By following the best practices outlined in this article, you will be able to make the most of the Revit BCF Manager, ensuring smoother workflows and more efficient management of Issues within the projects.
Update your Revit IFC exporter
The default IFC exporter is installed with all Revit versions. However, if you haven't updated it recently, it might be outdated. To ensure better control over schema versions and to benefit from bug fixes, we recommend using the latest open-source IFC exporter published by Autodesk.
To check if your IFC exporter has not been updated, look for a missing version number in the IFC exporter menu.
Make sure to use the same coordinate system in your project as the one in the BCF Manager
Proper model origin coordination is crucial as it directly impacts how your Issues viewpoints are displayed and processed by the BCF Manager.
If Issues are created based on specific coordinate origins that are later modified, double-clicking on those Issues may lead to incorrect camera positions. This occurs because the original coordinate origin used during the creation of the Issues has been changed. As a result, the elements in the view may no longer align with the updated coordinates. In some cases, this could lead to an empty viewpoint or a viewpoint with missing model elements.
To avoid this, ensure that your Revit BCF Manager and IFC settings exports use a consistent coordinates base point, whether it be the Survey point, Shared Coordinates, or Project Base Point.
⚠️ Attention: Internal Origin is not currently supported by the Revit BCF Manager.
This change in the settings will only need to be done once in a project. Note that if an Issue has already been created and this change is made, it will have no effect on already created Issues. It will only impact newly created Issues.
Ensure the right components are stored in your Issues using the viewpoint information panel
To effectively communicate with your team, Issues viewpoints can remember which components should be isolated or hidden by linking your model's components to the Issue's viewpoint using their unique Ifc GUID. If you notice that an element appears to be missing in your Issue, you can check the model elements by using the viewpoint information icon highlighted in the image below.
This feature in the Revit BCF Manager provides an overview of the elements captured in an Issue, helping you determine whether they are present, missing, or located in a linked model.
By checking the status color of the items in this panel, users can determine whether the BCF Manager can successfully retrieve the model elements:
If the components appear in black and their Revit ID is visible, they exist in your model and should be isolated/hidden.
If the components appear in black but the Revit ID is not visible, they are likely in a linked or detached .RVT file and cannot be found in your current model.
If the components appear in red, they are missing entirely, most likely because the model file they belong to is not open or components are no longer present in your model.
Use the section box function when working with Linked Files in Revit
Due to limitations in the Revit API, our BIMcollab BCF Manager cannot access the Ifc GUIDs of elements from linked files. This restricts its ability to isolate or hide those elements. As a result, if all the elements in an issue are located within a linked file, the BCF Manager won't be able to locate them and your viewpoint will be empty.
💡 Tip: Access the BCF Manager viewpoint info panel explained above to know if your issues contain elements from linked files.
In this situation, combining the quick zoom-to and section box functions from the BCF Manager will help you overcome this limitation. Although you may not be able to recreate the exact original viewpoint from your issue, it will allow you to enclose all affected components in your issues within a section box while keeping linked models visible.
Learn how to work with Linked files in Revit:
Use Zoom-to functions available in the BCF Manager
To avoid slow performance, you can consider adjusting the BCF Manager zoom-to functions. These give you the chance to decide how much information will the BCF Manager process, wether you want to either retrieve all the info in your viewpoint (hidden or isolate elements), or simply retrieve the camera location to quickly find the affected area in your model.
Choose between three modes of Zoom-to in the Revit BCF Manager, which are Smart, Quick and Full.
The Quick option focuses exclusively on the camera location and is the most recommended for an agile workflow.
The Full option retrieves all the viewpoint information and attempts to replicate the original viewpoint as accurately as possible.
The Smart option optimizes performance by allowing the BCF Manager to switch between Full and Quick, based on the amount of information stored in the viewpoint.
📝 Note: Revit, as other BIM applications do not support override colors for Issues. This means you might find that components in the viewpoint are displayed in their original color when opened in these applications rather than the modified colors shown from the Issues.
💡 Tip: Learn more about the Zoom-to options in Revit BCF Manager:
Create view templates in Revit to improve Issue visualization
In Revit, you can create view templates to manage how model elements appear when you double-click on an Issue in a project using the BCF Manager. This allows you to ensure consistency in the display of model views.
This can be done by applying the following specific names to your templates depending on the view type:
Template name for a 3D view: BCF Manager 3D
Template name for a 2D floor plan: BCF Manager PLA
Template name for a ceiling plan: BCF Manager CEI
Template name for a section or elevation: BCF Manager S/E
⚠️ Attention: Please note that the naming is case-sensitive in the BCF Manager.
If you are working in a shared model or collaborative workflow, additional considerations may apply to avoid troubles or limitations regarding workset ownership when collaborating with other users. Check out our article Use the BCF Manager with a shared Revit model for more information
💡 Tip: Learn how to create BCF Manager view templates: