What happened to negative distance value?

[Gadget Man]

Hi Folks,

Did they change a behaviour of the dimensions in the families? In RAC2011 suddenly most of my windows stopped working correctly... They were behaving excellently in all previous versions and now they don't want to... And it's not just my observation - every draftsperson in the company complains about it.

What I found is that if, by altering the values of the parameters, your family changes in the way that some of the defining dimensions would become negative value, instead of flipping the direction Revit simply doesn't let it happen. E.g. when my window's head height is made lower than its overall height (forcing the sill elevation to become negative) instead of flipping the direction and going under the base level Revit refuses to create such family. This was working brilliantly in all the previous releases!

Why oh why they had to fix something that wasn't broken!?!?!?!? If they wanted to fix something about windows they should let them be insertable by the HEAD HEIGHT rather than useless SILL height... :banghead: Now I'm facing re-doing all my many (and I mean many!) windows' families because somebody decided to change this behaviour - just like that! And what warranty do I have that the next release they won't change something else, so some other families will have to be re-done? Is it going to happen every new release? I am getting fed up with Autodesk each and every time I use their product - just a little bit more every time...

[truevis]

Sounds frustrating. Adesk never advertises the features they remove.

Staying compatible with all the bizarreness in Families must be a programming challenge. I wish they'd rework the whole thing with clear constraints like in SolidWorks.

[Scott D Davis]

Who says that anyone at the Factory purposely removed it? It could have been a result from some other effort that did not get caught in testing. The functionality was added in this release to allow parametrically driven geomtetry to be "stretchable" by dragging them graphically in the family editor, just as you could in Conceptual Massing in previous releases. I don't know if this is truely what happened. So you may have found a bug, and should report it as a support request.

[dfriesen]

The functionality was added in this release to allow parametrically driven geomtetry to be "stretchable" by dragging them graphically in the family editor[...]
Was that not possible in some of the earliest versions of Revit? Seems to me I was doing that at one time, and then lost that ability in an update.

[jeffh]

Was that not possible in some of the earliest versions of Revit? Seems to me I was doing that at one time, and then lost that ability in an update.

This was not possible until 2010, and only then in a conceptual mass family. In 2011 this functionality was extened to all family categories.