The Revit X-Files

The truth is out there... I think.

So this is a new category of posts here at Big Bad BIM. Reminiscent of Revit OpEd's Department of Unfair. This will be the repository for all the freaky,weird, off-the-wall Revit stuff that just drives me CRAZY!!!


I think Autodesk calls these "service requests." Ok, ok, I'll try to log those too.


First installment comes from our Mechanical Engineering department. One of our user's was trying to use the "Tag All Not Tagged" tool to tag all of the ceilings in a view. He just couldn't get it to work. He could tag them one at a time, but not all.


Wondering if it was something related to that particular project, I tried it in a view that was set to the Architetural discipline as opposed to the Mechanical discipline. Sure enough, no problem. I changed the view in question to an Architetual discipline. Tagged All Not Tagged and changed it back. Worked great. Work-around? You bet, but we have lots of those.

Back at my desk, I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed something. So I compared the element properties of a couple of views.Here are the results (notice in particular the "underlay orientation"):


Architectural Discipline:



Mechanical Discipline:




Note: the Mech view didn't default to "Plan" for the Underlay Orientation. I changed it. I CHANGED IT!!! You shouldn't be able to do that. That parameter allows you to underlay a ceiling plan in a plan view (so you can coordinate overhead information with your floor plan.) I don't think we were meant to access this in a ceiling plan.

Are these two conditions related. Is it a programming bug? Aliens that have it in for HVAC designers? Who knows, but it sure is weird (not to mention frustrating.)


Here a couple of ceiling related videos. First is a video that shows the workaround mentioned above. The second is a video that shows how to apply filters (powerful little buggers, those filters) that make "non-standard" ceiling heights really "pop," which really helps when coordinating information in the model.