by Dennis Collin
Recently I posted about how the T4R suite add-in could deliver benefits and efficiencies with an office using Revit. In Part 1, T4R’s annotation and enhanced filtering tools make performing Revit tasks so much easier and more efficient with the enhanced tools.
The T4R suite can be accessed from here.
Once installed some additional tabs are added with some useful extras.
Fig 1. T4R tools panel showing both subscription and the free tools, with the Enhanced Legend functions highlighted.
Legend View generation, using Revit’s out of the box tools, is somewhat manual and rudimentary, where components must be placed manually into a legend view and annotated with conventional uncoordinated text notes. This is totally contrary to the whole BIM coordination philosophy! Many users simply just place a typical CAD file instead! However, this task can be achieved more smoothly with T4R’s subscription set of commands.
T4R has a few Legend generation tools. The first of these, the Wall Legend Function will place a Legend Component for each wall within a project. A text note linked to the Wall families description is placed adjacent to it. If desired, additional text notes and dimensions can be added subsequently.
Fig 2. Legend views featuring Walls, Doors and Windows can be created more easily.
In addition to wall legends, general component legends can be created including elements like Doors and Windows. This function puts each component as a separate view, along with some selected parameters and some dimensions.
The third Legend tool not only creates legend views of the components but also places the legend views onto a selected sheet. If not enough space is available, then additional sheets are created, with suitable numbering and naming applied.
Fig 3. T4R’s Legend generation tool brings a much-needed productivity boost to Legend view creation!
Other useful tools include a bulk upgrading utility to migrate legacy versions of component and system family versions to the current release. The function allows the original file versions to be retained in its original directory and the upgraded files in a different location and suitable suffices or prefixes being added if required.
Another key function is the improved Parameter Manager. This command allows users to manage and filter parameters within the current project. It lists the parameters and provides information to the nature of the parameter whether it would be Project/Shared or Instance/Type based.
Fig .4 T4R’s Parameter managers environment makes it user for Users to keep track of their parameters!
A similar environment is also available for the bulk editing and assignment of parameters to Revit component families.
It still surprises me that coordinate values are still not accessible as standard parameters to elements for tagging and scheduling within Revit. However, with T4R’s coordinate tool, shared parameters are assigned to elements, providing coordinate positions relative to the project base point and north and to the survey point and true north.
These parameters can be inspected and removed if required using T4R’s parameter manager if required.
Fig 5. Assigning coordinates to a user selectable range of categories or selections.
Revit can make certain categories location aware when scheduling. This is useful for Door, Lighting and Equipment schedules. However, this function is not available for all categories such as planting, which is a major component of Landscape Architecture, for example, producing planting bed schedules. However, with T4R’s element location tool, Revit can access additional categories such as Planting and create a shared parameter reading Revit room data providing the element with a location. Furthermore, this parameter will be updated with model changes if required!
Fig 6. T4R has some useful features for Site modellers and Landscape Architects!
For Interior designers and architects there is a Room Finishes tool, where T4R’s Room Finishes command will read the facing material of all walls, floors and ceilings etc. and combine the material names into Room object parameters, listing different materials with a comma.
Fig 7. T4R has a Room finishes function useful for Interior Designers!
T4R’s commands also come with some other useful time saving commands, a bulk geometry join tool (useful for floor and wall intersections), a wall description generator, for the quick labelling of wall materials and dimensions, a batch level generator, an enhanced MS Excel export function and a collection of sheet generation utilities. Once installed these enhancements make many more tasks easier, more efficient, and easy to get used to!
In summary, the T4R set of tools extends Revit’s standard offerings by saving time in many typical and repetitive tasks. My main highlights are the much-needed Legend View generation tool as well as the Parameter manager making it easier to make, create and edit parameters stored within the project, families and Shared Parameters file. Whilst some functionality can indeed be achieved with Dynamo scripting, using Add-ins via the API performs tasks faster, in a more reliable way and if necessary, tasks can be performed on multiple files.
In future I will go through some of the main features provided with the T4R collection in some more detail, which should be of interest to anyone who wants to become more productive with Revit.