The Building Coder

Selection Filters, Adjacency and the Good Universe

Today, let's look at: A generic selection filter implementation Determining adjacent rooms and spaces The good universe A Generic Selection Filter Implementation Yesterday, I presented my new JtPairPicker element pair selection utility class. It included a templated selection filter class. I later realised that I could make use of that in several other places as well, replacing the existing explicit Wall, CurveElement and Pipe selection filters by a generic JtElementsOfClassSelectionFilter one instead: ///

/// Allow selection of elements of... 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 →

Migrating Deprecated API and 2D Boolean Operations

While my colleagues are busy with the DevDays in Asia, Let me mention two little questions that I addressed in the past few hours: 2D Boolean operations Getting started migrating deprecated API 2D Boolean Operations Question: In AutoCAD development, the ObjectARX AcGe library provides powerful tools such as the AcDbRegion::booleanOper computational geometry unions and differences. Does the Revit API provide anything similar for surfaces? Is there any way to calculate and display the difference between two areas? Revit is a... 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 →

Berlin Hackathon Results, 3D Viewer and Web News

We completed the Berlin hackathon last weekend, and many other noteworthy and exciting things are going on, concerning the Revit API, the 3D web viewers, web services and more: Berlin hackathon projects and winners Avoid unnecessary unit conversion 3D viewer news AutoCAD as a web service Collada STL ADVA export settings RvtVa3c update Berlin Hackathon Projects and Winners The Berlin hackathon completed and the winners were announced last weekend. I took notes of four teams' project presentations: US4, us four... Read more →

PoiPointer, View Depth Override and Destination BIM

Three topics for today: Brussels hackathon and PoiPointer View depth override Destination BIM contest Brussels Hackathon and PoiPointer I returned from the Hackathon Open Data Brussels that I mentioned last Friday, promoting the use of the huge amounts of open data, cf. this impressive list of available data sets. As said, I participated in the PoiPointer project, with a goal of implementing an app pointing out points of interest of various categories in Brussels, e.g. museums, cultural places, monuments, sculptures,... Read more →

Brussels Hackathon, Pipe Wall Thickness and Voids

I received an email asking whether it is possible to determine the Revit MEP pipe element wall thickness, and also about the API access to voids in the family editor. Before getting to that, let me mention that I am now in Brussels at the Open Data Hackathon. Hackathon Open Data Brussels I arrived in Gent last night and returned to Brussels this morning for the Hackathon Open Data Brussels taking place today and tomorrow, October 17-18 2014. It is... 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 →

Past, Future, Frameworks, RevitLookup and Hackathon

Today, let me ask you to test my RevitLookup future-proofing update and mention a discussion on the use of the .NET 4.5 framework for Revit 2013, 2014 and 2015. I am sitting here writing this among the swans and gulls, squinting in the autumn sunshine on the shore of the Zurich Lake. Later, I visited the nearby Kronenhalle, a rather exclusive restaurant highly praised year in and year out by gourmet Christian Seiler, e.g. 2011, 2012 and 2014. With all... Read more →

Is a Given Element Hidden in a View?

Lately, several people have asked about how to determine the visibility of an element relative to a given view crop box. Here is a nice little stand-alone method IsElementHiddenInView that can be plugged in to any add-in to answer that question, plus a couple of others as well, shared by Frode Tørresdal of Norconsult Informasjonssystemer AS. For any given element e and view v, it returns true if e is hidden in v. This is determined by performing the following... 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 →

Modifying, Saving and Reloading Families

I recently grabbed one of those rare opportunities to do a little bit of coding myself, to answer a question on modifying and reloading a family. More precisely, the task at hand is to modify the text note type font in all of the loaded families. I'll take a look at that below. First, lets look at a simpler question, on how to save a family after editing it, raised by Raunoveb on the Revit API discussion forum: Saving Family... Read more →

ADN Labs Xtra on GitHub and RvtVa3c in Three.js

I had several cases recently discussing advanced Revit API exploration issues with experienced application developers new to the Revit API. Therefore, once again, the topic of available tools and their various uses came up. One important tool for me is the simple element lister, which is currently still part of the ADN Xtra labs, the precursor to the official ADN Revit API training labs. I had not yet migrated those to Revit 2015, so I now finally did so and... Read more →

AdnRme Update to Eliminate Obsolete API Usage

The ADN Revit MEP HVAC and electrical sample AdnRme version 2015.0.0.2 produces three compilation warnings, all three saying: 'Autodesk.Revit.DB.Family.Symbols' is obsolete: 'This property is obsolete in Revit 2015. Use Family.GetFamilySymbolIds() instead.' So let's do what the man says. The code producing the first two instances of the warning in the module CmdChangeSize.cs looks like this: FilteredElementCollector collector = new FilteredElementCollector( doc ) .OfClass( typeof( Family ) ); foreach( Family family in collector ) { // Family category is not implemented,... Read more →

Document Version, GUID and Number of Saves

Alexander Buschmann of the IDAT Ingenieurbüro für Datenverarbeitung in der Technik GmbH added a new comment to the interesting discussion on detecting family modification: I'm a little bit late, but still: Since Revit2015 there is a class 'DocumentVersion' – it provides a GUID and the number of saves of the document. Together, this information should make it possible to identify changes to a document. Store the data in a read-only parameter, and you should be set, without the need to... Read more →

Basel.js Meetup View and Data API Demo

I am busy right now answering Revit API cases as usual, and preparing my Basel.js meetup View and Data API presentation for tomorrow evening. One of the cases caused me to add yet another iteration to last Friday's note on how to empower yourself to search for an answer on the Internet. Also, before I get to the technical stuff, let me mention that I went climbing again last weekend, after a long break, and in spite of the rather... Read more →

IFC GUID Algorithm Update and Family Modification

Two short topics for today, an important little IFC GUID algorithm bug fix and some thoughts on detecting family modification. IFC GUID Algorithm in C# Update Håkon Clausen implemented a bug fix update and created a GitHub repository for the IFC GUID algorithm in C# that he originally published back in June 2010. Here are the details on the update and a direct link to his IfcGuid GitHub repository. Detecting Family Modification For ages, content creators and developers have been... Read more →

Write Revit Add-ins No Coding Experience Required

Adam Sheather of YTL Corporation created and presented a complete and in-depth Revit API introduction titled Learn to Write Add-ons No Coding Exp Required! for RTC, the Revit Technology Conference 2014, held in Australia, Europe and North America. He describes it like this: This course is for expert users of Revit who wish to learn how to code. This will cut a lot of non essential information from standard and other coding classes to get users quickly up to speed... Read more →

AdnRme Migrated to Revit MEP 2015 on GitHub

John asked a very relevant question in a comment on the Revit 2015 Update Release 3 that prompted me to complete the rather overdue migration of the ADN Revit MEP sample add-in AdnRme to Revit MEP 2015. I also took this opportunity to create a GitHub repository for it: AdnRme GitHub repository Revit MEP 2014 version 2014.0.0.1 Revit MEP 2015 version 2015.0.0.1 Much easier to share and collaborate on. The enhanced documentation now explains all the basics and points to... Read more →

Room Editor Live and Unofficial Custom Ribbon Button

I spent a wonderful weekend and yesterday's Whit Monday holiday enjoying high summer in Swiss nature with no electricity and a Chäschessi, the Swiss variant of a Jacuzzi or hot tub. Today I am leaving for a ten-day camping vacation in nature in Sweden. Here are two topics I would like to address before leaving that will hopefully keep you occupied and entertained during my absence: Room Editor Live Adding a custom button to the Modify tab Vacation time Room... Read more →

The Revision API and a Form on the Fly

Poetical, ain't it? One of the major Revit 2015 API additions is access to revisions. All prior versions provided very limited access to revision data in a project. Here are some things people achieved in spite of the limitations: Max' revision wrapper class Wrangling revisions with Ruby Let's now take a look at an elegant example of accessing and displaying the complete revision data in a project, GetRevisionData, prompted by the following query by Dan Tartaglia of design technology@NBBJ: Question:... Read more →

Room Editor with Handlebars and Refresh

Somehow, I have a much harder time documenting my JavaScript exploits than my Revit API ones. The Autodesk Tech Summit is taking place in Toronto next week, and I am making those potentially disastrous last minute changes that every sane person avoids at all costs. Automatically Refresh on Save One really important thing that I fixed now required just one single line of code: The browser display of the model is automatically refreshed when you press 'Save'. I remember wondering... Read more →

ADN Revit 2015 API Training Material

The ADN Revit API Training Material available on GitHub from the RevitTrainingMaterial repository has now been updated for the Revit 2015 API. Here is a direct link to download it as a zip archive. The Revit 2014 version is still available as release 2014.0.0.0, and the Revit 2015 version – obviously – as release 2015.0.0.0. Tech Summit Preview Recording In case you are interested in listening to what I plan to say about my enhanced cloud-based round-trip simplified 2D BIM... Read more →

RvtVa3c Assembly Resolver

One of the RvtVa3c implementation aspects that I mentioned was the fact that we ran into some problems using the standard .NET Microsoft System.Runtime.Serialization.Json.DataContractJsonSerializer class and chose to replace it with the more reliable Json.NET component instead. Serialisation is required by our early decision to define and generate the three.js JSON file format by representing all the required objects, their properties and relationships by a set of C# classes. We instantiate and populate these classes in our custom exporter context... Read more →

Views Displaying Given Element, SVG and NoSQL

I am slowly getting back to normal working mode after the AEC Hackathon last weekend and the neat project that we worked on there, so I finally get around to publishing this post that I started working on last week. The only remaining issue is of a physical nature: my feet are still swollen after flying to New York on Friday, sitting and working non-stop at the Hackathon from Saturday morning until Sunday afternoon, standing for a couple of hours... Read more →

Project Solon and BipChecker for Revit 2015 on GitHub

One of the handful of Revit database exploration tools that I use on a regular basis is BipChecker, the Revit built-in parameter checker, so that is a pretty obvious candidate for migration to Revit 2015... see below. Before I get to that, let me mention some new Revit energy analysis functionality that you might want to check out: Simple Interactive Energy Analysis in Revit with Project Solon Project Solon beta arrives in Revit, providing more interactive energy analysis results, the... Read more →

Hackergarten Meetup

In order to become more immersed and fluent in web and mobile technologies, I participated in the Hackergarten meetup in Basel last week. We were a dozen people, mostly experienced in large-scale modern web and database technologies. The suggested topics were legion, including WebRTC, Spike/Chatapp, Node Webkit, JS tools, CouchDB, Ionic Framework, High scalability, Guice, Gradle plugin, Android slide show, Polymar JS (similar to Angular). I sat down with three other guys with the goal of exploring PouchDB. It is... Read more →

WPF Fill Pattern Viewer Control Benchmark

I recently presented Victor Chekalin's WPF control for viewing Revit fill patterns. In his comment, Victor already mentioned some worries about performance of this control and his intention to create a simple benchmark to monitor it. Well, here it is. At the same time, I also took the opportunity to migrate the fill pattern control to Revit 2015. Migrate the Fill Pattern Viewer Control to Revit 2015 The migration to the Revit 2015 API was extremely straightforward, just like the... Read more →

RevitLookup for UR1, ADN, AEC and AU News

Here are some of the non-confidential items from the new confidential April 17 Autodesk Developer News newsletter, plus one or two additional items of interest from myself and elsewhere: AEC Technology Symposium Migrate Autodesk Exchange Apps and publish 2015 versions Proposals for Autodesk University 2014 Proposals for Autodesk University Germany 2014 Autodesk ReCap Connect Partnership Program RevitLookup for Revit 2015 UR1 Happy Easter! AEC Technology Symposium I already pointed out the upcoming AEC Technology Symposium in New York City on... Read more →

Determining the Size and Location of Viewports on a Sheet

Today, let's look at how to determine the size and location of a sheet and the views displayed by it. This is part of the first and most Revit-related of the three enhancement goals for my simplified 2D BIM editor: Display selected BIM elements in their sheet and view context – in addition to pure model space room and family instance elements. Display and edit non-graphical parameters – in addition to the purely graphical family instance outlines. Implement more graphical... Read more →

Migrating RoomEditorApp to Revit 2015

Yesterday I discussed the typical steps you would need to go through to set up a Revit 2015 add-in development environment. My top priority right now is getting my Tech Summit talk prepared, which involves adding some functionality to the room editor application add-in. I decided to migrate it to Revit 2015 as well. Here are the steps I took: Flat RoomEditorApp Migration Selection.Elements is Obsolete ViewSheet.Views is Obsolete Enabling CopySourceAsHtml for Visual Studio 2012 Download Flat RoomEditorApp Migration Just... Read more →

Transaction Group Regeneration for InstanceVoidCutUtils

We looked at a nice example of using Boolean operations and InstanceVoidCutUtils back in the year 2011, cutting out part of a beam using a void cutter family. I tried to make use of this again in a recent Revit API training and was somewhat shocked to discover that it did not work as expected. I checked all the prerequisites were fulfilled. Void Cutter Family First of all, the void cutter family must have its 'Cut with Voids When Loaded'... 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 →

WPF Fill Pattern Viewer Control

Today, I present a useful stand-alone WPF control for viewing Revit fill patterns, originally implemented by Victor Checkalin, Виктор Чекалин, shared with us by Alexander Ignatovich, Александр Игнатович, of Investicionnaya Venchurnaya Companiya, as part of further enhancements for the AddMaterial add-in. The rest of his new enhancements will be discussed as soon as possible in a future post. The AddMaterials add-in reads a list of material properties from an Excel spreadsheet and generates Revit material elements accordingly. The input data... Read more →

Selecting Sheets instead of Views in the RoomEditorApp

Today I look at interactively picking sheets to export, instead of views. First, however, I must mention the list of April Fool's posts compiled by Stephen Preston, including my own visionary idea to recycle waste as insulation and curtain wall material around the building producing it. Personally, I like Stephen's own post on the Autodesk Toilet Design Suite product much better :-) Back to picking sheets... This is the third instalment of implementing the new RoomEditorApp features required for my... Read more →

Adding New Materials from List Enhancements

A weekend post, for a change. There is just too much going on! I recently reimplemented the AddMaterials add-in for Revit 2014, updating the simple little Revit 2011 system to generate new materials in a Revit project based on a list of required material properties stored in an Excel spreadsheet. Luke submitted a comment on that, asking: Question: I have built the solution and created an XLSX file. The add-in runs and says that it has added materials, but I... 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 →

Selecting Visible Categories from a Set of Views

Today I look at interactively picking specific categories to export to the simplified 2D BIM editor cloud database from a list of all categories retrieved from a collection of elements displayed in a given set of plan views. This is the second instalment of implementing the new RoomEditorApp features required for my generic 2D simplified BIM editor Tech Summit presentation. Specifically, I now address steps 4 and 5 in the tentative workflow: Launch the RoomEditorApp export plan views command. Display... Read more →

Using Generic Collections with Filters and Forms

Today I discuss some uses of generics to elegantly and efficiently handle lists of Revit elements and .NET Windows forms, specifically: One line of code to retrieve all printable floor plan views from the BIM. One line of code to retrieve all selected floor plan views from a Windows check box list. This is my first step starting to implement the new RoomEditorApp features for my generic 2D simplified BIM editor Tech Summit presentation. The current tentative planned workflow steps... Read more →

Adding New Materials from List Updated

Back in the year 2010, I discussed a simple little system based on a Revit add-in named AddMaterials to generate new materials in a Revit project based on a list of required material properties stored in an Excel spreadsheet. The input data includes: Material Name Code Title Strength Graphics RGB colour values Transparency Surface pattern Cut pattern Identity Filter criteria Descriptive information Custom parameters All the further workflow details are described in the original post, of course. The add-in was... Read more →

Deleting Unnamed Non-Hosting Reference Planes

Once upon a time, while teaching a Revit API class, the training participants identified a problem that was simple enough to be used as a filtered element collector learning example and did something useful at the same time: deleting reference planes not hosting any elements, implemented as the stand-alone external command DeleteUnnamedNonHostingReferencePlanes. It deletes all reference planes that have not been named and are not hosting any elements. Here is another thread discussing filtering reference planes and explaining the use... 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 →

Lots of Clouds

Let me recapitulate my cloud related explorations for my simplified 2D BIM editor, since I will be discussing it again at a web-based BIM workshop later this week. Before getting to that, though, talking about cloud related topics reminds me of some others of completely different nature that are near and dear to me: Clouds in La Palma Cloud Atlas Cloud-based simplified BIM editor Autodesk cloud service overview Updated RevitLookup on GitHub Above, in and under the Clouds of la... 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 →

Connecting the Rolling Offset Pipe to its Neighbour Pipes

I continue the work on my MEP CASE BIM Hackathon project to calculate a rolling offset between two pipes and insert the rolling offset pipe segment. The next step consists in connecting the pipes with each other. Until just now, I was under the false assumption that just connecting the pipes with each other would automatically place the appropriate fittings in between. That appears to be wrong. MEP Connector Utilities I created the following new MEP utility methods for The... Read more →

Calculating a Rolling Offset Between Two Pipes

Here is a nice little MEP related external command that I implemented to calculate a rolling offset for pipes at the CASE BIM Hackathon at AU, prompted by a suggestion by Harry Mattison and Matthew Nelson. It calculates the rolling offset between two selected pipes and generates a model line in the Revit model to display the result. In brief, a rolling offset is an angled pipe segment that connects two pipes with each other. For instance, imagine a situation... Read more →