Some little juicy tit-bits within Revit 2015!

by Dennis Collin

Revit 2015 has been out for a little while now and whilst some of discipline specific enhancements have been well documented, including sketchy lines display in views for architects, rebar and schedule enhancements for structural engineers and improved object display settings and pipe / duct connections for building service engineers. I haven't seen so much said on the core improvements within the Revit engine and object behaviours in the core platform.

When training new users in Revit, a common issue is the turning off of the properties dialogue box and or the Project Browser. In the past we had to navigate the ribbon (quite a task for a new user) or setup some keyboard shortcuts, which aren't to everyone's tastes. Instead many users rely on the Right Click strategy (which also works very well for many AutoCAD based solutions)

Within Revit 2015 right clicking brings up Project Browser (and System Browser, if enabled and are using Revit the MEP environment) on a right click menu as well as the properties dialogue.

This I think will be popular for all users, but particularly for new users who perhaps find Revit a bit of a steep learning curve.

Another enhancement which is very welcome is the ability to double left click to activate AND deactivate views on sheets. (you could only use this function to activate views in 2014 previously) However if desired other methods for view activation can be found by right clicking on the view and accessing said command within a context menu.

Selection filter controls introduced in Revit 2014

Pinned elements has also undergone a welcome and recent change. It is an area which I always get questions on. Or how Revit treats pinned elements and how do we stop people 'ruining' the model! In the past you could delete elements which were pinned. But at least Revit would alert you to the fact. On the Revit 2014 platform you gain the ability to make pinned elements non-selectable which is very welcome, along with linked files, ‘underlaid’ elements and face selection. However now pinned elements cannot be deleted until you 'unpin' them! resulting in the following dialogue box if such an operation is attempted. Very nice!

Many other elements have also been improved like the graphics display control. Potentially speeding up 'screen regeneration times' As of writing this article I havent made any comparisons between view opening and display performance. But I imagine overall project performance should be a lot more speedy than the same Revit project in an earlier version.

I will do some tests in this area, and other useful improvements and comment on this further in a future blog.