Friday, August 16, 2013

Scope Boxes Visibility

I'm a big fan of Autodesk® Revit® scope boxes. I'm also a big fan of Quality Control (QC) views. And therein lies a bit of a rub.

I advocate that a model should have a group of views where each view is dedicated to doing a QC on a specific feature. For example, set up a view that is dedicated to making sure that the grids in the model are in the Shared Levels and Grids workset. The only elements the view displays are the grids that are not in the correct workset. If the view is blank, then the model passes that particular QC item.

I create a QC view to do the same thing for scope boxes. I place those in Shared Levels and Grids too because other firms that link in our model don't need to see our scope boxes, right? So why not put them in the workset that everyone turns off already to get rid of the levels and grids in the linked model?

Now here is the tricky part:

I usually turn off all model categories and all annotation categories except the desired category. However, when I did that, no scope boxes were visible! They were there. I could hover over one with my cursor and select it. But I could not see them. I double-checked visibility settings. I made sure that the scope boxes themselves were set to be visible in that view. No joy.




I then turned on the model categories and, to my surprise, the scope boxes immediately became visible. I thought that the display must somehow be tied to the Generic Models or Lines category but when I isolated to just those categories the scope boxes still disappeared. So I laboriously went thru all the categories, turning them off in small batches, to try to isolate the relevant category.

And it turned out to be something else entirely. As usual. It seems that scope boxes won't be visible unless there are model elements also visible. You see (groan), there were no elements in Generic Models or Lines and that's why the scope boxes disappeared. When I turned on the Electrical Equipment category, or any other single model category that had elements, the scope boxes became visible.


This is a bit unsatisfying because I can't make the QC view blank when everything is ok with the scope boxes. I did change the color and half-tone the Electrical Equipment category, but I'm worried someone will try to "fix" those elements too. Time will tell!

Autodesk, the Autodesk logo, AutoCAD, Navisworks, and Revit are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries.

No comments:

Post a Comment