Explore how the PyRevit plugin can enhance your use of Autodesk Revit, offering a variety of tools developed by daily users to make the software more efficient and user-friendly. This article in particular focuses on the custom pattern creation tool, a feature superior to its native counterpart in Revit.
Key Insights
- PyRevit is a plugin for Autodesk Revit, developed by regular users of the software, offering a range of tools that improve its functionality and make it more user-friendly.
- The plugin includes a custom pattern creation tool that provides an easier method of pattern creation than the code-based system native to Revit.
- Once PyRevit is installed, users can explore a variety of tools beyond the scope of this article, but the focus here is on creating custom patterns and applying them to a project.
This lesson is a preview from our Revit for Interior Design Course Online (includes software) and Interior Design Professional Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Before we get going on our next set of lessons here, what I wanna do is make sure we're all on the same page and have the same plugin. And so this is a link that we'll provide for you guys, but this is to install PyRevit and just to prove that it's a real software, not something random here. But it's RadTools for Autodesk Revit, and I totally agree with that.
It's a software we use in our office and it works incredibly well. It has a lot of the things that I feel like the software should have come with, but people who use it every day develop the tools and have provided this extension for free. And so we're gonna download the latest release.
And then we wanna get this admin all users installer, which I've already downloaded. And then I'll go ahead and open the executable. And then I'll just run through this.
And so we'll accept the agreement, install it where we know it's gonna go. And then these are the options that we'll want to use. We want the full installation.
And then if you want all these other extensions, you can do those, but we don't need them right now. And there's always an option to do them later. One thing to keep in mind as this runs through the install here is that this program has a ton of features in it, so much more than we're going to use for this class.
Learn Interior Design
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
But there is one, which is the custom pattern creation tool that is so much better than the way that we'd have to do it natively within the software that it's worth installing this plugin just to have that one feature. And once you see what I'm talking about here, you will agree with me 100%. We're gonna go ahead and let this install.
I did close Revit before I started this install because it does need to reboot to load one of the tabs on the ribbon for us. Now that it's finished, I'm gonna hit finish here, and then I'll go ahead and launch Revit. So I've now launched Revit, and I'm getting this warning here that's saying, hey, we're trying to load a plugin.
What do you wanna do? And what I do is I'll just hit always load so I don't see this every time, and it'll go through the process of loading the plugin. And now it's loaded. I'm gonna go ahead and open up our project here.
And remember, anytime we open a model from the recent files window, it's gonna go ahead and ask us to create a new local, which is totally fine. I'm gonna go ahead and say, overwrite the existing, and it's gonna go ahead and open that file. And you can see here, if you take a look up top, we've got two new different ribbons or tabs on the ribbon that we can use.
And so now that it's loaded, there's a couple of things I'll do. I don't need this dockable panel, so I'm gonna go ahead and close that. I'd rather have the screen space.
And then we'll just take a look at the PyRevit ribbon here, and you can see there's a whole bunch of tools in here that we could use. There, like I said, there are so many more than we'll be able to cover within the scope of this class, but we do have a bunch that are very useful, and I encourage you to look into these. But the one that we're gonna focus on here is gonna be this make pattern option.
And we'll go through an exercise in a bit here on how we could do that. But essentially, it allows us to draw a custom pattern, and then we can export it to be the pattern that we wanna create versus using a code-based system that is built into Revit, which is much more difficult to work with. Okay, so now that we've got PyRevit installed, we can move on to the rest of this lesson where we could create some custom patterns and do some more intricate tile work based on the lessons we've gone through previously, and then how we can apply them to a project here.
