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Wes Macaulay
2004-03-06, 05:31 AM
A client was griping about Revit's reactive behaviour in joining objects together -- he called it "stickyness" which is exactly the term I've used before for this very subject. All my clients gripe about it.

So I thought I'd fire up some reference restrictions and see if can't keep the parts from talking to each other. One of my clients is having some frustration about walls outside his unit plan groups mucking up his groups - the groups are changing because of their relationship with wall intersections from without.

I know that many of you get frustrated with how wall ends jump around, wall joins change, curtain wall ends gets sucked into the regular wall end into which they butt, etc; and I thought it my service to y'all if I could research this little used aspect of Revit.

I remember someone having the problem with curtain wall ends getting sucked into regular walls, so I did the same, but with a twist I knew would give Revit some grief. I set up a workset called "Exterior - Inert" that prevented other worksets from referencing it. I drew some regular walls that formed a corner in this workset. I created a workset called "Interior" and tried to snap a curtain wall in this workset to different places in the "Exterior - Inert" workset in the model; the snap would often work out with the ignorable warning popping up that I wasn't allowed to create a workset reference between the two worksets with the join I was attempting between the curtain wall and the regular wall.

http://www.pat.ca/images/support/zoogstickyws1.gif

In the above pic, because of how the walls have been trim/filleted to create the corner, the curtain wall wants to "pop" into the wall. And when the workset referencing was forbidden, I couldn't snap the curtain wall end onto the wall at all -- it would create a workset reference, and I got the unignorable error notice and would have to cancel. I then allowed the workset reference to happen, and I got what you see above. However, I pulled one of the brick walls away from the join, then pulled in the curtain wall and snapped it to the end of the colinear brick wall, then brought in the brick wall perpendicularly, and everything was fine.

The upshot is that I'm not sure if reference restrictions will help in this regard, and if they do, you're going to have to have your joins worked out before you even try to snap pieces of the model together, and this could be frustrating.

The bottom line is that I'd like to see Revit become less reactive in its connections between components... and then if we wanted to join objects together, we'd use the Join Geometry command or something like to glue the pieces together that we really want glued together.

beegee
2004-03-06, 05:48 AM
Nice bit of work Wes.

Good to have for reference, even though its not really a tip ... then again, maybe it is. :D

irwin
2004-03-06, 06:58 PM
There is a different way to solve the buried mullion issue. Each end of a joined curtain wall is actually two "ends". One of these is the blue control used for joining -- if it is attached to another wall then moving that wall will make the curtain wall longer or shorter. But there is also a "shape handle" that controls where the final mullion and panel go. It is displayed in plan as a short line perpendicular to the curtain wall when the curtain wall is highlighted. By default, this shape handle gets put at the face of the joined wall. However if it isn't where you want in some situation then you can select it and move it. To select it you need to Tab until the selection candidate listed in the prompt string includes the word Shape Handle.

Workset reference restrictions were intended for a different purpose that is now obsolete. We intend to remove them soon. If anyone is making real use of them at the moment, please let us know what you are using them for.

http://www.zoogdesign.com/forums/phpBB2/download.php?id=1676

Steve_Stafford
2004-03-06, 07:25 PM
I am using reference restriction to show two versions of a building, one with a locker room and one without. Reference restrictions allowed me to put them in separate worksets and stop cleanup issues I was having. With design options I could tackle it differently now. This project is too far down the road to really factor in your decision to remove it. But that is how I was using it. And for my needs it served well.

Wes Macaulay
2004-03-06, 10:15 PM
That's a great tip, Irwin... thank you. If the curtain wall is regular wall, with referencing prevented, I can't pull it into the brick wall intersection if the brick walls were joined by trim/fillet; it wants to jump into the wall as shown in the pic.

http://www.pat.ca/images/support/zoogstickyws2.gif

So then I have to play with the wall join between the brick walls again. This is still not something I've heard of anyone else trying to do though, so I don't imagine that reference restrictions are a feature people will clamor to keep.

Besides modelling families outside the project or using linked files, I'm just trying to find some ways to make the model less reactive.

What Steve was doing is the only reason I would have ever suggested reference restrictions, and thanks to design options, I would agree that we don't really need reference restrictions anymore. But maybe someone else has an idea on how they might be used...?

irwin
2004-03-15, 05:52 AM
I am using reference restriction to show two versions of a building, one with a locker room and one without. Reference restrictions allowed me to put them in separate worksets and stop cleanup issues I was having. With design options I could tackle it differently now. This project is too far down the road to really factor in your decision to remove it. But that is how I was using it. And for my needs it served well.
You can't enable workset reference restrictions in a project in 6.1 if they weren't already enabled in that project. If you enabled workset reference restrictions in a project in 6.0 or earlier, then you will still be able to use them in that project in 6.1. However, the current plan is that in any future versions after 6.1 these reference restrictions will be removed. You will still be able to retrieve the file and work with it, but as you add new elements and make changes the software will no longer prevent relationships between those worksets.