On August 21, 2019 Autodesk continued with their recent tradition of releasing a point release of their flagship BIM software, Revit. To provide their subscribers with new features, enhancements, and fixes since their release of Revit 2020 back in April. Revit 2020.1’s enhancement list is quite the feat, with things from reinforcing cover, API modifications, to improvements on the all new path of travel tool that was released with Revit 2020.
Here is a list of my Fave Five enhancements:
The Path of Travel tool was released in Revit 2020 and this brought on a functionality that architects have been wanting for a while. While the initial release was nice and gave users the functionality that we wanted, it left us wanting more.
With the release of 2020.1, several of the functions were enhanced. The start and end points can now be modified easier, allowing users to update the route easier. Users can now also tag, schedule and view, the room names and numbers of the start and end points.
1: Path of Travel From and To Room Tagging
There is also now a Dynamo Node that allows a list of start and end points to be provided and it will generate the path of travel, this will aid in generate several paths very quickly. The list of obstacles has also grown giving users more control over the route analysis. Lastly, there is now a Reveal Obstacles display setting, that allows users to see what is being considered an obstacle before running the analysis. With all these enhancements to the tool, I am excited to see how people start use it.
2: Path of Travel's Reveal Obstacles View Display
My second favorite item includes a feature in schedules that all users have wanted for years, since we started expanding our use of schedules. The ability to schedule data in Revit is one of the great powers of the program. However, sometimes that multi-line list of data is difficult to follow. While we can break that list up and make it a little easier to read; having the ability to create a table style of graphic like Excel or AutoCAD has been a request forever.
With the release of Revit 2020.1, our requests have been answered, with the function, Stripe Rows. While we don’t get the ability to change the colors of these striped rows to our wonderful blues, oranges, greens and reds that we love in Excel; we do get an elegant yet useful light gray. Now for the bad news, these striped rows are only visible in the schedule editor, not on the sheet and they are not printable. Guess that leaves room for future improvements.
3: Schedule Striped Rows
My next favorite is a simple setting that I have struggled with for years. I every time we model a roof or floor and it touches a wall, we get the pop-up asking if we would like to attach the highlighted walls to the roof/floor. While there are many different workflow thoughts on this, mine has always been to respond NO, so that I can control the individual attachments, but the default highlighted response in the pop-up was YES.
Finally, now the tables have turned and the default response is DO NOT ATTACH, and it will remember your choice if you choose to ATTACH.
4: Wall Attachment Dialogue Box
Another enhancement that I am a big fan of, is something that I have heard time and time again from electrical designers, why in the world is the homerun line always have to be so long when using Revit’s auto wire command? Autodesk listened and this next enhancement has reduced the length of the default homerun line by almost a 1/3. This should help with keeping electrical drawings cleaner, easier and faster.
5: Electrical Wire Homerun Default Length
Last but not least of the new features/enhancements, my Fave Five is the inclusion of Dynamo Core 2.2 / Dynamo Revit 2.1 with the update. Dynamo is one of the under utilized tools that Autodesk offers and I believe is because of the lack of knowledge and/or the fear of scripting that many people have.
6: Dynamo 2.2.1
This is only a small selection of enhancements that were included with the Revit 2020.1 release. For a complete list of enhancements, please visit the Autodesk Release Notes.
There are also a pretty healthy list of issues that were resolved with this update as well. These can all be seen on the Autodesk Release Notes Issues Resolved page.
Enjoy and Happy BIMing!
