Author

Ryan Lenihan

Why Revit Grids Disappear (and How to Fix It)

It’s a common issue, your grids show up fine in one view, but disappear in another, or sometimes grids copy/monitored from one source appear, but don’t appear from a second source. Before you assume something’s broken, here’s a checklist of the usual suspects and what to do about them. Common Reasons Grids Aren’t Showing Grid extents don’t cross the levelGrids…

Half-Baked Solutions Looking for Real Problems

Digital By Sep 11, 2025 No Comments

I came across this video recently, and it nails the problem with so much of the AI hype right now. At the end of the day, most of it is just fancy autocomplete. The video makes the point from a using AI in coding perspective, posing that every extra line of code you add is another liability. The same is…

Optimising IFC Files in Python

Digital By Sep 04, 2025 No Comments

I came across a Python-based IFC optimiser built on top of IfcOpenShell. It was solid, removing unused spaces, orphaned entities, and redundant metadata, but I saw room to push it further. The original script handled: Good start. But I was dealing with a 517mb Ifc file and wanted to see what else I could get out of it, see if…

A Brief Dubai Adventure

Stepping away from the world of BIM and construction tech for a moment, I recently had the opportunity to visit Dubai for work, as part of two global standardisation initiatives. It was great to catch up with old colleagues from Dubai and Ireland, and meet new people from Poland, the UK and the US. One of the best parts of…

Building a Material Cube Farm

When you’ve got 200+ materials in your model and someone in the viz team asks for a preview, the last thing you want to do is manually place and assign materials one by one to a cube. But that’s exactly what we were staring down on a recent project — a clean export of every used material in the Revit…

From Niche to Necessary. Making Revit Skills Count in a BIM World.

Digital By Aug 14, 2025 No Comments

In a recent Reddit thread, a Revit modeller shared their frustration after spending 9 years creating high-quality, parametric Revit families for big building services brands. Thousands of families, deep knowledge of lookup tables, nested content, type catalogues.. and yet, they now find themselves unemployed and wondering if those skills still hold value. It’s a question that resonates deeply within the…

Setting IFC Material Overrides for Cable Tray and Conduit

Digital By Aug 07, 2025 No Comments

In a previous post, we looked at how to set IFC material overrides for pipe fittings. But when it comes to cable tray and conduit, things get a bit trickier. Unlike pipe and duct, cable tray and conduit don’t belong to a system in Revit, so there’s no MEP System parameter to piggyback off. That’s why most teams colour them…

Dynamo vs. Revit API. Choosing the Right Tool for Your BIM Automation Needs

Digital By Jul 31, 2025 No Comments

A recent post on the r/BIM subreddit sparked an interesting discussion: should you learn Dynamo or the Revit API for automating tasks in Revit? As a BIM professional, you’re likely no stranger to the quest for efficiency and automation in your workflows. But with multiple tools at your disposal, it can be daunting to decide which one to invest your…

The Highest Paid Opinion in the Room

Ever been in a meeting where everyone magically agrees with the boss? No debate. No pushback. Just a room full of nodding heads. That’s the HIPPO effect—when the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion wins by default. And it’s one of the fastest ways to kill good ideas. Why This Is a Problem The second the big boss shares their thoughts, most…

Your Pipe Fittings Are Grey in IFC? Here’s Why (And How to Fix It)

You’ve exported your model to IFC. Pipes look great. Fittings? Grey. Again. What’s going on? This one trips up a lot of teams, because pipe fittings in Revit don’t actually carry system data, even though they look like they do. So when you rely on system-assigned materials for your IFC exports, fittings get left behind. Revit’s built-in exporter just shrugs…

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