Custom Revit Elevation Tags - Part 2

Sorry it has taken me a while to get back to this post. In a post a couple weeks ago, I shared the steps to create a custom elevation tag with a PDF excerpt from the soon to be published Aubin Academy Master Series: Revit Architecture 2011. (Sorry the book is slow to store shelves. I am assured by the publisher that it will be here soon...)

Meanwhile, here is the second part of the tutorial on creating and adding custom elevation tags in Revit Architecture 2011. This part of the tutorial is from Chapter 4 in the new book. The previously posted excerpt was from Chapter 10. (In the book, I show you first how to load a pre-built tag that I provide in Chapter 4, and then how to build it yourself later in Chapter 10).

You can find a PDF with the steps here.

If you did not build the tag, the previous post explaining how to do so, or you can simply download the completed Revit file here.

I hope you find this post helpful. Have fun creating your new elevation tags!

Teaching Revit at Moraine Valley this Fall

I'll be teaching MDT-292 at Moraine Valley Community College again this Fall. The course is Tuesday and Thursday evenings 6:00 to 8:15 PM. The college description for the course is found toward the bottom of this page: http://www.morainevalley.edu/schedule/bin/descriptions.asp?prefix=MDT.

Moraine Valley Community College is located in Palos Hills, IL. If you are in the Chicago area, you might want to check it out.

Aubin Academy Master Series: Revit Architecture 2011

The 2011 edition of Paul F. Aubin's Mastering Revit Architecture is almost here. The book is being re-branded this year as part of the Aubin Academy Master Series. As we do every year, the entire book has been revised, new material added for 2011, existing content enhanced to reflect current best-practices and techniques and where found, errors and omissions fixed. This year's edition will be a little larger than last years reflecting new features for 2011.

To give you an example, I would like to share an extract of the text with you here. An exciting new feature in 2011 is the long requested ability to customize elevation tags. The 2011 edition of the book includes two tutorials, one detailing how to load and apply a custom elevation tag (in Chapter 4) and another detailing how to build the custom tag from scratch in the Family Editor (this is in Chapter 10). I have extracted the text of the tutorial from Chapter 10 and posted it here. Enjoy! I will post the steps from Chapter 4 in a future post, so stay tuned.

Excerpt from Chapter 10 of Aubin Academy Master Series: Revit Architecture 2011:

Creating Custom Elevation Tags (download PDF).

More free Revit videos on lynda.com

Several samples of the Revit Architecture 2011 Essentials training that I authored on lynda.com are available for viewing on YouTube.

Here they are:

Revit Architecture 2011 Essential Training now on lynda.com

I am pleased to announce the availability of my first course for lynda.com. lynda.com has been providing high quality video training for creative software for many years. There are thousands of courses to choose from including Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dream Weaver, Flash), Microsoft projects (Office 2007, Office 2010), portable devices (iPhone) and much more.

The list of Autodesk product training offerings has been increasing each year as well with courses currently available for AutoCAD, 3ds Max, Maya, Sketchbook Pro and now, just released, Revit Architecture 2011 by yours truly! I am thrilled to join such an expert team of authors as those assembled by lynda.com.

In this 8 1/2 hour course, I cover all the basics of Revit from modeling, adding annotation, creating basic Families, linking files, plotting and more. You can read the complete description of the course and view free sample movies here.

Book Updates

So its summertime again and that means trying to get book updates finished! We have four books slated for release this year and some re-branding as well. The four books are:


















The Aubin Academy Mastering Series: Revit Architecture 2011 (formally Paul F. Aubin's Mastering Revit Architecture).

The Aubin Academy Mastering Series: AutoCAD MEP 2011 (formally Mastering AutoCAD MEP)

These two are slated to hit stores late August. 

The Aubin Academy Mastering Series: AutoCAD Architecture 2011 (formally Mastering AutoCAD Architecture). This one should hit the streets by mid-September.  

Finally, we have a new title this year: 

The Aubin Academy Mastering Series: Revit MEP 2011. I am co-authoring this my three existing co-authors Gregg Stanley, Darryl McClelland and Martin Schmid. We don't have a pub date for this one yet, but hope to have it out late Fall.  

Workset Crash Solved

Thanks to some folks who left comments here on my previous post, I have figured out the reason for my Revit Workset Crash! Thanks very much.

Here is a cross-post of the solution. This is my response to the AUGI thread that ultimately led to the solution.
If you want to read the entire AUGI thread, you can find it here.

--

I was having a similar issue. I placed a post about it on my blog and got some comments back, one of which directed me to this thread. Steve's reply about the factory post (and disabling addons) did the trick! (Isn't the Internet great? Blog post > Comment > Link to AUGI > Post > Link to Factory > Success! )

Anyhow, here is the summary: In Revit Arch and MEP 2011, I could create a Workshared project, but the next time I tried to open the Worksets dialog, I would crash Revit. STC worked, Save worked, just if you click Worksets, poof.

So, I dragged all Addins to my desktop, tried it, it worked fine. SOOO, I began adding them back to the folder one at a time.

Worksharing monitor - check
Batch Plot - check
MEP Space Naming - check
Revit DB Link - check
Model Review - check
Google Link - check
Avatech Utilities - check (so glad this wasn't it. I use these tools all the time - great stuff).
Revit Extensions - POOF - This is the one!

When I launch, I get the following error:

Revit cannot run the external application "ARECRevitStart" contact the provide of this external tool with the information below

System.IO.FileLoadException
System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'AREXManager,
Version=2011.0.0.1408, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The
parameter is incorrect. ﴾Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070057 ﴾E_INVALIDARG﴿﴿
File name: 'AREXManager, Version=2011.0.0.1408, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' ‐‐‐>
System.ArgumentException: The path is not of a legal form.
   at System.IO.Path.NormalizePathFast﴾String path, Boolean fullCheck﴿
   at System.IO.Path.GetFullPathInternal﴾String path﴿
   at System.IO.Directory.InternalGetFileDirectoryNames﴾String path, String userPathOriginal,
String searchPattern, Boolean includeFiles, Boolean includeDirs, SearchOption searchOption﴿
   at System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories﴾String path, String searchPattern, SearchOption
searchOption﴿
   at System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories﴾String path﴿
   at 16X1KUK4svrrlwHMOP.vhGAR3PPbtEL1aD7bU.7KsIl5cW4﴾Object , ResolveEventArgs , String ,
Assembly ﴿
   at System.AppDomain.OnAssemblyResolveEvent﴾String assemblyFullName﴿
   at REX.Common.Start.REXStartProxy.OnStartup﴾﴿
   at REX.AREXRevitStart.AREXRevitStart.OnStartup﴾UIControlledApplication application﴿
   at revitManagedAppStartup﴾MFCApp* pMFCApp, AString* assemblyName, AString* className,
AString* exceptionName, AString* exceptionMessage﴿


You can click CLose and continue. Now admitedly, this is not the first time I have seen this error. I just figured, well, until I need that addon, I won't worry about it. :-) Silly me. Well, I have uninstalled it, submitted the report to Autodesk and all systems seem to be a go now.

Thanks to the folks who posted on my blog and helped out here.

Workset Crash

Anyone else having this issue? In Revit 2011, anytime I try to access the Workset dialog, Revit crashes. Happens both when I click the Worksets button and when I try to use the Specify option during open.

What is most annoying is that I get this message about four times before it finishes crashing. Even worse than that, it happens in both Revit Architecture and Revit MEP 2011. I don't have Revit Structure installed, but i suspect it would happen there too.

Anyone have a potential solution? I have tried the repair and reinstall options. I have not tried to uninstall and reinstall yet, because I am not looking forward to having to do that and wait an hour or so for the process to complete, but that is coming next...

Update to Course|Notes for Revit

Who would have thought there would be so much to do updating Course|Notes reference cards for Revit 2011. I had to create 20 new images. There are only 37 images on the whole card, so that is over 50%!

Course|Notes Reference cards are six page fold out cards (8 1/2" x 11"). They cover many of the basic commands and techniques and serve as an ongoing reference to the most frequently used commands of the software. They are full color and packed with images. I have just sent the new version of Revit Architecture card into production. AutoCAD Arch, AutoCAD MEP will follow shortly. We will also be doing one for Revit MEP later this year.