The Building Coder

Flatten All Elements to DirectShape

I am still busy preparing my presentations for Autodesk University and making slow progress due to handling too many Revit API issues in between. And blogging, as well. Here is a new cool sample contributed by Nikolay Shulga, Senior Principal Engineer in the Revit development team. In his own words – Name: Flatten – Motivation: I wanted to see whether DirectShapes could be used to lock down a Revit design – remove most intelligence, make it read-only, perhaps improve performance – Spec: converts full Revit elements into DirectShapes that hold the same shape and have the same categories – Implementation: see below – Cool API aspects: copy element’s geometry and use it elsewhere – Cool ways to use it: lock down your project; make a copy of your element for presentation/export – How it can be enhanced: the sky is the limit... Read more →

Revit Answer Day and Creating a Roof

Today I'll highlight two items, plus an addendum for Kinjal and Carolina – Revit Answer Day – Creating a Roof – Setting FootPrintRoof Slope... Read more →

Change Type, Iterate Elements, Create Family

Let's wrap up this hectic week with a couple more recently answered issues and one non-Revit note – Changing element type – Iterating over elements – Creating an electrical family – La costola di Adamo... Read more →

SVG, In-Memory Family, RevitLookup BoundingBox

The cloud accelerator kept me busy last week, I am working hard on the CompHound project and documenting that work on The 3D Web Coder. Besides that, I submitted several enhancements to various Revit add-in projects. Here are some of my recent activities – CompHound component tracker project development – RevitLookup displays element bounding box – SvgExport for Revit 2016 – In-memory family creation and structural stiffener migration from 2012 to 2016... Read more →

Simple DirectShape on Face, RestSharp, PUT and POST

Creating a DirectShape from a face used the picked face reference and its stable string representation to navigate the element geometry and determine a transformation. Let's take a look at a much simpler approach – Simpler DirectShape on picked face using total transform – The CompHound component tracker – FireRating in the cloud enhancement... Read more →

DirectShape From Face and Sketch Plane Reuse

The creation of a DirectShape element on an interactively selected existing element face requires a transformation to be applied to the face of a family instance returned by the PickObject method to convert it from the family symbol space to the family instance real world coordinates – Creating DirectShape from face mesh – Determining real world transform of a family instance face returned by PickObject – Iterating over element geometry to find a specific target geometry object – Reusing sketch planes for model curve creation... Read more →

Revit API Context and Form Creation Errors

I am back from my vacation. I had a wonderful time. Now, let's look at two important recurring topics that came up while I was away: Revit API Context Summary. Detailed Form Creation Error Information. Before getting to those, let me mention some of the nice places and mountain tours I was blessed with in the past few weeks: Pallanza and the Lago Maggiore: Mont Blanc, mountaneering and climbing around the Cabane d'Orny: Monte Leone above Locarno (photo album): Pizzo... Read more →

Clicks, DMU, Surfaces, FireRating Feedback, Vacation

Let me list some of the topics we discussed today in the Revit API discussion forum before I head off for vacation: Reacting to Windows mouse clicks in Revit. Reacting to changes and setting parameters using DMU or DocumentChanged. Creating a surface in Revit. FireRating in the Cloud feedback. Vacation Time Now. Summer has seriously arrived in Europe, and the weather is really good as well, for a change. I took advantage of it this weekend and climbed the Alphubel... Read more →

Grevit, FireRating in the Cloud Deployment, Vacation

I have been extremely busy the past few days implementing my FireRating in the Cloud sample, a migration of the standard Revit SDK FireRating sample to a cloud-based multi-project implementation – reflected in this week's GitHub contributions: Also, I heard from Max Thumfart about his very interesting Grevit project: FireRating in the cloud demo and deployment Grevit Vacation time soon FireRating in the Cloud Demo and Deployment I'm just about done with my FireRating in the Cloud project. I published... Read more →

Intersect Solid Filter, AVF vs DirectShape Debugging

We already discussed the important topics of the analysis visualisation framework AVF, DirectShape (mesh import, new functionality), and the ElementIntersectsSolidFilter. Today, let's look at a little-know restriction on the latter and how to work around it, raised and solved by Miroslav Schonauer, Solution Architect in Autodesk Consulting, and Scott Conover, Software Development Manager of the Revit API team: ElementIntersectsSolidFilter problem Resolution Rectangular prism solid construction DirectShape is easier than AVF for prototyping and visualisation ElementIntersectsSolidFilter Problem Question: I have a... Read more →

Create Duct, Pipe and Point Transform

Our topics for today are on creating ducts, pipes and transforming a point: Creating specific ducts and pipes How to use Transform.CreateRotationAtPoint I am writing this from the village Agii Apostoli on the east side of the Greek island of Euboea, on my way to the second I love 3D – Athens meetup on June 5, followed by the AngelHack hackathon on June 6-7. For more details, please refer to The 3D Web Coder. Creating Specific Ducts and Pipes Question:... Read more →

Getting Started Creating Families and RFA Files

Here are some more pointers for getting started generating family definitions and RFA files programmatically: Family types and parameters Imperial internal Revit database length units Programmatically generating Revit family RFA files I am writing this from the Greek island of Euboea, on which I already visited Limni or Λιμνι on the north end a couple of years ago. This time, I am heading towards its east and south end instead, on my way to the second I love 3D –... Read more →

Geometry Creation and Line Intersection Exceptions

Today, let's look at some geometry related questions, a small enhancement of the line intersection we discussed two days ago, NURB spline and solid creation: Creating a NURB spline GeometryCreationUtilities, moving and copying solids Line intersection enhancements Built-in parameter checker for Revit 2016 1001 discussion forum posts Creating a NURB Spline This question was raised by anarchyfree in the Revit API discussion thread on a NurbSpline creation error: Question: I'm working on a Revit plugin that in part accepts curves... Read more →

CopyElements, Revit 2016 Scalability, Python and Ruby

Here are a bunch of infos on and updates for Revit 2016, as well as some important hints on the use of the ElementTransformUtils.CopyElements method: CopyElements view argument is for 2D only Revit 2016 scalability enhancements Revit 2016 Python shell Revit 2016 Ruby shell RevitLookup for Revit 2016 CopyElements View Argument is for 2D only You should only use the ElementTransformUtils.CopyElements views argument when working with view dependent elements, i.e., 2D elements. This was pointed out by Arnošt Löbel in... Read more →

How to Retrieve Dimensioning References

Several cases recently came up asking how to obtain references to programmatically create dimensioning elements. These hints expand on the recently discussed topic of creating dimensioning between family instance insertion points. They were raised by the following queries on how to retrieve suitable references for dimensioning: Dimensioning to family instance centre reference planes Dimensioning between a grid and an edge of a face Dimensioning to the wall opening wrapping location Before getting to that, I'll just add that I returned... Read more →

Transferring a Wall Type

Let's look at transferring a wall type from one document to another. In fact, we already did so, way back in 2011, as an example about how to possibly approach the task of at least partially programmatically transferring project standards. Now Parley submitted a comment on that, saying: Question: We could still really use this... This post originally was from 2011. Any update on API access for this tool? Answer: Glad to hear it sounds useful to you. Well, nothing... Read more →

Curved Wall Elevation Profile and Creator Class Update

Alexander Ignatovich, Александр Игнатович, of Investicionnaya Venchurnaya Companiya, took another and deeper look at The Building Coder sample external command CmdWallProfile that I originally implemented in 2008 to retrieve the wall elevation profile and my colleague Katsuaki Takamizawa modified to use the ExporterIFCUtils.SortCurveLoops method to sort the outer and inner loops a few months ago. Alexander already made a number of other important contributions to The Building Coder in the past: Exporting Image and Setting a Default 3D View Orientation... Read more →

Revit API Trends and Team Meeting in Bretagne

Here is an illuminating explanation by Arnošt Löbel and Martin Schmid on some Revit API development trends that have already been underway for a couple of releases. Before I get to them, a quick report from our ADN team meeting: ADN European Team Meeting in Bretagne As you may have noticed from Adam Nagy's tweets in the past few days, I am at a team meeting with my European ADN colleagues: We are convening in Brittany, home of our manager... Read more →

Re-Researching Lighting Family Instance Placement

The placement of family instances can sometimes be a tricky topic in the Revit API. Programmatically, this is always achieved using the NewFamilyInstance method. However, this method provides 13 different overloads to choose from, which can be a non-trivial task: NewFamilyInstance(Face, Line, FamilySymbol) – Inserts a new instance of a family onto a face of an existing element, using a line on that face for its position, and a type/symbol. NewFamilyInstance(Line, FamilySymbol, View) – Add a line based detail family... Read more →

PostRequestForElementTypePlacement Sample

I am back from my vacation in the snow, full of new energy, and up to both ears in hot Revit API cases again instead of that frozen stuff :-) The creation document NewFamilyInstance method provides the traditional way to programmatically create a new family instance within a project, or a nested instance within a family document. It does not support any user interaction whatsoever. A little bit of user interaction is provided by the PromptForFamilyInstancePlacement method introduced in the... Read more →

Terminating a Family Instance Placement Loop with Esc

I presented the PromptForFamilyInstancePlacement method in June 2010 when it was newly introduced in the Revit API, together with a nice little solution temporarily subscribing to the OnDocumentChanged to access the newly added elements after terminating the placement interaction. Since then, the Revit 2015 API provided some Document API additions such as the method UIDocument.PostRequestForElementTypePlacement enabling an add-in to launch and to some extents control the full standard placement interaction between user and the Revit product. To retain control over... Read more →

DevDays, GitHub, STL and OBJ Model Import

Long time no post. Sorry, I am rather caught up in the DevDays conferences, accompanying meetups and travel back and forth across the continent. After the first Western European DevDays conference and meetup in Paris on Monday, we continued and repeated in London, UK, and Gothenburg, Sweden. We had a day's break there, and I took a quick bus and ferry ride out to Styrsö before leaving. Now we have arrived in Munich, Germany, and the last goal for Tuesday... Read more →

Traditional, 3D Printed & Vertical Compound Structures

Let's look at various kinds of structures and compound structures today: A traditional American Indian sweat lodge The biggest co-created 3D-printed object on earth Creating and assigning vertical versus simple compound structures A Traditional American Indian Sweat Lodge First, here is a quick look at the nice sweat lodge we built last weekend for an Inipi purification ceremony: I traditionally try to do that before embarking on my yearly worldwide travels to Autodesk University and the DevDay conferences. Here are... Read more →

Picking Pairs and Dimensioning Family Instance Origin

We looked at various aspects of creating dimensioning in the past. There is still one glaring omission, though: how to dimension to a family instance origin point. Let's take a look at that, after quickly mentioning the official announcement of the movie matching game that we created at the recent Berlin hackathon. Actually, coincidentally, I discuss two topics today that are both completely and utterly dedicated to picking pairs: the Movie Match MasterY game, matching pairs of cards representing films,... Read more →

Rotation by π and NewSweptBlend Using Arcs

Let me address two questions concerning form generation in family documents raised by Alex Hearn: Rotation by π NewSweptBlend using arcs Among other things, the answers also demonstrate some trivial migration steps of the form generation code from Revit 2012 to 2015 and, yet again, the occasional crucial importance of regeneration. Rotation by π Question: I am exploring and really enjoying your blog site. Thanks for all the detailed information. I have been attempting to build a Revit translator that... Read more →

DirectShape versus Families, Category and Texture

Let's begin this week with a discussion of several aspects of direct shapes: Direct shapes, part families and application porting DirectShape categories DirectShape texture assignment Direct Shapes, Part Families and Application Porting Question: I am looking for some guidance related to porting my application to Revit. I have a parametric part engine that lives outside of Revit with a large set of existing library content. It would be very costly to rebuild from scratch using the Revit Part Family editor... Read more →

Creating Topography Contours and Building Masses

After diving deep into both Revit MEP and Structure API issues in the past few days, let's round it of with a GIS related topic: I had an interesting discussion back in the spring of this year with Mohammad Rahmani Asl, Saied Zarrinmehr and Chengde Wu of the Texas A&M University in the Revit API discussion forum on the topic of creating a height dimension for a form. I finally grabbed some time last weekend to document that discussion thread... Read more →

NewCrossFitting Connection Order

A long, long time ago, Davex raised a very pertinent question on the error messa... Read more →

New Text Note and Text Width Calculation

How can I determine the exact width of a Revit text note? This is the topic of the Revit API discussion thread on textnote width calculate minimum. We worked through a whole series of implementation attempts, mostly suggested by Scott Wilson, who also finally suggested the one that currently seems to be optimal and near perfect: Question: When creating a new TextNote I'm given the option to give the TextNote a LineWidth Property. I understand this is the 1:1 scale... Read more →

Creating a Sloped Wall

Several questions concerning programmatic creation of sloped walls came up recently, so let's take a look at that, point to some existing samples, and implement a fantastic new one that does it all, including mass family creation, instance insertion and face creation in one fell swoop: How to programmatically create a sloped wall Sloped wall versus sloped slab Creating a sloped wall from mass The Creator CreateModelLine method The Building Coder Samples download Floor creation fails for foundation floor types... Read more →

Events, Again, and Creating an Extrusion Roof

Jon and Scott Wilson discussed some issues creating extrusion roofs on arbitrary planes in the Revit API discussion forum in the past couple of days. One neat spin-off is a simple little external command that shows the basic use of the NewExtrusionRoof method, so I took the opportunity of adding that to The Building Coder samples. Before getting to the details of that, here is a little update on the upcoming events: October hackathons and AU Germany Autodesk University in... Read more →

How to Fail, Still Win Big and Handle Duplicate Types

Let's start this week with a couple of interesting topics that have been hanging around a while up, one Revit API related and not: How to fail at almost everything and still win big Handling duplicate types when copying elements How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big I received a very nice present from my colleague Steve Mycynek, Principal Engineer of the Revit API development team, at the Autodesk Technical Summit in Toronto: How to Fail at... Read more →

Accessing Discipline and Duplicating View Template

I am back again in the land of the living... working, blogging. I'll jump right ... Read more →

Activate Your Family Symbol Before Using It

Here is an interesting case with a simple solution that was rather hard to discover. In summary, you need to ensure that all family symbols are activated before making use of them. Question: I'm having a strange problem when replacing curtain walls by windows in Revit 2014. When I run my add-in command, all the curtain walls are successfully replaced by the window family instances. All except the first also cut the hosting wall in the proper manner. The first... Read more →

Teaching a Man How To Fish and Schedule Creation

As you all know, we at ADN spend a significant amount of our time ensuring that API information is available and easy to find for all. In order to find something, though, you often need to invest at least a minimum amount of effort in searching. This can be practiced, of course, and I obtain a useful answer to almost every question I ever have on any subject whatsoever from a single Internet search. Here are two examples of performing... Read more →

Revit 2015 Update Release 3

Revit 2015 Update Release 3 has been published. It includes a large number of important new enhancements, as well as the improvements provided by the update releases 1 and 2. I count the following numbers of bullet items in the release notes: Architecture: 45 MEP: 18 Structure 7 API: 9 Here is the full list of Revit API enhancements: Improves retention of device connections when using Wire.Create to create new wire connecting to a device. Improves display of wire connection... Read more →

Back from Sweden

I returned from my wonderful relaxing outdoor vacation in the vast nature of Sweden and had numerous simple Revit API questions waiting for me on my return, e.g. Annotation Location property Placing ElementType instances Commercial use of the Revit API Before looking at those, here is an impression of the huge open space offered by heaven and earth in the islands in the Stockholm Skärgården archipelago, e.g. Utö and Ålö: For something more tranquil, here is a sunset meditation on... Read more →

DirectShape Performance and Minimum Size

One of the exciting API enhancements in Revit 2015 is the Import API functionality providing the new DirectShape and TessellatedShapeBuilder classes. These enable significant performance enhancements and powerful new possibilities for generating libraries and importing geometry, especially repetitive shapes. On the other hand, the same limitations on minimum size apply as in the past. DirectShape Performance Regarding the performance, here is a first enthusiastic reaction and quick report from a developer after the initial introduction during the beta phase last... Read more →

Getting Serious Adding New Materials from List

Here is a post on some serious usability enhancements for the AddMaterials add-in, which reads a list of material properties from an Excel spreadsheet and generates Revit material elements accordingly. It was originally presented for Revit 2011, reimplemented for Revit 2014, and enhanced with improved error messages and reporting soon after. Until now, it was more of a programming example than an actual usable tool, but that is starting to change, thanks to a number of enhancements by Alexander Ignatovich,... Read more →

Creating a Sloped Floor

Today, let's look at an interesting and overdue topic raised by the query on creating a sloped floor in the Revit API discussion forum, addressed with help from Jaap van der Weide and Joe Ye.Before getting to that, let me quickly mention some other happy and important news: Revit 2015 is Coming Soon The Autodesk 2015 software portfolio for the building and civil infrastructure industries has now been officially announced. Here is a direct link to the Autodesk Building Design... Read more →

TextNote Leader Alignment

Let us explore TextNote leader alignment. Before getting to that, I'll just briefly mention that I still have unused vacation days from last year to use up, so I am going away again, this time on a desert hike near Zagora in Morocco. No computer, no Internet, no blog... TextNote Leader Alignment Here is one last topic before I leave, contributed by my colleague Katsuaki Takamizawa, with help from Jim Jia and Pawel Madej of the Revit development team: Question:... Read more →

Creating an Offset Wall Solution

Happy St. Valentine's Day! As we all know and have known for a long time from the exploration of the wall compound layers, the Revit API wall location line is at the centre of the wall. There is no way to change that, and it is important to note that the API location line is completely separate from the one whose location can be controlled through the user interface, and also through the built-in parameter WALL_KEY_REF_PARAM, but only after the... Read more →

Lots of Views, Families and Booleans

Certain applications require large numbers of similar but different objects, e.g. for framing, scaffolding, steel detailing etc. Every one of the past few years, Revit has been further enhanced to better still support these kinds of applications and handle larger numbers of families and instances gracefully and performantly. This work is still on-going. Below, we address a bunch of questions related to creating a new wooden structural BIM application. One aspect of such applications is the need to generate a... Read more →

Skip Invalid Element Generation Using Failure API

We already took a couple of looks at the Failure API in the past, e.g.: Failure API Failure API Take Two Failure Rollback Here is a slightly more convoluted situation that motivates revisiting the topic from a new angle, raised and solved by Stephen Faust of Revolution Design, Inc. together with Arnošt Löbel of the Revit API development team, who invested significant time and research in the issue: Question: I am generating some floor objects from rooms in a project.... Read more →

Future Proofing The Building Coder Samples

We've reached the add-in future-proofing season again, the time of year to eliminate compiler warnings and deprecated calls for easier migration to an updated API, just like last year in January and February. It is very easy this time around, since we only have two warnings, about use of the obsolete TitleBlocks property and FindReferencesWithContextByDirection method: CmdSheetSize.cs: 'Autodesk.Revit.DB.Document.TitleBlocks' is obsolete: 'This method is obsolete in Revit 2014. Use FilteredElementCollector with a FamilySymbol class filter and an appropriate category filter instead.'... Read more →

Final Rolling Offset Using Pipe.Create

I am writing this on the way back to Switzerland from my hiking trip on La Palma. Actually, lacking good bandwidth during my travels, I actually arrived back before being able to post this... Even before my return, I already have some good news to share: Victor Chekalin provided a working sample of using the static Pipe.Create method, so I can update my rolling offset series to make use of that more modern and flexible method rather than the older... Read more →

Simpler Rolling Offset Using NewElbowFitting

I continue the work on my MEP CASE BIM Hackathon project to calculate a rolling offset between two pipes, insert the rolling offset pipe segment, connect it to its neighbours and explicitly placing elbow fittings. The explicit fitting placement was pretty hard and fiddly to implement, requiring the following steps: Explore a manually generated model to determine the appropriate family and elbow fitting types. Research the fitting family instance parameters to determine how to define its diameter and elbow angle.... Read more →

Explicitly Placing Rolling Offset Pipe Elbow Fittings

I continue the work on my MEP CASE BIM Hackathon project to calculate a rolling offset between two pipes, insert the rolling offset pipe segment and connect it to its neighbours. The last missing puzzle piece was inserting appropriate fittings between the three pipe segments. It only took me about a hundred debugging and testing iterations to nail down a working sequence to perform all the required steps manually, edging forward minute step by minute step. Here are some of... Read more →

Creating a Rolling Offset Pipe Between Two Pipes

I talked about my nice little MEP related CASE BIM Hackathon project to calculate a rolling offset between two pipes the day before yesterday. An obvious immediate question is: OK, and now how do I insert a real pipe segment element instead of just displaying a model line to represent the calculation result? Actually, this involves two separate steps: Create the rolling offset pipe segment Connect the three pipes with each other As I mentioned previously, e.g. discussing how to... Read more →

Erasing Extensible Storage with Linked Files

Here is a query and resolution raised by Marc in the discussion forum on erasing extensible storage data with linked files, followed by a reminder of the need to regenerate the model to avoid accessing stale data and hint of possible things to come related to Revit and cloud computing: Erasing Extensible Storage Data with Linked Files Question: I am calling the method Schema.EraseSchemaAndAllEntities in a project containing linked documents, and it is throwing an InternalException. How can this be... Read more →