The Building Coder

Revit API Training Preparation

Yesterday I pointed out that the Revit 2012 API training material is now available online from the Revit Developer Center and provided a more or less detailed overview of its content. In addition to downloading and working through that, there are a couple of other preparations that I recommend my training participants to work through up front: Install the Revit SDK. Install RevitLookup. Install RvtSamples. Work through the developer guide hands-on walk-through tutorials. Work through the DevTV classes. Work through... Read more →

Revit API Training Material

The Revit 2012 API training material that we use for our ADN trainings is now available online to the general public from the Revit Developer Center. Here is a direct link to it, with no guarantee that it will remain valid in future. It includes three subfolders: Labs Presentation Sample Drawing These are the Powerpoint presentations used for the training: 0_Revit_Programming_Training_Class.pptx – Overview 1_Revit_API_Intro.pptx – Basics 2_Revit_UI_API.pptx – User Interface and Events 3_Revit_Family_API.pptx – Family API The labs parallel the... Read more →

Linked Element Geometry Access

I just arrived in Greece to give a Revit API training here during the next few days. I am in a pleasant place called Κηφισια (Kifissia), a suburb of Athens. I still need to get the training material set up properly... Meanwhile, here are some notes on a different topic that I have been sitting on for a while: Analysing the geometry of linked files is a challenge. Certain basic information is actually easily accessible, as shown by the discussion... Read more →

Top Faces of Sloped Wall

In the distant past, I discussed retrieving specific floor and wall faces based on their face normal, e.g. the bottom face and boundary of a horizontal floor slab, the exterior face of a vertical wall, and finally the bottom face of a wall. But what if the normal is not exactly horizontal or vertical? For instance, how about retrieving the top face of a wall with a sloped profile or the gable wall that we just looked at a few... Read more →

Retrieve Railing Elements

I already mentioned that API access to stairs and railings is currently still a bit patchy. Still, you can retrieve their geometry, determine the instances on a given level, and list the railing types. As you can see from the comments by Berria and Andrew, it is currently not possible to create railings, even though I did once implement a command named CmdNewRailing in The Building Coder samples to test this which unfortunately does not create a new railing instance.... Read more →

Translate Revit Tooltips

Kean Walmsley recently started exploring the exciting and useful idea of hooking up machine translation to AutoCAD, initially to auto-translate tooltips. As Kean points out, you can get all AutoCAD tooltips translated into one of 35 different languages, which is a great help for people learning or using the product in regions for which we don't currently localize. Here's a tooltip in Arabic, for instance: Kean quickly followed up the original proof of concept with an improved implementation including caching... Read more →

Python Shell in Revit and Vasari

Finally! I was always so excited about Daren Thomas' RevitPythonShell which I pointed to now and then in the past. Now Zach Kron of buildz and Nathan Miller picked up this theme again and show how to install and run RevitPythonShell using IronPython in Vasari: Too good to miss! Read more →

Create Gable Wall

I discussed creating a wall with a sloped profile using Revit 2009. Now Saikat Bhattacharya created a similar command to answer a similar question in Revit 2012: Question: Using the Revit user interface, I can create walls that consist of more then four edges, i.e. non-rectangular. Usually they would represent some sort of gable wall in a building. How can I achieve this using the API, please? Answer: To answer your question, I wrote some quick code which creates a... Read more →

VendorId, DevTV, and My First Plugin

Here is a simple issue from a discussion with Stephen LeCompte of FKP Architects, Inc. that several other people people also recently ran into: Question: I followed the steps provided in 'DevTV: Introduction to Revit 2011 Programming - Part I' and incorporated them in my Revit Architecture 2012 64-bit version, but there is a problem. When I start up Revit 2012 it displays the following error message saying 'Failed to initialize the add-in "RevitNETAddin3.addin" because the add-in registration is missing... Read more →

Point Cloud Snap and Freeze

Here are some questions that came up a while ago regarding point clouds: Question: As far as I can tell, the standard object snap settings also control snapping to point clouds: Is there any way to snap to individual points in the point cloud? Answer: Revit itself never asks for the pick of an individual point in a point cloud, so there is no mechanism to support this in the API either. Even when Revit prompts the user to pick... Read more →

ImportExport Update

I mentioned some features of the ImportExport SDK sample in previous posts, e.g. on porting it from C# to VB, setting the DWG export filename, modifying the DWF export filename, and exporting a 3D view to 2D DWF. Now Kurt Schrempp ran into a little problem with this sample. He says: I solved my problem. Here is the issue: When you try to export as DWG, it requires and gives you options to define the layer mapping. If you don't... Read more →

Section View Creation

I mentioned some basics of elevation and section view creation a long time ago, but omitted to publicise the results of the ensuing discussion with Konstanty and similar ones with Jenney and Bhavana. The issue came up in some ADN cases as well, so it really is time to get a bit more information on this out there to you. Question: I see that the CreateViewSection SDK creates a detail view of a wall seen from one side. How can... Read more →

Refresh Element Graphics Display

Here is a little issue with an interesting workaround that I encountered in the past in similar incarnations in other CAD software packages besides Revit, so it is worthwhile making a note of this for potential future use almost anywhere. The issue has to do with refreshing the graphics display of individual elements in the Revit user interface. Committing the transaction, explicit regeneration, and even calling RefreshActiveView does not help. One additional thing that sometimes does help in similar situations... Read more →

Text Size

I am back again from the Autodesk European Football Tournament 2011 in Verona, Italy, vividly described in more detail by Kean on his blog. We were both part of the combined Global Services (to which we of ADN belong) and Worldwide Marketing team: Back to the Revit API, we already looked at some aspects of text formatting such as textnote alignment and rotation. Here is a still more immediate and simpler issue: Question: I created some text using the NewTextNote... Read more →

MEP Placeholders

Happy Independence Day to all US-Americans, and a wonderful Monday and beginning of the new week to all the rest of us! I recently discussed the Revit MEP 2012 API news and mentioned that MEP placeholders are one of the important new features in both the product and the API. Mostly, new API features are demonstrated by some of the samples provided by the Revit SDK, but the placeholder elements form an exception to that rule. Still, we did present... Read more →

Basic Parametric Cube Family Tutorial

I recently discussed the programmatic creation of an extrusion family. Now I just noticed that there is a new little eight and a half minute video showing how to do something similar through the user interface, just as a basic introduction to setting up constraints and parameters in the family definition context. In his wonderful buildz blog, Zach Kron recently presented a quick 'back to basics' demonstration of making a parametric cube, i.e. how to hook up geometry to dimensional... Read more →