Friday, March 15, 2013

Show Me Wish

Revit offers us the opportunity to "Show" an element when we review warnings, use the Select by ID and fairly often when an error message is generated and we expand the warning.



Choosing Show will often generate a warning that there is no good view to show it in and ask us if we really want to let Revit hunt for a view.



I'd like to be able to specify which kind of views to hunt through before it does its magic. For example I know I want to find a ceiling so don't bother showing me 3D, elevation or section views if I'm really hoping to see just ceiling plan views. Perhaps a new Zoom option: Zoom to Selected that goes to the current element in the view, like Revit will do in a 3D view using the view cube.

Let me help Revit focus on what I'm interested in or think I need. I occasionally have a clue...

6 comments:

The Revit Kid said...

They could just use the system Navisworks has in place to find and focus on elements... That would be nice.

DaveP said...

Excellent idea. I don't know HOW many times I've I've used that and ended up on the Site Plan.

On a mostly related note: Ohm to be able to Copy/Paste a UID from the Warning dialog to the "Select by ID" dialog!

Steve said...

Copy paste would be nice! I wrote this knowing that the API could help but I'd still like Revit to get some polishing.

Steve Bennett said...

I believe Phil Read has released a plugin for Revit called "Zoom to Awesome". It does your desired behavior of zooming to a selected object. It is awesome indeed. :)

David Kozina said...

I realize this comment is on an old topic...
I have found Select Elements by ID to be very useful at times...
Example: Sometimes 'Copy to Clipboard' is not not working because of some kind of strange relationship that exists between elements. The warnings given often allow the IDs to be extracted, then they can be used to locate what's causing the issue.
However, I have also noticed some cases when Revit tries to find a good view but comes up empty-handed. One thing I have found that could cause this is if the sought-after element in question is in a Legend. Not sure why this is so, but Revit doesn't seem to want or be able to open the Legend and show the object. (Similarly, right-clicking on an object in a Legend and choosing "Select all instances..." also doesn't get much mileage - again I have no idea why that is the case.) Do you perhaps have any thoughts on why this is so?

Steve said...

David, They need to rework the Show feature to recognize elements are visible in Legends. Actual families are visible in regular views but "symbols" of those families are shown in Legends so they don't "count" in schedules. That different I suspect is why the show feature doesn't "find them".