What's New in Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2011

User Interface Improvements

Several changes and new features were added to the Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2011 User Interface.

The new Properties Palette is “modeless,” so you have constant access to both view and element properties, without having to interrupt your design workflow. The new palette is dockable, resizable and supports multiple monitor configurations.

The Quick Access Toolbar has been enhanced with a new dialog for customization. The dialog allows you to reorder your tools and add separators, for better organization and grouping of commands.

The Keyboard Shortcuts dialog provides an easier way to assign keyboard shortcuts to all of your tools, including tools that were previously inaccessible for shortcuts. Search and filter options are also available. Shortcuts are immediately available upon closing the dialog box without restarting Revit.

Several new tools have been added to the right-click context menu, including Repeat last command, Repeat Commands recently used and Select All Instance Visible In View.

Worksets and Design Options controls have been relocated to the Status Bar area.

Design Productivity

Elevation tags are now fully customizable and can be designed based on your company standards

Improvements have been made to text and leaders that include the ability to display a border around text notes, control the vertical alignment of leaders and create lists with bullets and numbered formatting.

Sheet Guide Grids are available on sheet views which allows for alignment of views across multiple sheets. Reference elements in your views, such as Levels, Grids and Reference Planes can be snapped to Guide Grids. The grid spacing can be adjusted for individual sheets.

Analysis and Visualization

Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011 enables you to simulate the sun path. The sun path is a visual representation of the sun's range of movement across the sky at the geographic location you specify for a project. The sun path displays in the context of your project and includes on-screen controls for positioning the sun at any point within its range of movement.

Visual Styles: In addition to Wireframe, Hidden Line, Shaded and Shaded with Edges, Revit Architecture now has two new visual styles:

Consistent Colors is a Shaded with Edges view that covers the model in even lighting, so you don’t have to worry about dark areas of the model due to undesigned lighting conditions
Realistic is a shaded view with ‘live’ rendered materials and textures, including decals. It offers the ability to have a working view that looks almost like a rendering.

Linked File Improvements

Workset Control: Workset visibility control has been simplified with easier access to global and per-view visibility controls at any time in your work process.

View Filters: Additional granularity has been added to the control of view filters between host and linked projects, with the option to allow host view filters to act upon the linked model geometry.

Element Tagging: Revit Architecture now supports tagging of linked elements directly in the host file. This feature enables users to centralize all of their tags in one project, as opposed to managing tags for similar elements in multiple files.

Performance Enhancements

Application startup
Model open
Synchronize with Central file
Linked files
User interface reaction time

API Enhancements

Dynamic model update helps enable external applications to react to changes in particular elements or changes to selected categories.

Analysis visualization framework helps enable external applications to graphically display detailed visual results of model analyses within Revit-based software.

Advanced selection and element filtering enables more precise selection behavior and access to advanced selection and filtering options that can help improve speed and usability of applications.

Model update on demand allows Revit Architecture to react to many queued changes at once, helping to improve the speed of sequential programmatic edits.

UI tools: Developers now have access to a wider range of UI widgets, which will help to create a consistent look and feel and a more integrated experience.

Application idling event enables developers to take advantage of idle processing cycles within Revit Architecture to help accomplish tasks such as analysis calculations or updating external databases.

Custom error handling: Developers can display custom errors and warnings in Revit-based software’s standard interfaces, as well as suppress warnings.

This page last edited on Monday, February 14, 2011