Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Revision Trickery


As I was blog-stalking today, I saw Steve Stafford over at Revit OpEd posted about the revisions on sheet dialog that is somewhat hidden in the sheet properties but helps with revisions schedules so much! It got me thinking I should post about some other little revision tricks that I think are hidden or people just don’t think about.  

In the revision dialog you have the option for your "numbering" sequence to be by number, alphabetic, or None. None is the secret hidden power here!  If you want to add your initial packages such as DD and CD to your revision schedule, but don’t want to show a number because you will not be tagging anything, you can do this by adding these items to the revisions dialog and changing the sequence to none. You’d then need to go to each sheet's properties and in the revisions on sheet dialog check on those initial packages as they apply. Sadly, there is no way to check these on and off quickly from the drawing list.

I’ve also had it where we start clouding and tagging, but then for one issue we only want clouds and no tags, and end up going back to clouding and tagging needing to keep the tags in sequence. I just set the revision that didn't need the tags to None, and the other tags number as they should.

The next thing is that the revision tag does not have to read the revision number!  Common examples would be including the ADD, RFI, or ITC indicator in the tag. Or showing the date the revision was made.. etc etc. So, Go on and Edit those Revision Tags! Make new families, new types, whatever works! Look at all your options! And remember just because AutoDesk named a parameter one way does not mean you cannot use it to indicate something else (as long as everyone on the project is aware of it).
Personally when I know the project is going to be heavy on tags like ADD 001 skipping to RFI 023 to RFI 037 I like to use the Issued To or Issued By fields in the revision dialog since I typically never use those for anything else. It keeps all the tags the same for that revision just as quickly as using the revision number and lets you shorten the name from what is shown in the revision schedule. Or just set your schedule up to read any of the other parameters available.
 

If you wanna get crazy, try adding the Mark or Comments parameters to the revision tag label. Then you can basically add whatever you want to that single revision tag.  Not sure why you'd do that for a single tag and not the others but hey! Ya never know!

 And lastly, something I just learned a few days ago... Use split when drawing the revision clouds! Hello! I don’t know why I haven’t tried this; It’s these simple things that really make me go Oh Duh!
So you’re clicking a bazillion times to draw your revision cloud when you fall asleep and get a giant double arch. Instead of deleting and redrawing, just split that bugger!

Until next time good buddies!



6 comments:

  1. Currently there is no way to schedule individual revision clouds with the comments to show up in a schedule. The revision schedule only exists in a title block, and the parameters are by type so individual instances cannot be isolated. Adding comments could be nice if there was something specific, but it would not be shown outside of the bubble itself, or would have to be added to the revision tag itself. I want to be able to created a schedule during CA of the revisions by sheet I've made, creating a narrative and breakdown of each instance. Any clue how this could be accomplished?

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  2. Doh! Maybe some fancy API tricks, but that’s above my head at this point. Seems like you're pretty knowledgeable of what’s already going on with revisions.. sorry I couldn’t be of any additional assistance/tricks.

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  3. Found my answer:

    This ad-in allows us to schedule and document individual revision tags so that our narrative is accurate and can be documented properly. App works great for 2012 and 2013.

    http://apps.case-inc.com/content/revision-cloud-data-export-text-file

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  4. I came across this problem on a project in our office and with the ability to turn off REV on Sheet from the properties, I instructed our team to create placeholder REV within the schedule. This allows REVIT to just increase the Tag naturally as if another REV were present instead of overwriting the schedule value with another parameter.

    What do you think of this as an option? I know that is works with the REV in use per project, its a little more complicated with REV per Sheet.

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  6. This app seems to allow for scheduling and reporting of comments. I'm not sure why AutoDesk wouldn't have incorporated this by now especially since it is a 3rd party app on their app store

    https://apps.autodesk.com/RVT/en/Detail/Index?id=2881103757382926713&appLang=en&os=Win32_64

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