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Revit 2014 SDK and Visual Debugging Tools

Originally Published in

Two hot topics for today, especially the first:

Updated Revit 2014 SDK

An updated Revit 2014 SDK is live on the ADN Open Revit developer page ↗ now:

www.autodesk.com/developrevit ↗

This version includes RevitLookup and the AddInManager!

Visual Debugging Tools

Rudolf Honke of Mensch und Maschine acadGraph GmbH ↗ discovered a glitch in the definition of the room solids in one of the standard sample RVT project files.

Rudi says: When testing VRML exporter with Revit 2014, I noticed that the brand new rac_sample_project.rvt has some inconsistencies.

I export the ClosedShells of the rooms into VRML format to display then in my browser. On the left side you see overlapping room volumes from ‘Hall’ and ‘Entry Hall’:

Overlapping room volumes

‘Kitchen and dining’ has an upper edge that needs to be cut off:

Upper edge sticks out

‘Hall’ has two ears protruding into the sky:

Hall with ears

I noticed this when debugging the funny results my application was producing.

Since it is not the code, I concluded it must be the input that was corrupted…

Without a visual tool like this, it is quite hard to evaluate what’s wrong.

Jeremy adds: You can also observe this using the Export > gbXML command:

Overlapping room volumes

‘Kitchen and dining’ has an upper edge that needs to be cut off:

Upper edge sticks out

‘Hall’ has two ears protruding into the sky:

Hall with ears

Furthermore, the Revit 2014 program folder contains a utility named gbXML2dwfx.exe.

If you drag and drop a gbXML file onto this it will create a DWFx file that can be viewed in Autodesk Design Review ↗, the free 2D and 3D DWF viewer, which provides more functionality than many VRML viewers.

Response: Interesting. GbXML2Dwfx.exe appears to be new in Revit 2014.

Regarding the geometry, it is important to note that you cannot rely on geometrical integrity of your Revit Elements.

I faced this problem previously, not only with rooms but also with walls.

Every cut-off and every Boolean operation makes the geometry more complex, and rounding errors may occur.

This totally confirms the GiGo principle of Garbage in, garbage out ↗, slightly less helpful than FiFo ↗…