Let's Try this Again

Okay, AU2012 is just around the corner which means I try to kick start my blog back up. Hopefully one of these years it sticks and I stay consistant with posting. I certainly have plenty of stuff to talk about which is why I haven't been posting, too BUSY!

If you see me at AU give me a jab and tell me to start blogging.

Let AU2011 Begin !!

Well, I am here, excited for another year at AU. Hoping to catch up with those I haven't seen since last year, meet new people, and learn about what's going on out in the industry as well as what's to come.

I am guessing that this will be like any other year, I write my first post the minute I get to the hotel room and than never have time to write again once I step foot out the door. Hope this isn't the case this year, but we will have to wait and see.

Why does Revit Structure Suck?

Well, actually it is not "Why does Revit Structure Suck?", rather "Why does Revit Structure Suck for those who use it?

Well, I will tell you. WE (at least for us) DON'T DICTATE WHAT VERSION WE WORK IN, our clients do. What does this mean? Believe it or not most of my time in the last year has been working on a project in RS2009. This project is mostly steel and its not flat or straight. The below image shows one of the images from this project. Sure would be nice to be able to use RS2012.

We still have projects that are required to be done in RS2010 and RS2011. Happy to say they are mostly in RS2011. And now finally within the last month, 5 months after release, we are just starting to see our clients move to RS2012. Several still have not moved, and if they have some will only start new projects and not upgrade existing projects or those that are in progress.

So how many of you try to keep your sanity while working and supporting 4 flavors of Revit. By the end of the day your brain is mush. RS2009 to RS2010 we have the interface change. Nothing is even close between these two as far as where the tools are located. RS2010 to RS2011, much better, but tool locations did get tweaked in RS2011 as well as become more static in their location when you are editing elements. You definitely come to appreciate the improvements with each new release when you have to work a day without one of them.

I am not going to even get into the analysis because with this workflow we are faced with, it can be difficult to count on whether or not you can use the analysis exports nor can you get a consistent workflow in place for doing it. One project you can use a new export feature, the next you can't because it is in a older version that doesn't work. Of course I realize that this is not the case for everyone, but for us it is.

So how about having to maintain 4 versions of Revit with regards to templates, families, and source files you may have created. I myself like to upgrade this stuff each time we roll out a new version. This way we are not dealing with "upgrading on the fly" with these files as we are working on them. It can definitely be a challenging environment.

What I have to question is what holds you back from not taking advantage of the latest and greatest version you are paying for. I know that there are two sides to every story and I get that, I typical like to here the other side of the story rather than make assumptions. I realize you might want to wait for the first service pack to come out. I even understand that their are firms out that are much larger than us and transitioning to a new version is a huge task. I guess my question would be, "What can Autodesk do to help make this workflow a more of a no brainer?

Anyways.... these are my comments for today, Revit Structure does not suck, it just means we have to be on our toes and ready to adapt to various situations and workflows. It makes each day a little bit more exciting.

Where Does The Time Go...

As I write this I think to myself where did I ever have time to write a book, let alone an update to it. My last post to this blog said that I was heading to AU 2010 and this was the year I was going to blog. Well, that didn't happen. Maybe this is going to be the year, at least I am going to give it another try.

I am hoping that AU2011 gives me a little boost to start burning the midnight oil again. It's amazing what kids can do to your schedule as they get older.

Anyways... this is another attempt at getting this thing going. If anyone out there is interested in hearing what I have to say let me know. Maybe it will light a fire.

As I mentioned above, I am heading to AU 2011 this year. Sadly to say that I will not be speaking. I hope to meet everyone I have met over the years as well as meet many more of you to share our experiences with using Revit.

Thanks for reading.

On my way to AU2010!!

Wow, I hate to even write a post, it has been almost a year since my last posting. I can hardly call myself a blogger, but I have to keeping trying whenever I get the time to put something in writing. Hopefully throughout my time here I am able to sit down an jot down a few words about what is going on.

My plan is to lock myself in my room for a day or so (Sat/Sun) and brush up on my Class Presentation.

"Why are you not having a BIM/Revit Kick-off meeting?"

During the class I hope to give a good overview of the importance of having this type of meetings for projects using Revit, along with having the right people involved so your projects can be a success for everyone involved. I will discuss how critical it is to keep the lines of communication open at all times, before, during, and after a project. The main focus will be on the BIM/Revit Kick-off meeting agenda we use here at Ericksen Roed & Associates.

From this agenda, we will look further into a few of the main bullets such as: Identifying Team Members, Expectations and Goals and Indentify the Workflow.

With each one of these I will share with you and discuss some of the documentation we use to help communicate all of this. These methods of communication have worked well for us as well as for other project team members. Hopefully the class is enough to motivate you to start similar communications back at the office or continue to build upon what you already have.

I look forward to meeting you at AU2010.

Redline Coordination Schedule (from a Structural Guy)

Another one of my articles (along with several others that are of great reading) have been published in the January/February 2010 issue of AUGIWorld magazine.

I encourage you to read mine as well as the others. They can be found at the below link.

AUGI World January/February 2010

Here is a quick blip of what I had to say. I hope you enjoy!

In my experiences using Autodesk Revit Structure for our projects, I have realized that the workflow is much different than what you are accustomed to doing in any other 2D environment. This is not an easy change, but if you just make an effort to seek something new you will see change start to happen. I am always looking for ways that not only change the workflow process while using Revit Structure, but also increase the team’s efficiency, both internally and externally.

One of those workflow processes that I would like to share is our Redline Coordination Schedule. This replaces the old hardcopy redline workflow we used in our 2D environment. We also use it where less-experienced users are working in the model and, if they do not feel comfortable making a certain change to the model, they can pass it off to a more experienced user who reviews the comments and picks them up as required.

I mentioned this workflow in the first Autodesk University class that I co-taught called, “Getting Your Company Ready for Revit Structure.” It was one of the biggest hits of the class. In fact, suggestions from other users helped make the process much better by sharing their thoughts and ideas about how the family should or could behave.

Hopefully, this article allows you to enhance your workflow and gets you thinking a bit differently about how you can keep communication ongoing between team members within your Revit model. With a bit more thought you may even develop ways to carry the communication to outside team members.

What exactly is it? .................

Read the complete article to find out!!

Framing Moment Symbol - Did you know?

I found out something interesting today about the "Connection-Moment-Filled" symbol that is used to show a symbolic Moment Connection type at the Start and End of framing members when set to a course view. Its solid Filled Region is controlled by the surface pattern of the Structural Framing category.
We had a view where we had the surface pattern turned off in the Visibility Graphics Overrides for Structural Framing for some of the concrete beams. Eventually we noticed that the moment symbols were not shown filled even though they were using the correct family which did have the triangle filled. After a little bit of trouble shooting I traced it to the surface pattern.

I guess it makes sense because it is a pattern and is a surface, but since this is a symbol and not really part of the Structural Framing family I would expect that this Filled Region not be affected in this way by this action. Anyways... if you are finding that your solid filled moment connection symbols are not filled in, you might want to check to see if the surface pattern is toggle off either in the view or by the element.

Starting a Project Advice - My Two Cents

I am re-posting this here because I think that it is great advice which as structural engineers, we are not always included in on the decision process. One of those topics that should be discussed each and every project before you start. The below blip is one of two pieces of advice that Steve Stafford. posted on his blog regarding Advice for starting a project.

"There are lots of things to consider when starting a project. Doing so with Revit is no different. Here's a couple comments that will save you some trouble later.

Number One - Forget about True North!

Revit has a bias or assumption that you are going to ignore True North when you start out, probably because you don't have a survey yet. Sustainable design demands that you think about True North for proper sun orientation but let's just pretend for a moment that you are more interested in making it easy to document the building than its sun orientation. This means that Revit has assigned every plan oriented view (stock templates) to Project North. Model your building so that it is easy, horizontal or vertical as opposed to at 45 degrees. Don't worry about True North because you can define the True North orientation quite easily later, using a couple different approaches."

These approaches can be found in Steve's original post.

I would like to add another which involves the elevation of the project, Project or Shared elevation. By know means will I say I am an expert in this area, but I know that the workflow you choose to use can determine whether or not you will have a headache at the end of the day when things decide to change. I see to many times that our architects are adjusting their "Project Elevation" to set how their levels display an elevation reference. Will the documentation be using a reference of level 1 = 0'-0", 100'-0", 860'-0", or 810.8'? If known up front this is fine, but some projects have this requirement change in mid stream, so what happens? They move their project elevation up to that elevation. Most will find that after they do this all of their geometry may go with levels, but their annotations and view crops stay put. The task is not always easy and can be a tedious task.

Revit offers a tool for this and you will find forum post and blogs talking about it. The Relocate Project tool is the tool you are looking for. It sets up a shared coordinate for your elevations. Basically saying that "Project Elevation" 0'-0" now equals "Shared Elevation" 860'-0". Your project is still at 0'-0", but your levels will now display the Shared Elevation as long as within the Type properties of a Level you set the "Elevation Base" paramete to "Shared" The same settings will have to be set in other tools that use annotations that display elevations from the model. When a new and improved survey comes along and your elevation reference changes, you just redo the Shared Elevation in lieu of moving all of your modeled elements and annotations to the new elevations.

Reading the comments from Steve's blog tells me that their will be users who disagree with this, but this is my findings in our day to day workflow. Always interested to here the other side of the story.

Yes, I am still here...

It has been a while since I have posted and I still don't have a lot of time to sit down and write something worth while, so I thought I would at least post to let you know what has been going on. Since I am not real active with this blog, I am probably the only one reading it, but for anyone who happens to stumble across the blog I hope you enjoy what is in the archive.

Most of my time is taken up by writing and picking up edits for the "Mastering Revit Structure 2010" book. The book which is set to be published in September, is updated with all the new features and for the new Ribbon UI. My portions are mostly done, so things are settling down a bit for me, at least in the area of what do I do after work and after I put the kids to bed.

This weekend I am getting a start on the Ancillaries for the book which include a Power Point, Test Questions, and additional Exercises for Instructors who will be using the book in a classroom environment.

Hopefully soon, I will be able to get a few more post up. Winter seems to be just around the corner, it will be dark when I get home, and not to much to do indoors, so I should have much more time than I do now.

Revit Worksharing on Wide Area Networks

We have been using this solution (GlobalSCAPE WAFS) to work between our remote office for a while now with our non-Revit files and it has been working great. I just received word today that their solution now works with Autodesk Revit Worksharing. This is great news and hope that it works as advertised. If you have been looking for a solution to work with Revit files over your WAN this is defiantly one worth checking out.

Hopefully we will have this rolled out to our Revit projects soon. I expect that you will be able to read more about this in the days to come. For now you can read below for the most current information available.

*************************************************

If you collaborate on projects across multiple locations, WAFS file sharing can now be used on Revit projects. No matter how many locations you have or how far apart they are, Revit Worksharing performance can be improved by up to 10x.

Some key benefits include…
Instant access to remote files with minimal bandwidth consumption
File coherence with real-time file locking, file release, and synchronization
Continuous back-up at the central server
Instant access to newly created files anywhere on the WAN
Secure encryption keeps your sensitive data safe
Completely transparent to end-users, no training required
Easy installation, browser-based management, and firewall friendly (tunnel through HTTP/S)

You can view a flash demo:
http://www.globalscape.com/wafs/Revit_Video_Skin.html

or read more detailed information from our website product page:
http://www.globalscape.com/wafs/revit.aspx

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Inconsistent naming for the Paste Aligned tools

I noticed the other day that the Paste Aligned drop-down in Revit Structure has a case of " I don't know what I want to be called". Should I be called"Select Levels" or "Select Levels by Name" or should I be called"Pick Level Graphics" or "Pick Level"?

If you look at the drop-down selection from using the tool in the Modify contextual tab your list will look as follows:

• Select Levels
• Select Views
• Current View
• Same Place
• Pick Level Graphics

If you look at the drop-down selection from using the tool in the Modify tab your list will look as follows:

• Select Levels by Name
• Select Views
• Current View
• Same Place
• Pick Level

I personally like "Select Levels by Name" and "Pick Level Graphics" because that is what you are doing. Regardless of what they are called, all methods of placement appear to do the same thing. I am sure in a future version The Factory will decide on which names to go with.

New Filter Categories added in 2010

I believe that it was in Revit Structure 2009 that the "Level" category was added to the filters tool when creating a "Define Criteria" filter. We used this to auto hide those additional levels that we created to reference geometry to. These additional levels usually were not required to be displayed in our views. What we did was created a "Define Criteria" filter that was set to find any Level whose Type name contained "Hide in View". This filter was then applied to our view templates where its visibility was set to be turned off in the Visibility/Graphics Overrides, within the Filter tab.


I have been waiting for the "Section" category to be added as well, and with Revit Structure 2010 my wish has come true. Callouts, Elevations, and the Section category have been added. We can now do the same thing with our working sections. These are a section type that we create for working in the model. These sections will never be put on a sheet and will not plot as long as check the "Hide unreferenced view tags" checkbox in the Print Setup options. That was all great, but users were starting to work around them with other annotation and text as if they were going to plot when they would not. Below shows our working sections showing up in a documentation view.

Here is the filter we created to keep them removed: (the Filter tool can be found on the View Ribbon tab in the Graphics panel)

If a working section needs to become a Project Section you just have to switch its Type and it reappears beause it no longer meets the criteria of the fitler. You can filter by whatever criteria works for you.

The 2009 work around was to set our working views one scale above our documentation views. Working sections were only to be cut in a working view. This way the sections "Hide at scales coarser than" instant parameter was set such that it would not display in a view whose scale was coarser than the working view. This worked pretty good as long as the users were following the rules. I like the filter method much better.

Thank you Factory for this addition. It's these little things that can make certain task go just a little bit smoother.

Level display in the Graphical Column Schedule

Gosh... how did this one slip by me. Not for sure if it was in the initial 2009 version or one of the web updates. I guess it pays to read the new features list closely. This was one of those items that was on my wish list from day one. The ability to display the shared elevation of a Level in the Graphical Column Schedule (GCS). Well, I just found out that you can, or at least Revit does it automatically for you based on the "Elevation Base" parameter value in the Type properties of a level. The value that a particular level or level type displays throughout your project is what is displayed in the GCS.

We typically follow the lead of the architect on the majority of our projects. We link in their Revit model at origin to origin so our coordinates match up. Some of our architects standards are to start all projects off at 0'-0" and set up a shared coordinate for 0'-0" to equal 100'-0". Some start all projects off at 100'-0" and if for some reason the contractor wants to see the datum elevations of 860'-0" they will move the project to Revit's project coordinates of 860'-0". We would follow their lead and try to avoid the entire project being moved after it has been started. In some cases the right choice was to set up a shared elevation in lieu of moving all of the elements in the model to a new position. Anyways, the GCS was not friendly in displaying the shared elevation base when it was required for us to take that route. We would either miss out on the opportunity to use the GCS, place text over top of the elevations and maintain their position, or place a note on the schedule saying 0'-0" = 100'=0".

After dealing with this for a few years I just got so use to the work-arounds and kept requesting that the architect not use a shared elevation base that I stopped looking for it to be added.

Enough rambling.... if you didn't notice this behavior change (like me), hopefully this post will brighten your day.

Redefine your Collaboration Workflow

I recently had an article I wrote published in AUGI World magazine which has now went Green and is only available in digital format. I encourage you to read all of the articles in the magazine. It can be found at the below link.

AUGI World January/February 2009

Here is what I had to say. I hope you enjoy!

Redefine your Collaboration Workflow

By now I am guessing that most of you are already using Revit® Structure to produce your design documentation, and, if you aren’t using it, more than likely you are at least considering it. If you aren’t looking at it, what are you waiting for? The use of Revit for any discipline definitely changes the workflow for you. If the workflow is not changing, then you were doing it way different than the way I was doing it! How different this workflow becomes depends a little bit on how much you are willing to change how you have been doing things in the past with other 2D CAD applications. Let’s take a second and reminisce about what I now call the “Old School” 2D days of CAD.

Old school CAD
As structural professionals, we would always receive what everybody said was this perfectly good CAD file from the architect. This file contained everything we needed to produce our structural documentation, we were told. The thinking went something like this: “They already have the grids laid out. Let’s just trace over them, or better yet, let’s just copy/paste them into our file, or much better yet, let’s just save their file as a new file, delete information that is not needed, and make it our structural file.” In return, the CAD manager would say, “Absolutely Not! We are going to verify every single line, dimension, text, and draw our own information in our file.” Why was this done? Because over time we began to lose faith in the accuracy of the drawings we were receiving. Structurally, we wanted precision set to 1/256" and “they” wanted it set to 1/16" or sometimes even 1/8". Other programs were used to produce napkin sketches of the building during schematic design and those sketches were being pulled into CAD. Sometimes the sketches were turned into nice numbers that were easy to work with and other times it looked like they were just left as sketches. The bottom line is we could not trust the CAD files to enable us to produce an accurate set of drawings that would allow other parties, such as fabricators, to use downstream. Using Revit on a project changes all of that; at least it needs to in order for the whole process to work.

The workflow needs to change
What needs to change? First, everybody needs to start producing accurate models that we all can trust. This means that those working on the project are going to have to step up their game a bit and go that extra mile to make things correct. Without this accuracy in the Revit models you are sharing, you will have little chance of relying on someone else’s model. Second, we need to start communicating again. No more of the architect moving an elevator shaft over 6" so he or she can maintain a certain corridor width and not tell structural it was done. Drawings get issued, it gets built from the structural drawings, and the elevator shaft is constructed in the wrong location. There can be no more of the engineer changing a beam depth size and not telling mechanical. The field guy is installing some duct work and finds out that his duct work does not clear the bottom of the beam. Dropping it would lower the ceiling height. Who wins? I could go on and on with scenarios from all sides of the design team, but right now I would like to talk about how Revit can eliminate this. Using Revit to model your projects and to produce construction documents is a chance to regroup with everyone and change the way you have been doing things in the past. I know that some of you who have been doing this correctly, but I also know that there are others using the undesirable methods described above. So let’s discuss the workflow that can get you started in a new direction.

Using a dependent collaboration workflow
What do I mean by dependent collaboration? Well, this means that each discipline models only the elements for which it is responsible. Architectural should not be modeling footings, foundation walls, columns, framing, and structural slabs. Structural shouldn’t be modeling exterior finishes and door/windows to show how they relate to a lintel or a foundation wall. And I have to believe that Mechanical does not want to model any of that, preferring to model its own discipline specific elements. Can all of this happen 100 percent of the time for every project? No. You will face challenges that might discourage you from thinking that any of this makes sense, but hopefully as you are reading this, you are thinking about what part of this workflow might allow you to take advantage of the same benefits we see when we work on projects in this manner. Some project schedules might not allow for this workflow and certain structural systems may accommodate this more easily than others. There will always be scenarios that will prevent some of these efforts from being carried out to the fullest degree. But over time, I see this slowly decreasing as the workflow is further defined. At my company, this method of collaboration is what we try to use on the majority of our projects. The goal for all team members is to avoid modeling anything twice. If this can be done, then your model has to be coordinated or your drawings will not be correct. Figure 1 shows a structural section that clearly is not coordinated.

figure 1

figure 2

The red indicates that the architectural model is linked into the structural file. This information is not modeled by structural; structural can’t change it because it is linked into our model. We could lower the trench footing down, but whose model is right? Well, I’m going to say that structural’s model is right because structural is always right! Of course, the architects will say they are always right. Seriously, we could both change our models to be correct, but the next time we exchange our models the section would be wrong again. In the past, we would each change our drawings and when the drawings were issued we would not be coordinated.
With Revit, you can be dependent on each other’s work, so as long as you are communicating about whose model is correct and you are using the most up-to date models prior to printing, you will be coordinated. At least if your section is wrong, it will be wrong in the same way throughout everyone’s documents.

What does the structural engineer use from the architectural model?
· Doors
· Windows
· Walls
· Curtain Panels
· Curtain Systems
· Curtain Wall Mullions
· Architectural Columns
· Stairs and Railings

What does the architect use from the structural model?
· Footings (wall, isolated, slab)
· Foundation Walls
· Piers
· Columns/Post/Hangers
· Framing
· Slab on Grades
· Structural Slabs
· Roof Deck

Now don’t get the idea that Revit is going to do all of this for you. It will, for the most part, after you determine your settings, but first you need to get yourself familiar with working with the Visibility/Graphic Override dialog box and the RVT Link Display settings shown below. Getting deep into this is another topic for discussion. So for now, if you are unfamiliar with it, check it out.

figure 3

figure 4

figure 5

Also take note that getting started with all of this is going to take a bit more time than you are accustomed to, mostly because it is new method of working and thinking and you need to get past the learning curve. What I see is the time you may have spent on the phone after your documents were issued is now shifted to more time on the phone before you issue. The kick is that your time on the phone is going to be much more enjoyable and beneficial for everyone because you are fixing problems before they are costing everybody more money. If you are just starting out, it will take more time because everyone is learning the new workflow as well as trying to understand and learn what everyone expects to happen on the project. So with that said, the most important thing for you to take from all of this is to communicate before a project is even started. Get everybody’s expectations out on the table and come up with a plan to achieve your goals.

Communicate, communicate, and communicate some more
During this communication process you need to be communicating internally to your own people, externally to other team members, and continue to communicate on a daily basis throughout the duration of the project. Currently, I find that users of all levels from all disciplines are still learning the software as well as the new work flows involved, so the level of communication required to pull this off is key. The biggest thing is to get everybody on the same page prior to starting a project. Decide what is expected and discuss the best way to work within those expectations. To do this, we push to have a Revit kickoff meeting prior to any new project. This means that the minute someone catches wind of a project starting up, someone needs to be picking up the phone to get a meeting scheduled. In this meeting we bring with us an agenda that walks the team through everything that should be discussed prior to starting the project.

What things should you talk about in a Revit kickoff meeting?
· Identify team members and their roles
· Set the expectations and goals for the project
· Identify the workflow process each team will use
· Determine who will be modeling what
· Review how each team will be using Revit
· Discuss limitations each team might have with the software
· Discuss how models will be transferred and how often
· Decide when Revit will be used (some might still use 2D CAD for SD and DD)
· Define the deliverables (Revit model, DWF, DWG, hardcopy, model presentation)

You might also consider creating a separate document that is more specific to your company regarding your own list of expectations in terms of what will be in your model as well as what will be in someone else’s model. Be prepared to manage expectations that are not met. You may be dealing with someone who is new to Revit or a client with whom you haven’t worked before. Either way you need to be ready to deal with the consequences of a changed workflow and you must relay that workflow back to your own team. At least with the BIM/Revit kickoff meeting, you are dealing with these problems up front rather than waiting until the day of a deadline or after an issue arises. The use of Revit gives you the perfect excuse to embrace change and redefine your collaboration workflow. Revisit the accuracy of your drawings, duplication of effort, and how you communicate. Over time I think you will find that it was the right thing to do. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead, call your client or your consultant. Set up a meeting to see how you can use Revit to collaborate on your projects and maybe even change things up a bit with regard to how you work on a project. Who knows, with your next project, you might just be able to leave work on time!

Jamie D. Richardson is an Associate and CAD\BIM Manager at Ericksen Roed & Associates, a Structural Engineering firm based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA. Throughout his 14 years of experience with Autodesk products, Jamie has been instrumental in the rollout of several versions of AutoCAD as well as the implementation of Revit Structure. He has been an avid speaker on Revit Structure at Autodesk University and recently co-authored the book Mastering Revit Structure 2009.

Watch Your Active Workset

Today a user was having an issue with regards to a beam not showing up in a plan view. Once the beam was placed, you could access the properties of it while it was still selected and see that the beam was definitely in the model and at the same location of the beams adjacent to it that were displaying properly in the view. When I went to their desk I walk through all the steps, and yes, as described the beam was being placed properly but it was not displaying in the view.

My first thought was to switch to a 3d view to make sure that is was where its properties was saying it was located. As we were switching to the 3d view I noticed that the active workset was set to the "Linked Revit Model - MEP" workset. The display of this workset was currently turned off in the plan view where the beam was not showing up.

Problem Solved!! Once we turned the workset on we found 4 beams placed on top of each other. (I bet if we placed it one more time it would of showed up) This is something that we come across every now and than and is on my list of things to check when elements do not display as expected. Remember to keep your eye on the active Workset if you have Worksets enabled.

Grouping Headers in a Schedule

When working in any Revit Platform you can find a lot of your wish list items by keeping your eye on the Options Bar. Even after using the software for a while now, I find new things that show up that I swear were not there the day before. But of course they have always been there.

Anyways... I had one of our users the other day ask me how I was able to group Length, Width and Depth under a Size field in the schedule. Something that a lot of users probably know how to do but also one of those features that can slip by you. In any case since I never like to just give out the answer, I told the user to select the Length, Width and Depth fields and than look at the Options Bar. They did, and they immediately figured it out. Go ahead, give it a try.




You can also use this Group command to display the Title of the schedule. Typically a schedule like this shows its title with the same name that the view is called. Their may be cases where you want the view name to be something other than the title of the schedule. In this case you can choose to not show the Title by going to the Appearance tab of the schedules properties and deselecting "Show Title". Than you can select all of the header fields in the schedule and select Group from the Options Bar. Now you can name the schedule whatever you want.

My First Post

So, I have been thinking a long time about starting a blog. I have been debating on whether or not I have the time to stay active with it and what it should be called, but I think that after Autodesk University 2008 the name Revit Workflow rings a bell. Hopefully that takes care of the name. As far as the time goes... I think that this will be a good way for me to start a log to help keep track and record my day to day activities.

The Blog will mostly be about Revit Structure and my day to day dealings with it (good and bad) in a Structural Design Firm's production environment. The new workflow that Revit brings to the table is something that we have been working on since we started using it back in 2005. (Internally and externally) Now with Robot Millennium Analysis, the Revit Extensions, as well as potential to take advantage of some detailing through AutoCAD Structural Detailing, the workflow process involved with Revit will go to a whole new level. One we will have to figure out.

Anyways.. look for more to come going into the new 2009 year with regards to Revit Structure to start with, and a site change as I get more familiar with this new blog thing.