

As you know, I work in the AEC workgroup of the ADN or Autodesk Developer Network DevTech organisation, providing support to developers making use of Autodesk products and their application programming interfaces (APIs). ADN is part of the Autodesk support organisation. Another, much larger part of the support organisation is the product support team, which resolves end user issues. For a really quick overview of the E-Services provided by Autodesk Product Support, you can have a look at this new... Read more →

Optimisation using Robot Structural Analysis API

After mentioning a very simple example of using the Revit Structural analytical model to find connected structural elements two days ago, here is a presentation of some more advanced structural optimisation in case you are interested in going further in this area, beyond the pure Revit API: Al Fisher and Shrikant Sharma of UK-based Buro Happold Engineers published a whitepaper on exploiting the Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis Professional API for structural optimisation. Its introduction says: Access to an open API... Read more →

Modeless Door Lister Flaws

I recently presented the modeless door lister created by Agnius Vasiliauskas as his very first attempt to make use of the Revit API. While representing an impressive achievement, it also contains a number of flaws that I did not notice. Luckily, Arnošt Löbel of the Revit development team took the time to examine the application implementation in greater detail, and he has a number of suggestions that are of great interest to anyone wanting to make further use of the... Read more →

Finding Connected Structural Elements

We had some glimpses in the past of the structural analytical model maintained by Revit Structure, e.g. when looking at The AnalyticalViewer SDK sample Revit Structure API Resources The NewLineLoad method Analytical support tolerance An overview of geometry options The Revit Structure 2011 API Here is a very basic question that can be addressed using the analytical model: Question: Is there any way to find connected structural elements? For example, to find columns from a connected beam, or beams from... Read more →

Happy New Year, Ribbon Spying and UI Automation

I hope you had a wonderful end of the last and beginning of the new year! Happy New Year to you all! I returned from the week of rest and was completely occupied with the backlog of ADN support cases in the past few days. Here is a really heavy-duty post to get us started again, and started with a bang! It revisits the never-ending and always popular issue of launching a Revit command programmatically, but this time based on... Read more →