Monday, May 11, 2015

Revit 2016 - Selection Box

You’re already familiar with this new tool, conceptually at least, if you’ve used the 3rd party applications COINS Section Box or Xrev View Box. Just select elements and click the button to generate a 3D view with a section box cropped around those elements.


You may not want to give up those other tools just yet because they may offer more control of the resulting view than this tool does. It carries out the action with your default 3D view so if you didn’t want to mess that one up you need to remember to save it before you use it. It is easy and fast, you decide if you agree.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you know if there is a valid reason why there is no corresponding undo function for this tool ?
I assume there is an underlying reason for not having a keyboard shortcut or other immediate RMB context menu or ribbon button to remove the Selection Box ?
Practically, this tool is of no use (to me) without the ability to dimsiss the section box without the need to go to the first layer Properties dialogue and turn off the section box.
Am I missing something ?

Steve said...

Underlying or valid reason? I have no idea, only the designer and developers could really answer that. I don't think they purposely considered it and said "NO, they shouldn't or couldn't do that". Do the other 3rd party tools offer a way to do that? I haven't used them.

Personally, turning off the section box property isn't a hardship. I usually don't even have to scroll properties to do it, one click, the same or less effort than if a ribbon button or keyboard shortcut allowed me to remove it. I probably wouldn't use it enough to remember a keyboard shortcut for it. Fwiw they assigned BX to the Selection Box tool and I probably won't remember that next time I need to use it.

I doubt it is a matter of it not being possible. More likely, in my view, that they were focused on speeding up the application of the section box to a selection, to do it faster than it could be done with the orient to view right-click option of the view cube. Since, in comparison to that, it is a much simpler task to remove the section box via properties it probably didn't rate as much attention or consideration.