LINE IS TOO SHORT!?!?!?!?!?

[Limbatus]

C'mon Revit. It's the year 2011. I should be able to draw a line any length I want. thanks for making my details look ******. I appreciate it.

[Craig_L]

Hot Tip #50095
Draw the line longer.

[SkiSouth]

C'mon Revit. It's the year 2011. I should be able to draw a line any length I want. thanks for making my details look ******. I appreciate it.

What construction detail requires accuracy of more than 1/32" of an inch, and do you think that it can be built in the field to that accuracy? Just curious, not a criticism.

[dhurtubise]

Couldn't agree more with Skisouth.

Thats usually a case of an AutoCAD user moving to Revit. Note that we shouldn't have done it in AutoCAD either.

[dbaldacchino]

Most of the issues I see with short detail lines is when someone tries to draw something TO SCALE rather than using true 1:1. Or taking a scaled down CAD file and exploding it in Revit (ugh!). The only time I run into this issue is when creating annotation (symbol) families that do require lines shorter than 1/32". When that happens, it is very very annoying however.

[Dimitri Harvalias]

And the Revit apologists come crawling out of the woodwork!!!;)
I'm in the 'never been an issue for me' camp. Even at a scale of 1:1 or 1:2, for millwork of other highly detailed items, a line shorter than 1/32" is not much longer than the thickness of the drawn line itself. If this type of thing needs to be detailed so it can be dimensioned then I would suggest a text note on the detail.

[david_peterson]

I can't say I've ever needed a 1/32" line, but that said, if I was to truly detail some of my structural connections, there's a possibility I may run across the need. For example, if I was to actually add in the thickness of a piece of 30# felt which we use as a bond break material, I would need something that short. However, we just draw a fat line and call it a day.

[dbaldacchino]

I'm not an apologist! I said it's annoying :p

[Mike Sealander]

This error often occurs with aluminum extrusions, such as with storefronts. Should we be designing aluminum extrusions in Revit, or not? Should we be representing aluminum extrusions in Revit, or not?
As some of these posts intimate, the problem probably lies with manufacturers drawing their stuff in AutoCAD and then creating Revit families from that ACAD geometry.
One interesting area where 1/32" might become meaningful is in energy analysis. We have drawn opaque and transparent wall assemblies in Revit in order to create .dwg files for input into Therm (a two-dimensional thermal analysis program). 1/32" ends up making a difference, much like the felt paper used as bond breaker in the structural detail mentioned above.

[nealbij]

I'm running into this problem trying to bring in our company logo into a Revit title block. I took painstaking steps to cleanly bring in our vector logo (originally in Illustrator) to AutoCAD, reduced everything to simple polylines and hatches, and import into Revit. The problem is that not all the hatches come in (some just don't come in from the import) and if I try to do a Full Explode in Revit thinking I'll make Filled Regions, I lose lines.

Has anyone ever tried using a CAD or vector based company logo instead of just using an image?

[jsteinhauer]

I take it this is still an issue for 2013? I'm trying to create detail components for Storefront/Curtain walls like Mike, and I'm running head first into this limitation. Draw a longer line, but that isn't the profile given to us by Kawneer.

Today's status = AutoDesk Fail...
Jeff S.

[rbcameron1]

It appears this won't ever be corrected. I haven't had any issues with it except for one thing. I go to move a series of lines that are connected at the ends every once in a while. Those lines sometimes go under the 1/32" mark and I get a warning, line gets delete and I lose something. Ctrl+Z and nudge again. AutoCAD and Inventor have no issues with this...it would be nice to have the ability, but not necessary. Doesn't Revit also have the same problem if the line is too long, like 3 miles or something? I'm more concerned with that.

Cheers,

RBCameron

[MikeJarosz]

Aluminum extrusions.......EXACTLY!!!

I had a project in Kazhakstan a while back. I was doing the curtain wall details. The aluminum extrusions were from a German manufacturer. They furnished us with a basic set of stock extrusion sections, drawn to perfection. Every intersection was radiused 2 mm. I was forced to develop some custom configurations without the tiny radius. They looked terrible next to the manufacturer's perfection.

[DaveP]

Just glanced at this thread again and misread the title as "LIFE IS TOO SHORT"

How true, life is too short to be forced to mess around with seemingly minor issues like this. :)

[david_peterson]

Just glanced at this thread again and misread the title as "LIFE IS TOO SHORT"

How true, life is too short to be forced to mess around with seemingly minor issues like this. :)

It's only a seemingly minor issue until you need it :)
Then it becomes a major pain in the butt. Just like yesterday when I was trying to sort through my project browser and I wasn't able to select multiple drawings to fill in parameters for sheet order and volume set. Then after banging my head against the wall I figured it out. You can only do it if you have both the properties window and browser window docked. How silly is that.

[antman]

Dave, if you don't want to dock them, you can use a non-Aero Windows theme. You pick the lesser evil. .-)

[Mike Sealander]

I think the problem lies with Revit's dynamic, parametric updating. Years ago, a CAD manager friend of mine (at Degenkolb in SF) said she liked AutoCAD better than Microstation because in ACAD, you could draw a line from SF to NY and be accurate to the 1,000th of an inch, or something like that. In Microstation, you might be 1/4 inch off. I think that much floating point precision would take up too much CPU bandwith if Revit tried to implement that level of precision.

[jsteinhauer]

Mike,

Did she really ever try to draw a line from NYC to SF? We had a project back in '06 where the 0,0,0 point was 400 miles away from our buildings. We couldn't draw a line at 0 rotation to save our lives. Well I take that back. We could draw the line at 0 rotation, but once we deselected the line and reselected it again, it would rotate it 1/1000th of degree.

Cheers,
Jeff S.

[MikeJarosz]

We had a project back in '06 where the 0,0,0 point was 400 miles away from our buildings.

The World Trade Center project origin is somewhere around Easton Pennsylvania. The Port Authority of NY & NJ picked that point. My speculation has always been that a point that far away puts all of their facilities (JFK airport, LGA airport, bridges, tunnels, PATH train etc., all in the ++ quadrant.

I believe Mike Sealander is right when he cites floating point as the problem. There are numbers that cannot be represented in floating point. I have always found it amusing to see people try to force Acad to make a true zero value for a point. The internal representation of numbers is so complex,it would take a book to explain it. In Acad, the z coord isn't even a simple number. It's a vector.

Just the conversion between binary and decimal is a thesis topic by itself! Google the title "Perils of Floating Point" for more info. As an example: 1/3 in binary is not a repeating number but 1/10 is...

[DaveP]

If you want to talk binary and decimal, here's a mind blower:
What does binary 1010 convert to in decimal?

[MikeJarosz]

If you want to talk binary and decimal, here's a mind blower:
What does binary 1010 convert to in decimal?

It could be integer decimal 10: 1[8] + 0(4) + 1(2) + 0(1) = 8 + 2 = 10

BUT!!!!!! It could also be a two's complement. Subtract 1: 1010 - 1 = 1001 Then reverse all the numbers: = 0110 which makes it: 0[8] + 1(4) + 1(2) + 0(1) = -6 (I think... I don't do this every day)

Two's complement is a way to convert a binary negative number into a positive number. Then the computer doesn't need a subtraction circuit. This combined with bit shifting means that subtraction, multiplication, and division all are performed as additions in binary. That's one reason why binary is so fast.

[DaveP]

Ah, we're all bozos on this bus.

[MikeJarosz]

Ah, we're all bozos on this bus.

A FST fan!!!!!!!!

Check out my signature

[DaveP]

Yep. That's why I knew you'd get it.