RevitForum Blog: The best posts of the month of August 2011

The best posts of the month of August in Revitforum.org are:

1) Post #25265 by FBlome in Thread: "Worksets and DropBox - how to do it without getting yourself in deep trouble"
2) Post #27089 by Gordon Price in Thread: "Working views and annotation views - Display of view callouts"
3) Post #26725 by Mark B. in Thread: "Sloping parapet?"

Brief comment about the first post:

In his debut contribution to RFO, Fred Blome, AIA, shares with us his experiences at using DropBox as a means of storing a central file for doing remote collaboration between two people who were in different cities, separated by a 3-hour time zone difference. After trying other alternatives, Fred decided to take the risk of using Dropbox, in spite of having read warnings about "don't use this for serious work". Following some rules for coordinating what to edit and when, which he describes in this post, Fred and his teammate managed to get the work done. Fred recognizes that there are high risks of corrupting the central file, if the rules are not followed carefully. One big risk is that the two parties edit the same element. That would be a guaranteed corruption of the central file. The biggest issue of working with Dropbox for this purpose, is that Dropbox does not have a file lock mechanism to prevent simultaneous saves (as Revit Server does).

For more information, please refer to Post #25265 at Revitforum.org

Brief comment about the second post:

In this post, Gordon Price posted a Revit file to illustrate his solution to a problem posted by Ross Kirby, in regards to how to hide elevation markers that refer to working views which are overlapping elevation markers that refer to annotation views. Ross had tried to use a filter (not specified) that was hiding only the active part of the callout (view name), but not the reference part (the sheet name). Gordon provides a solution by using a second type of elevation marker, named as "Working elevations" for the working views, to be placed near (not overlapping) the default elevation markers for annotation views. Then, he uses a filter for Elevations, by Family and Type, where the name of the family is "Working elevations". That requires to have two types of elevation markers, with different shapes, for clarity: one for annotation views (round), and another one for working views (square). (See illustration).

For more information, please refer to Post #27089 at Revitforum.org

Brief comment about the third post:

This post, by Mark Balsom (Mark B.) illustrates his solution to this question posted by John McCamont: "Is there a way to make a parapet slope with the roof other than cutting the wall profile?, followed later by "Is there a way to make the slope "smart" to match the roof slope (in case the slope changes)?"

After trying first with reference planes, Mark discovers later that by simply modifying the wall with Edit profile, relating the pitch of the wall with the pitch of the roof with a locked dimension (probably using "pick lines" with offset first), now the profile of the wall is associated in a smart way to the slope of the roof.

For more information, please refer to Post #26725 at Revitforum.org