Enhance Spacebar Functionality: Enable Simultaneous 90° Rotation and Flipping for Families

[tobias.tschorn]

Enhance Spacebar Functionality: Enable Simultaneous 90° Rotation and Flipping for Families

Core Idea: The spacebar should allow a family to be both rotated in 90° increments and flipped (mirrored) during the placement process, without one function canceling out the other.

Problem Description: In Rev Modeling it, the space bar is an incredibly useful tool for quick orienting components. By default, it rotates a family in 90-degree steps.

As shown with the provided cabinet example, families can be configured so that the spacebar triggers a flip/mirror action instead (e.g., to change the door swing from left to right). This is extremely practical as it eliminates the need for separate families or types (e.g., "Cabinet Left" and "Cabinet Right").

However, the major drawback is that this flipping functionality completely overrides the default 90° rotation. If a user wants to both flip and rotate the cabinet, they must first place the component, then flip it using the spacebar, and finally use the separate "Rotate" command to orient it correctly. This interrupts the workflow and is unnecessarily cumbersome.

Proposed Solution: Implement a combined functionality that allows both actions to be used in parallel during the placement command. This could be easily achieved using a modifier key:

Spacebar: Executes the primary action defined in the family (e.g., flipping the door swing).

SHIFT + Spacebar: Executes the secondary, default action—rotating the component by 90°.

This would allow the user to quickly cycle through all four primary orientations (e.g., Left-hand/0°, Left-hand/90°, Right-hand/0°, Right-hand/90°) while placing the component, without ever needing to exit the placement tool.

Benefits of this Implementation:

Massively Improved Workflow: Components like doors, windows, furniture, and casework could be positioned and oriented correctly in a single, fluid step. 

Reduced Complexity: Fewer family variations and types would be needed, simplifying project and library management.

More Intuitive User Experience: The functionality would be consistent and easy to learn, as it builds upon a well-established tool.

This small but clever adjustment would provide a significant quality-of-life improvement and noticeably boost efficiency in daily Revit use. I hope the development team will consider this valuable enhancement!

 

[david_sartori6N3EF]

This would be useful for placing doors as well so that you can change the swing in/out and left/right.

[tobias.tschorn]

ideally, pressing the spacebar should toggle through the four main states in a loop: inside-left, inside-right, outside-left, and outside-right. This behavior is possible, but it depends on the family creator integrating both flip controls during its creation.

[Susana_Duarte_LMSI]

Actually, and because we are talking about doors, it would be great if that "position" could be associated with a hard-core parameter so we could then know how many doors are left and right and if any have the mirror activated (and thus having the room information wrong, for example). That parameter should show the same info regardless if the user used the flip arrows or the flip tool...

Now that is the major improvement for all trades (MEP included - because they should not mirror some equipments, and that way we could catch that with a simple schedule and some filters).

Make sure we could then create a shared parameter to "rename" whatever Autodesk decides to be the default values of this hard-core instace parameter by family - so we can put that information translated in our schedules to do the cost quatification. - This kind of formulas are not yet possible for text, I think... (another major improvement!)

[MiWolff]

Just to make sure everone knows this (and I have a means to find this again): When inserting components and they appear at your mouse pointer, hovering over a wall or slab edge will use that as ruler when you hit the space bar. This worked for all non-hosted components for me.