What if Revit® could imitate PowerPoint? Sometimes we really miss the Bring to Front function when we build sheets, and so we decided to develop the same in our architectural program.
example of use: The most common situation where you'll need the tool is when you have to deal with the composition of a Sheet that has some views overlapping like this one below.
How to
This argument of today has been spoken for a long and is never "solved" since every Revit user knows that deleting the viewport and placing it back does the trick... Yes, true, but shall we talk about the time unnecessarily spent? and the precision/location of the viewport??
The proposed solution does exactly what is quoted above, but automatically! You can find the script already cooked and working in pyM4B or, for those of you more passionate about Dynamo, in our latest release of the custom node library (Macro4BIM).
pyM4B
Here is a classic GIF showing the function in action. As you can see is pretty straightforward, and the viewport "movement" updates live with the click of the mouse*.
We took this example as the chance to show also the situation with the wrong order of the viewports, for then quickly solve the order by clicking on the viewport supposed to stay in front.
Macro4BIM Dynamo custom node
For this workflow, you just need to provide an arranged list of viewports to the custom node. The M4B node will "move" them to have the latest element of the list as the more in front.
To integrate this node into your team, we suggest creating a Dynamo Player solution like this:
And the back of the scene of this beauty above is this Dynamo graph, don't be afraid of the "yellow node" in the input. That is totally normal by the moment that the node itself deletes its input for placing back in the provided order.
Curiosity: the viewports do not necessarily have to be on the same sheet. The node will calculate and individually perform the discussed action per each input.
We hope you found this post as interesting as applicable. May our Revit model print nice axonometric cross sections!!!