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What happens when you change lighting fixtures in your design? Have you ever wished that you could "see" what would happen before they built it? Well check out this screencast by Autodesk's Jay Ayala and Eddie Perlberg. They will show you how you can benefit from Revit MEP and 3ds Max Design to design, analyze and visualize the optimum lighting design for your building.
Here's a quick tip that may simplify your circuiting process.
When selecting a panel while circuiting, you may have noticed that the order of the panels on the Options bar is ordered based on the distance from the selected devices to the various panels... i.e., panels on the top of the list are closer than panels near the bottom. As you circuit in various areas of your building, this order likely changes:
With the order changing, it may require a bit of dilligence to make sure you are selecting the proper panel.
However, did you know that instead of selecting from the list, you can select the panel from within the model... even if it is in a different view?
If you are going to be circuiting primarily to a certain panel, you can create a separate view with just that panel in it, then, as you circuit, select the panel in that view (instead of from the list). For example, if you have already defined all your circuits, and now need to select the panel to connect them to, you may configure your views as shown below.
Now, as you circuit your various devices, after you click 'Select Panel', instead of selecting from the list, you click in the panel view to activate it, then select the specific panel. No more paning in the model to find the panel, or searching in the list.
Has this ever happened to you?
"Frankly, I’m annoyed by having to turn on my workset every time I create a new view. "
When a workset is created, there is an option to make it not visible by default. If you've run into the scenario above, this box was unchecked when the workset was created.
One work-around is to create a new workset that is 'Visible in all views', and then delete the original workset. When you delete a workset that contains elements, you have to option to move those elements to another workset, so you can move them to the newly created workset. However, be aware that when you do this, those elements may be visible in views where they weren't previously visible (assuming their category is visible in those views). So, you may need to 'clean up' after yourself, to turn off the worksets where they're not needed.
New in 2011 is the ability to change your mind about the workset visibility default. In the worksets dialow, there is a new column titled 'Visible in all views' where you can toggle this setting.
This setting is then tied to the 'Use Global Setting' option in a view's visibility graphic overrides settings. The Global Setting will indicate Visible or Not Visible as appropriate. You also have the options of Show and Hide as in previous releases.
I have advised against unchecking the 'Visible in all views' option prior to 2011, because if a file had worksets marked as such, there was no way to turn on the worksets when linked into a host model. However, now with 2011, you have the ability to control the visiblity of worksets in linked files.
However, I would still advise to exercise judgement when making something not visible by default. Consider a scenario where roof drains are on a workset marked not visible in all views in the architectural model. The plumbing designer, not knowing any better, doesn't go looking for roof drains in toggled off worksets.. he just expects to see them if they exist in the project. IMO, it is better to have things visible, then turned off by the 'view owner' if/when not needed.
Better control of workset visibility, especially for linked files, is a great enhancement in Revit 2011.
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