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Please, Please! Please!!!!!! Make Titleblocks Less Painful!

Please, Please! Please!!!!!! Make Titleblocks Less Painful!

(Preemptive apologies for this one, but I feel very strongly about this!)

 

I hate to say it but Autocad Titleblocks are better than Revit.  And that's pretty sad!

 

Revit has about a million flexible ways to get info into a titleblock and that unchecked complexity makes it almost impossible to manage.  In the MEP field we have to manage several models and separate sets and get them all to match.  

 

You have to be a veritable Revit expert to competently manage titleblocks in an MEP (or structural, etc.) production environment!   And explaining the issue to new users or boss-types is impossible.  Here I'll just fix it myself!

 

In Autocad you can XREF in a titleblock and have some parameters write in into the fields.  When the titleblock changes it updates, the users just have to make sure the fields are filled in properly.  Generally they're right where the look like they are.  Pretty simple, two files, only a couple places the info can come from.

 

In Revit here's how confusing this is:

  1. Revit does not allow referencing in a centrallized titleblock.  You can insert a titleblock from a family, but once it's loaded into a model congratulations you have your own version that goes stale.
    • (I need to write another whole diatribe about how I hate this as well.)
  2. Revit allows a titleblock to draw from the following data sources (at least):
    • Sheet Parameters
    • Titleblock (which is not the same as the sheet?!?!?!) parameters
    • Shared Parameters
    • Project Parameters (only OF whichever model that it's in!!)
    • Oh and the above can be both instance or type parameters
    • Let's not forget that static text and numbers can be stored in a titleblock as well

The workflow just ends up being atrocious: 

  1. First ask the architect to send you a PDF so you know what you want it to look like. 
    • Because like many other things in Revit you cannot trust linked models.
  2. Update your titleblock family
    • A) Ask the Architect to send you a titleblock .rfa file or
    • B) open the architects model and pray the RFA you can extract out of there is OK.
  3. Once you have it make sure to manually reload the family.
  4. Then save the family for your other colleagues to do the same thing (btw, better email them because it's all manual).  Autocad notifies you when an XREF is modifies!
  5. Now the fun begins:
    1. There's a date on your sheet....you can click on it and update it...ok cool.  But was that a project parameter that updated all the sheets?  Or (more likely) the "Sheet Issue Date" that exists on each and every sheet in revit as an instance parameter?  So you have to click through all the sheets and click and update.  Unless you make a schedule (or select all instances of sheets) and assign a value. Rage.......rising...must....vent....on....Revit....Ideas!!!
    2. Now I need to add my firms CA # and our PE numbers.  So I hit edit family, now I'm editing the copy of the family in my model.  I get it the way I want, then have to remember to save it out to a central place and again yes notify everyone else to update.
    3. What's the revision info and date supposed to be...wait what's that? every model has a separate set of "revisions/dates/#" lines and they all must be manually synced?
    4. How come this sheet has this logo and that sheet has that logo?  Well the architects used intance parameters (yes/no) to control the visibility of an image...now you've got to go through each sheet and make sure it right.
      • Same for the north arrow, etc.
    5. Bonus Problem:  How come our viewport bubbles look this way, when the architects looks that way?  Nevermind

And then, Oh God! There's a mistake on the titleblock.  They mispelled my company's name! You better clear your afternoon because you're going to spend 2 hours fixing it.  I hope you didn't print and Sign and Seal five sets!

 

Revit really needs to step back and rethink the whole system.  Revit is used in teams.  Things need to match.  The architect should make the master and everybody else's should easily and quickly match that.  Revisions, phases, project parameters, Project info, room tags, text formats, north arrows, callouts, etc, etc, etc.  There's duplicate copies of it everywhere and it's ALMOST ALL JUNK!

 

Simplify man!

 

And don't tell me "Transfer Project Standards".  That heap of junk propagates so much garbage it's almost not worth using!

4 Comentarios
Anonymous
No aplicable

Holy moly! I don't feel bad about my rants anymore!

 

If you take segregated models out of the equation... then titleblocks, grids, levels, scope boxes, project info, etc all get simplified. If all could play nice in one big cloud model!  We are 10 years or more from that.

 

I remember back in the day when A,S,M,E,P  were all in one model... your project had to be the size of a walk in closet though. That workflow was obliterated due to file size and software/hardware limitations.  

 

COME ON Autodesk! You have us in the cloud now.... what are you waiting for to get us all back in one model?

krzystoff
Advocate

I feel your pain, but most of these issues go back to Shared Parameters which are a diabolical mess for most users.  Just adding a Revision schedule to your titleblock is a challenge even for an experienced user, but a piece of cake for any AutoCAD beginner. 

By far the biggest pain with Titleblocks is the North Point — getting the angle to be reliably parametric and adjustable from within the project is almost impossible, and then it doesn't match the project/site orientation — users have to manually update it on every sheet.  With this fact, you are left with many users who skip the step of setting the project angle correctly (because it pretty much does nothing) and then horrified to discover much later that the shadow angles (which we require for Govt Development Approval) are sometimes wrong.  If Titleblocks could support matching the north orientation automatically, this would cease to be an issue since it's immediately apparent from any sheet.

Anonymous
No aplicable

@Anonymous  haha yea, I really railed on this one.  But I stand by it, it's such a miserable mess right now. 

 

These are basic fundamental parts of construction documents.  I think Revit is too busy focusing on the fancy, futuristic 3d, high tech stuff....that they end up not making it easy to just make a set of drawings.  Maybe its because the users and projects are outgrowing the product.  It used to be no big deal to set up 10-20 sheets.  At over 100 sheets in a typical project for just one trade now, it's getting quite hard to manage the same bad old way...

murodesign
Participant

I'm glad i found this opinion, made me feel less bad today. I'm late on Revit, starting entusiast with the way we can get plans and sections without have to "drawing" them, or reduce measuring time, but at what price? I've spend the last two days, not modeling as supposed, but trying to achieve by myself connecting things on a sheet with the ones in titleblock. After all that time i found that it's not possible (Autocad help 10 - Revit help 0, we have to poke around the internet or consume a googled tutorial per day if we want to be proficient). The transition from a cad software were we basically control drawing elements, but control the process, to a system were we supposed to control 3d objects as reality miniatures with time saving promises, after all is leading to a maze of informatic knowledge requirements, which ultimately forces us to spend much more (unpaid) time in front of computers, doing and learning things that has nothing to do with our jobs (speaking by architects).
Furthermore, a software that leads you having a painful relationship with "parameters" at point of consider have to learn programming languages to deal with dynamo... all that in many countries where architects earn miserably. This seams crazy, not architecture!

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