corinoco
2004-03-25, 03:22 AM
I don't know how long the on / off parameters have been in Revit - I know I used on/off (yes/no) back in 5.1, but I only just today learned that you can control visibility with them!
Hurrah! I have been looking for this functionality for ages! And it was right under my nose all along.
So I immediately got to creating some new families to test it out - specifically a door with a catflap. There seems little point to me in having a complete seperate door type for door-with-catflap, I just want a tick-box in my schedules.
So with glee I set a void to have it's Visibility parameter linked to an on/off parameter called Catflap and.......! Nothing happened. :(
"Wierd, it works for everything else" I mutter, while WB glares at me because I am mucking with families rather than completing a DA report.
Some experimentation, and I find it *doesn't* work for everything else! At first I thought it only worked with Symbolic or Detail lines. OK, fair enough, but WHY is the parameter there on everything else? Then I found it worked on model lines too, dispelling my theory that it only worked on 2D elements. OK, maybe it doesn't work on parametric elements. Nope - it worked on a line that gets moved by a parametric dimension. OK, now I am getting annoyed. Let's try and array some lines - THAT doesn't work - the lines turned on and off before they were arrayed, but not after. It won't work on groups at all it seems - groups don't have the 'Visibility' parameter to set.
So, the situation (as seen in my attached RFA file) is this: On/Off works REALLY WELL for a limited set of elements. What defines an element's ability to be turned on and off is either too complex or vague or both for us without a Dev edition (that's a HINT) to nut out.*
To make matters slightly more confusing, almost every element actually HAS a Visibility parameter, it just doesn't seem to make any difference to most objects, in particular, solids and voids. Needless to say, those objects I most want to turn onn/off!
Hopefully I am missing something very obvious here, and there is some little setting** that makes it all work.
If not, can this please be made to work? I don't have enough adjectives to describe how useful this would be...
Cheers,
Adrian Esdaile
* translation: "nut out"; to think really hard, figure something out; as in 'I can't nut out this tax return form.'
** what I call the 'Disney Button' - you just press it and everything suddenly looks like a Disney production*** and you can go home
*** Can you actually use the term 'Disney' without having to pay a licence fee?
Hurrah! I have been looking for this functionality for ages! And it was right under my nose all along.
So I immediately got to creating some new families to test it out - specifically a door with a catflap. There seems little point to me in having a complete seperate door type for door-with-catflap, I just want a tick-box in my schedules.
So with glee I set a void to have it's Visibility parameter linked to an on/off parameter called Catflap and.......! Nothing happened. :(
"Wierd, it works for everything else" I mutter, while WB glares at me because I am mucking with families rather than completing a DA report.
Some experimentation, and I find it *doesn't* work for everything else! At first I thought it only worked with Symbolic or Detail lines. OK, fair enough, but WHY is the parameter there on everything else? Then I found it worked on model lines too, dispelling my theory that it only worked on 2D elements. OK, maybe it doesn't work on parametric elements. Nope - it worked on a line that gets moved by a parametric dimension. OK, now I am getting annoyed. Let's try and array some lines - THAT doesn't work - the lines turned on and off before they were arrayed, but not after. It won't work on groups at all it seems - groups don't have the 'Visibility' parameter to set.
So, the situation (as seen in my attached RFA file) is this: On/Off works REALLY WELL for a limited set of elements. What defines an element's ability to be turned on and off is either too complex or vague or both for us without a Dev edition (that's a HINT) to nut out.*
To make matters slightly more confusing, almost every element actually HAS a Visibility parameter, it just doesn't seem to make any difference to most objects, in particular, solids and voids. Needless to say, those objects I most want to turn onn/off!
Hopefully I am missing something very obvious here, and there is some little setting** that makes it all work.
If not, can this please be made to work? I don't have enough adjectives to describe how useful this would be...
Cheers,
Adrian Esdaile
* translation: "nut out"; to think really hard, figure something out; as in 'I can't nut out this tax return form.'
** what I call the 'Disney Button' - you just press it and everything suddenly looks like a Disney production*** and you can go home
*** Can you actually use the term 'Disney' without having to pay a licence fee?