Groups in Revit 8

[cliff collins]

There was post earlier today regarding Revit 8 and it's problem handling groups.
It seems this is a very critical issue, and that others, including our office are having difficulties developing larger projects where groups are vital for the project to proceed using Revit. How is SOM handling this in their exteremely large projects?

I think we need to be sure Autodesk is focused on this issue, and it would be good to
hear how they plan to address the groups issue.

I looked in the Wishlist and Known Issues and Workaround forums, and did not see
much if any topics about the Groups issue.

So--perhaps a class-action voicing should be raised to the factory!

cheers......

[lafe]

I believe SOM is using linked files and nested families to get around groups. Unless there is some other characteristic about groups that I am unaware of, I really don't see a need for them. I have found groups mostly useless, but if you are using nested families, along with the new editing within the project capabilities, I have no need for groups at all.

[bowlingbrad]

And probably now that you can schedule across linked files, this option may work! Has anyone tried this yet?

[lafe]

I haven't tried anything yet. I just loaded the program and have to finish a house in 5 hours.

[hand471037]

There was post earlier today regarding Revit 8 and it's problem handling groups.
It seems this is a very critical issue, and that others, including our office are having difficulties developing larger projects where groups are vital for the project to proceed using Revit. How is SOM handling this in their exteremely large projects?

well the issue isn't with Revit 8. The issue is that Groups haven't changed since 7, and until 7 they were more or less useless. Now they aren't useless, but they aren't useful, esp. in regards to multi-unit stuff.

So, just to clarify, it's not like something was done with Revit 8 that made groups *worse* it's that nothing was done to make them *better*.

[lafe]

I still don't think you even need them. It really should all be something that nested families and links should be able to handle easily.

[mlgatzke]

I still don't think you even need them.
I completely disagree. Groups are used for more than family objects. I, personally, use them extensively on annotations. Using groups allows me to use identical annotations across various pages of the same project. Then, if there's a change to the annotation, I only have to change it once and it changes throughout the project. Groups are very useful, also, in situations where groupings of objects are only necessary for a single project. In a case like this, nesting family objects would be overly time consuming and a waste of time.

You're pretty vehement about the uselessness of groups. Don't be. There are many of us that use them extensively.

[lev.lipkin]

We know about issue with multilevel model groups (when elements on different levels are in one group), and need for performance improvement.

What are other issues which are obstacles to use of model groups?
Thanks for your info.

[tatlin]

I second Lev's request. We are listening, but it helps when specific issues are described and not generalities.

We'd like to talk with firms using Groups extensively to determine what the main issues are as we plan and specify Revit 9 and beyond.

Calling all firms doing big projects with lots of repeating units: Would you be willing to participate in a series of conference calls to disuss Groups? If so, just email me at matthew.jezyk@autodesk.com .

Thanks,

[Mr Spot]

We've experienced problems with mirroring groups incorporating stacked walls with doors...

Always results in an unable to join geometry and of course you can't unjoin geometry as you would need to edit the group.... As such you cannot mirror the group.

Thing is nothing has beened joined so i can't unjoin anything. I think its to do with the wall joins for the stacked walls??

[aaronrumple]

Here's what works and doesn't work and what we've tried in our office.

My current project is 4 story student housing with 58 units and 256 beds. We have only 3 suite types which are repeated left and right hand. The project started with the suites including:
Partitions within the unit.
Associated doors.
Furniture.
Finish Floors.
Ceiling soffits.
Plumbing fixtures.

Demising walls were always a part of the shell and the shell is separate from the groups. For the most part groups "worked" during the schematic phase where wall joins were not critical and there were no associated dimensions. Note that this group was very simple. All units joined with the shell in exactly the same way.

However once well into DD, we kept getting "Can't update group. Ungroup and regroup, etc, etc, etc..." Even when this was done - you could still not select all instance and change them out without getting an error and having to cancel. This meant that updating a group required deleting and re-inserting another group. Of course this causes associated dimensions to be deleted and causes havoc with room tags. After doing this 4-5 times, I decided to break the units down. Now the walls and doors are no longer a group. The bathrooms are groups. The kitchens are groups. but that's about it. I rebuilt the walls such that they extent for the full 4 stories where possible, but if we need to make changes to the unit plans, I'm looking at repeating the updates over 12 times to complete the change without groups.

A previous project was a 2 story PK-5 school. This started in SD as above with 5 basic classroom types. Once this hit the end of DD we rolled the project into AutoCAD for completion.

We've had several housing projects each over 200 units where we might have 4-6 different unit types inside maybe a dozen building types. Each has suffered group problems and in many cases all we could do was ungroup and edit each one-by-one.

[lafe]

I guess my feeling was that if I am doing a project that is big enough to require multiple copies of something that includes walls, I would make a master "room" or building in a separate file and just link that to the overall project wherever it occurs.

I haven't been very successful at all with groups and they became so dang frustrating trying to modify them after I had created all of them that I reverted to nested families when it is individual objects such as a complex window, which people had earlier told me to use as a group so that I could get each component scheduled; or if it was a complete room, I would make it a separate file and link it. I suppose it becomes more like an xref in AutoCAD then, forcing you to go back and reload changes you make, but at least then it's not forcing you to ungroup everything and start over. I am just starting a fire station now that will require several rooms of the exact size, so I will try it out there and see how it goes. I don't do huge multi-family unit projects, but it would seem to me that if the project is bigger than what I am doing, linked files would be much more useful than groups anyway because it may reduce file size and improve performance, etc. When I have had problems with wall joins, I have often reverted to the "coarse" setting and made the wall fill black so you couldn't see them, or placed a filled region over the offending wall join. If I have made all the walls black on the overall plan, then it's usually big enough to do an enlarged plan anyway where the wall joins can be manipulated on only that plan.

I'll admit, my solution may not be the best, but dumping Revit over groups seems a little short-sighted, though it has been discussed at least a couple of times on this site.

However, I haven't worked with linked files so much that I can purport to be an expert. I just get opinionated pretty easily!

After doodling a little with groups and linked files, I have to admit that groups would be a better solution for my fire station if I didn't run into any glitches. But I am not even considering abandoning the wonderful and almost all-mighty Revit over it.

Lafe Harris

[Sweetshelby]

We have tried both ways. In Revit 6.1 we had a project with 6 different unit plans and had 6 separate files that we linked into the main building file. This can become very cumbersome. Plus we had to have individual sheets for interior elevations instead of combining them. This made for a large drawing set!

When we went to Revit 7 we tried the groups and found it better because you were inside one file but it did have a lot of errors when we had to make a change! We have tried to keep one unit type grouped in the building as long as possible and then when we must show them throughout the building we copy/mirror that group to all the levels. This is very time consuming and then when we make changes the error message "Can't make change group with more than one instance. To resolve: Ungroup and Group again under a new name." Of course when we try this solution it does not work as well! So we usually have to delete all the copies and ungroup the original and make the changes and then do the process all over!

80% of our work is timesshares and condos so to be able to draw a unit plan once is HUGE for us!

[lafe]

Sweetshelby -

Why in your first example did you have to have individual sheets for interior elevations instead of combining them?

[Sweetshelby]

Well unless there is another way we did not know about. We created the interior elevations within each unit plan project. Then we realized we could not combine them later. I guess we could have done it within the building plan? Is that what you would have done? Since that was our first project in Revit we were kind of running blind with it! We did not know if there would be problems with doing that.

[lafe]

I've done it the way you did it because of similar circumstances, but it would seem to me that since the linked file is fully loaded into the project, you should be able to do the whole thing besides the actual construction of the linked files in the main building set of drawings.

Another question I had was whether the hassle of doing links was more than the hassle of doing groups? It would seem to me that if you don't like links because of updating and so on, that's one thing. But from your description, doing groups seems a lot more of a hassle. Revit doesn't try to make links fit and join, so there shouldn't be any major error with them, I would think.

[Sweetshelby]

Well the hassle was more having to open all the files as well as when we reloaded them in the main building file something would always disappear and you would have to do a complete reload from file adn reselect the worksets you wanted. Did you have this problem?

Well the groups were not a problem on a smaller building we did but now that we tried them on this 5 story building they have become troublesome! It was too late to start over so we had to just deal. But if you have had no problems doing the link option maybe we will consider going back to that!

Thanks

[Steve_Stafford]

Quite plainly, linking files is not suitable for unit plans. There are many reasons but primarily, because Revit is not designed to interact with linked files in this manner.

Groups are how Revit intends to allow us to do unit plans. Unfortunately, as Aaron describes, they do not perform admirably in all situations yet.

[lafe]

As I said before, I haven't had problems with links, but I also am only doing 5 bedrooms in a fire station, not anything big or multiple storey. And since my project isn't huge, I am usually in control of all the worksets when I am making changes to the sleeping units. The changes from start to finish have been relatively minor in my projects, so I don't imagine it's quite the same situation as you have. One of the Revit developers mentioned in another link that there is a problem with using groups on multiple storeys, so that may be the problem.

It would seem that groups would be better than my workaround - too bad. I thought it would work wonderfully. I hope things get fixed soon for you guys.

[Sweetshelby]

Yes I talked to a guy at Revit Support and he said as long as the groups only go 1 level they should be fine. That is what we did. He said the problem comes when the "group" tries to clean up at the intersections that are different then the original group. Hopefully they can get this fixed and soon. I also suggested to him that having some way you could take a 2D snapshot of the group for copying. That maybe this would help in cases where one might not need the 3D information. Just a thought!

Thanks for all your input!

[gravelin]

What are other issues which are obstacles to use of model groups?
Thanks for your info.If you group points in a topo surface, they are not really grouped, they are locked. So you cannot manipulate them together easy.

[nrenfro]

Currently my biggest issue occurs when going to plot. If I plot a view with many groups in it the file sent to the plotter is very large causing memory issues and effecting the plotters output quality. Currently I am saving the file before plotting, grouping all grouped items, plotting and then not saving the changes. not an ideal situation.

[Danny Polkinhorn]

We used groups extensively on a recent project (around 170 rooms in a hotel) and we were able to work around most of the issues except:
1. If groups are in one workset that is not editable and demising walls are in another that are, sometimes updating the demising walls wouldn't work. We would get an "unable to update group" error. I suppose this was related to cleanups.
2. At the beginning we had a seperate file of unit masters. We saved the groups out and inserted them into two other revit files we were using. Any time we reloaded the groups, we would have to deal with the renaming of the group, then swapping the existing groups out for updated ones took FOREVER.

Granted we haven't gotten as far as Aaron on this project, so some of his issues haven't affected us.

[Martin P]

My problem with (model) groups in repeating units was pretty simple. Wall joins..... if a change to the wall joins did not constitue a change to the group they would be fine. My only soultion has been to dissallow all wall joins in grouped walls and do detail groups for wall join clean ups.

Detail groups behave fine. Be nice if I could draw etc in edit (detail) group mode though, would maked them far more useable. Same could apply to model groups too.

[John Anderson]

I've had groups sometimes fail to update because one instance of a group is contrained to an odd object.

It is important to be able to isolate and exclude the offending instance without failing the update of remaining instances. Remaining failed instance should then be identified somehow for manual ungroup or deletion and reinsertion.

[Scott Hopkins]

I second Lev's request. We are listening, but it helps when specific issues are described and not generalities.

We'd like to talk with firms using Groups extensively to determine what the main issues are as we plan and specify Revit 9 and beyond.

Calling all firms doing big projects with lots of repeating units: Would you be willing to participate in a series of conference calls to disuss Groups? If so, just email me at matthew.jezyk@autodesk.com .

Thanks,My guess is the Factory was too busy with Revit Structure and Revit Systems to get around to fixing groups.

Mat,

If you are still listening - I would start investigating mirrored groups. They seem to be very prone to errors. Also it can often take over 10 minutes to make a small edit to a complex mirrored group.