11 Jun

Engipedia Layers Manager PRO, Revit® Add-in

In short, use this add-in to:

  • tag/annotate wall material layers and their thicknesses in Revit®
  • schedule wall material layers and their thicknesses in Revit®
  • export wall material layers to Excel or CSV in Revit®

Now, replace the word “wall” in the sentences above with: floor, roof, ceiling, pad or structural foundation slab.

Try it on Autodesk® App Store (30 days free trial available)

Read More

11 Jun

Engipedia Structural Layers, Revit® Add-in

Engipedia Structural Layers application is Revit® Add-in with purpose to extract structural layers from layered structures in Revit®: Walls, Floors and Structural Foundation Slabs.

It’s unique workflow gives you ability to get structure from Revit® Walls and Floors. Once the structure is extracted, the model can be used as structural model, or as a reference for formwork plans in architectural model.

Update 2023-05-11: New version (v1.1.23.0501) is available, it now supports Revit 2016 to Revit 2024. Minor bug fixes. Minor UI improvements.

Add-in is available on Autodesk® App Store.

Add-in works in several stages:

  1. Analyzes current types of Walls and Floors in the model. (Structural Foundation Slabs are floors in Structural Foundations category, but basically act the same as floors).
  2. Types where none of the layers has “Structural” checkbox checked are types which are not considered structural and are shown with green background.
  3. Types with only one structural layer in core are presented with blue background.
  4. Types which have structural layer in core but also have other layers are shown with white background – these types can be “peeled” of layers.
  5. User select types from which structure will be extracted.
  6. When tool is ran, end result will be model with only structural layer in Walls and Floors category.

Tool will select only the types which have one structural layer in core. Structural layer is the one which has “Structural Material” checkbox checked.

Types with structural layer will be shown in table on the right. By the default, all the types will be selected in column “Selected”.

Selecting a type in any of tables will show their layer composition in the table on the bottom.

Bottom table also has feature to set core layer as structural material and apply it to the type without leaving the tool. Such changed types will automatically appear in the table on the right.

Selecting the types in the right table and running “Change Selected Types” command will change selected types in a way that they will end with only one (structural) layer. Tool will also impact instances of each type in a way that structural layer will stay in the same place as it was when it had other layers in type.

This way the end result will be model with only structural layers.

Warning: this will change the model drastically.  To avoid loss of work, or unwanted results, preferred workflow is as follows:

  1. Save your model as a new model with different name.
  2. Run Engipedia Structural Layers to extract structural layers from walls and floors.
  3. Save the model.
  4. Continue working on this structural model, or LINK it into your original model.

Other features:

Tool add each type change as separate Undo command so everything can be undone type-by-type.

Tool can automatically set every instance as “Structural”. This can be switched off in Settings.

If needed, tool can also change types with 0 instances (change setting to show types with 0 instances).

Use “Update Structural Checkboxes” to update any Walls/Floors instances with structural material to have Structural instance parameter checked (this can be used later for filtering).

Add-in is available on Autodesk® App Store.

06 Jun

Dynamo: Use Excel Coordinates to Create Model Lines in Revit®

If you have many coordinates in Excel spreadsheet or in other table format, it’s easy to use the power of Dynamo to get those coordinates into Revit®.

In our example, we will use x, y, z coordinates to create model lines within Revit® project.

There are two ways to approach this problem:

  1. Coordinates represent continuous points (like in polyline)
  2. There are pairs of coordinates, each pair representing single line

Read More

10 Jul

Rotate Revit® family into any direction

Don’t you hate “Can’t rotate element into this position.” error message in Revit?

Let’s say you need to rotate element into a position in which Revit will not let you. There is a simple solution, but it includes creating additional family.

For our example we will take a book family with “Always vertical” parameter turned on. It does not matter, we do not need to switch it off. Read More

30 Aug

Cannot select multiple elements in a Plan View

Common “problem” I see my coworkers stumble upon is the problem with selection of multiple elements in a Floor Plan (and other Plan Views in Revit®).

What’s the problem: “Look, I have no problem with selection of elements one-by-one, but when I try to select few of them at the same time, nothing happens! What’s going on?”

So, point is you CAN at least select something. That eliminates element selection controls as potential problem (you know, those little switches in the lower right corner of the Revit®).

Solution: Check if elements you are trying to select are not in the Read More