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FAQ

Tutorials

Here are a bunch of Frequently Asked Questions to help you.

Learn ARChetype & Revit by reading one of our tutorials. Also available via the QARC Plug-in.

How to start a one storey project?

There is no problem with deleting Levels 1 & 2 if you are doing a single storey project. The views deleted will all be related to the levels that you’re not interested in anyway. Don’t forget to move the top plate level down to the correct height for your single storey building, as that is the reference level for the roof.

Is ARChetype a Template (rte) or Project (rvt) file?

The ARChetype is a template in the broader sense of the word – not a Revit ‘template’ per se. Easy to see where the confusion would be. The ARChetype is a Revit Project file and you should open and save it as such. We do supply the ARChetype as a Revit Template file (rte), for those users who want to start a new project using Revit’s template file opening system.

How to add extra levels within the ARChetype?

The ARChetype is setup for 3 storey max buildings but adding levels is not a problem. In a section or elevation, select the Level tool (Architecture tab -> Datum panel). Ensure the Make Plan View box is ticked. This will cause Revit to create a floor plan and an RCP for your new level. Draw in your new level between Level 2 and roof top plate in your project. Adjust your levels to the appropriate heights. Always leave the roof top plate as the upper most level as the roof plan views are associated with this level. Every time you add a level, it means a plan view is created. We suggest you apply the relevant ViewTemplate to it as well. Then as an idea, repeat this methodology and duplicate that view and name it “working” so you have both a sheet version and working version.

How long does it take to load QARC4Revit?

To install the QARC4Revit plug-in, from wo to go, around 5-10 minutes.  That is for the plug-in itself.  Purchasing subscription entitlements is fast, and once payment is processed you have access to those entitlements the next time you load Revit.

QARC4Revit loads each time Revit is opened.  You see a splash screen showing its progress.  It adds up to a minute depending upon your internet speed.

On how many computers can I install QARC4Revit?

Feel free to install QARC4Revit on as many computers as you like.  It will only run on one computer at a time, per user.

Is QARC4Revit an annual subscription product?

Yes it is, for Premium and Premium+.  You will be invoiced on the same month every year.  If you choose not to pay, after four weeks, your access to the paid version will be removed.

Please note, the plug-in is constantly being updated, so staying a subscriber is a good idea!

The Free version of course is yours for as long as it is installed on a computer.

The BIMLocker suite of products are quarterly.  Check out BIMLocker PERSONAL.

How do I uninstall QARC4Revit?

Simple.  Like any piece of software, just Uninstall it via Programs & Features in the Control Panel.  It is a good idea to do this if you pass or sell the computer onto others.

You may want to load QARC4Revit onto another computer, so look at the FAQ about that.

How do I install QARC4Revit onto another computer?

QARC4Revit is a cloud based plug-in, with that content not residing on your computer.  Some items, like tiny thumbnails are cached onto your hard drive, so the QARC4Revit Content Browser does not have to load them each Revit start.  The rest of the plug-in’s functionality and availability is ‘built’ every time you run Revit.  This means any updates or improvements are almost immediately available to you.

Your entitlements belong with your login details and your A360 account.  So if you install QARC4Revit on a computer, and login, on the next opening of Revit, your entitlements automatically arrive.

Please be aware that when you run Revit on a second computer, QARC4Revit is disabled on the first computer.  For each user’s login.

So, to install QARC4Revit on another computer (or the first time), just click on I WANT QARC anywhere on this website, which takes you to the I WANT QARC page.  That page explains the simple installation method.

What do I do when the QARC Browser says “Waiting for Revit Invoke” and it's stuck?

That usually means Revit’s own Task Scheduling Engine has had a hiccup.  We know it can be caused by one of three things.  Your internet is slow at the moment of dragging, or you may have clicked on a command in Revit which confused Revit, or lastly it is caused by too much happening on your computer.

The simplest way to deal with any of these errors is to save, shutdown Revit, reopen.  You see, Revit’s API is a tricky beast, and sometimes just gets upset!

You can also simply wait while your internet catches up, and the families are likely to load, without needing to re-start. If it takes longer than 5 minutes then we suggest save, shutdown Revit, reopen.

The Task Scheduling Engine gets upset as explained here by our coder Justin Brown from Orbis Information Technologies:

The ‘Waiting for Revit Invoke’ message is due to the peculiarities of how Revit requires certain actions to be executed at a low level. The code routine that inserts content into the active project requires the cooperation of Revit’s internal task scheduling engine, so what is actually happening is that we make a request to Revit’s scheduler to perform the insert function, and then wait for it to call back to us to indicate that it is ready to proceed. Very early versions of the plugin would bypass the scheduler, but this would often cause Revit to crash outright, so there’s no real way for us to avoid using the scheduler.

As a result, on occasion it can result in the content browser sitting at the ‘Waiting for Revit Invoke’ stage, or even outright blocking at this step, due to Revit never calling back to us to indicate that it is ready to proceed – either due to higher-than-normal system load or hidden background tasks, but also occasionally for no reason at all (that we are able to discern).

My suggestion would be if you are experiencing the invoke message hanging around for longer than normal would be to check if your machine is under higher-than normal CPU load that could be causing the delay.

Does QARC4Revit run on RevitLT?

The short answer is no, sorry.  RevitLT cannot load plug-ins.

But . . .

If enough LT users request access, we will build something.  Send us an email support@qarcsystems.com.au

How often is content added to the QARC4Revit browser?

Nearly weekly.

But if you need something, let us know.  support@qarcsystems.com.au

If you would like to see a manufacturer’s content in the browser, let them know “I won’t specify your product unless I can find it in QARC4Revit!”

How often is the ARChetype updated?

Roughly annually, around July/August, when most people take up the latest version of Revit.  The ARChetype is our name for the very comprehensive template we provide.  We do update it on an adhoc basis though.

Why is Drag+Drop of System Families so special?

System Family delivery is a unique service in QARC4Revit.  There are two points:

  • Things like walls, rooves and floors are what’s called “System Families” in Revit.  Until our unique plug-in, these system families could only be built within a project file. There is no other method to Drag+Drop them into Revit. You can open a previous project and copy+paste a system family between open projects – if  you can actually find what you are looking for.  That is how others have attempted to resolve this – by creating a small project file with a ‘farm’ (collection) of System Families. This process is extremely cumbersome and a definite deterrent to architects and designers.
  • The other point is a big one.  It involves understanding how materials and rendering works in Revit.  The short version is that a user must be given every texture image file and then know where to put it on the C: drive. After placing it in the specific “right” spot then you have to map the path to this file and ‘teach’ Revit where that is –  for every single instance of its use by the system families. Unfortunately very few Revit users understand this – let alone know how to resolve it. QARC4Revit is unique in that it does all this automatically in the background every time as a user performs the Drag+Drop of the system family.

What are the differences between free and paid content?

The QARC Library has over 4000 items and growing, while the QARC Free library has over 800.  So, just in quantity, the paid version has a very large amount.  It is all Australian relevant and available through Drag+Drop from our unique content browser.  We have created a very large amount of System Families to choose from.  You know – floors, rooves, walls.  But as well there are roof cappings, fascias, gutters and gutter end caps.  Not to mention, dimensions, text and hatches.  And then there are a huge quantity of doors and windows.

The main difference between paid and free is that the free content has not been originally created by QARC Systems, but has been cross checked and adjusted to work, including renderable.

How secure is the QARC4Revit plug-in?

By Glenn Bond, director of Orbis Technologies, who built the plug-in –

For security we used best industry practices for storage, delivery and identification; for security/legal reasons I will not go into much detail of what we did to make QARC4Revit secure and safe to use. Points we can share:

  1. All QARC4Revit executable code is secured and can’t interact with insecure code.
  2. All QARC delivered Content for Revit is not executable at therefore can’t include viruses etc.
  3. All QARC Australian content is hosted in Australia.

Does QARC4Revit affect Revit's performance?

By Glenn Bond, director of Orbis Technologies, who built the plug-in –

As regards Performance we did several things to make QARC4Revit fast enough to have a good user experience.  Important note about how Revit processes loading Plugin’s, only one at a time can be loaded and many of Revit’s processes are what we call synchronous which means only one thing can happen at a time even on a multi core computer.

  1. Startup pre-caching, while there is a delay during a loading of the core QARC4Revit plug-in components this delay is so that all further processing is faster.
  2. QARC4Revit uses asynchronous side loading where possible, this is where our plug-in loaded content is loaded using a separate Thread/CPU on the PC and doesn’t slow Revit down.
  3. Local session caching, files downloaded during a session will be retained for reuse during the session.
  4. Our cloud services are highly optimised for speed and scalability, meaning that no matter how many users are using the system or how much content is being required the system can support users with a quality user experience to the limits of the internet bandwidth available.
  5. Our content is delivered compressed where ever possible.

What does this error message mean - "The request channel timed out . . ."? And what should i do?

The short answer from Peter:

If you are the first user on a day, Azure the cloud platform, needs ‘waking up’.

The longer answer from Justin of Orbis Technologies:

This is primarily caused by the start-up delay of our backend services, and will typically only affect the first user that ‘logs in’ to the QARC services on any given day. Unfortunately, the error message is somewhat obtuse and there is no way to retry the login without completely restarting Revit. We are working on adding a work item to our system and send out a patch to adjust that behaviour.

Why is my computer repeatedly saying QARC4Revit needs to update?

Firstly, refer the addendum at the bottom of the FAQ for more recent advice.

If that fails, try this process.

As explained by Justin from Orbis, May 2020, who code the plug-in:

This is usually caused by a ‘zombie’ Revit instance hanging around in the background that hasn’t closed properly. As the QARC4Revit updater requires all Revit instances to be closed before it can apply the update, if one fails to close for some reason, the update will not apply and you will get the ‘update is available’ message at next launch.

Most of the time, restarting the machine will clean out the zombie processes, but this can occasionally fail to work. I will have a look into changing the update process so that it’s more obvious when the updater is waiting, or has succeeded or failed.

Until then, the best solution for people experiencing the problem chronically is the following-

  1. Restart the machine
  2. Launch Revit. You will get an update prompt when QARC starts. Accept the prompt.
  3. Wait for Revit to fully load, and then close it.
  4. After 4-5 seconds you should receive a UAC prompt for ‘QFRUpdateExtractor’ or something similar, accept the prompt.
  5. Open a command prompt window as administrator (this can be done by searching for ‘command’ in the start menu, right-clicking on the result and selecting ‘Run as administrator’.
  6. Type ‘TASKKILL /IM revit.exe’ and press enter.
  7. You will get one of two results-
    ERROR: The process “revit.exe” not found.
    SUCCESS: Sent termination signal to the process “revit.exe” with PID <number>
  8. The former means that Revit had already cleanly closed, and the update should be applied. In this situation you can re-open Revit immediately with no problems
    The latter means that there was a zombie process floating around which is now closed. Wait 10-15 seconds for the updater to complete, and then re-launch Revit.

Addendum September 2022

After more work on the plug-in, the simplest way to resolve this should be this process:

The reason it’s appearing multiple times for you is because it has not yet been correctly applied – The plugin detects that the running version is older than the latest available, and will thus ask you again until such time that the version matches.

A potential point of confusion is the phrasing of ‘when you next restart’ in the update dialog – The way the update mechanism works is that when ‘yes’ is selected in the dialog, the plugin will download and unpack the update package, and then starts a small worker process which in turn waits until it detects that Revit has been closed, before applying the update package over the installed older version. If you (for example) shut the machine down entirely at the end of the work day without first closing Revit, this worker process will not have time to apply the update, and you will get the prompt again when you next start Revit.

I would suggest the following steps to resolve-

  1. Start Revit, and wait for the update prompt to appear
  2. Select ‘yes’, and wait for QARC and Revit to fully start up
  3. Close Revit
  4. Select ‘Yes’ on the yellow UAC dialog that will next appear (This can take up to 30-60 seconds, depending on the specs of your computer)
  5. Restart Revit. The update prompt should no longer appear.

I have QARC4Revit Free. How do I obtain QARC4Revit Premium or Premium+ if I don't want to use a credit card?

So, you’ve decided to upgrade to Premium (or Premium+).  And you want use a Bank Deposit method.  We need you to ‘purchase’ the product, without actually proceeding to a payment.  We’ll invoice you, and when paid, we can then access the order and show it completed.  We need you to do this so we can trigger the Point Of Sale to then link to the back end of the plug-in to increase your entitlements.

Please go here:

Premium

Premium+

From here on, it is based on Premium.

You’ll see a page like this:

Click on “Add to Cart”

 

Then you get to see this:

Click on “View or edit your cart”

 

Then you’ll see the cart:

Click on “Check out”

 

And the cart should look like this:

Now, of course you are not making any payment.  You’ll end up saying you will pay by Bank Transfer.

So, you need to fill in the Email Address and Password (same as your account registration), and click on “SIGN IN”.

 

You will end up here:

The system has recognised you, and I’m showing you my account on the system.

Because of the nature of BigCommerce (our POS), it doesn’t automatically fill in the billing address, but it is easy as doing this –

Just click in the Billing Address field and up will pop your details.  Just select the Name/Address item.

And you’ll see something like this:

 

Scroll down to this:

Click on “CONTINUE”.

 

You’ll see this:

DO NOT USE the Credit Card section!

Just select “Bank Deposit”.

And it will change to this:

Then select “Yes, I agree . . .” and “PLACE ORDER”.

 

And you get a confirmation:

 

As soon as we see this, we’ll update your order as completed.  And we’ll let you know.

Then all you do is close and open Revit, and it brings your increased entitlements to your session.

What do I do if I get an "Update Available" Message, and what does it mean?

You will see this pop up every so often as you open Revit:

Please click on Yes.

What has happened – an update to the QARC4Revit plug-in has occurred, and your computer needs a bit of a patch.  These updates can vary from very minor changes, to quite big upgrades.

As part of QARC4Revit opening up, you’ll see an annoucement saying the update is downloading.

After you shut down Revit, this dialogue box will appear.

Please click on Yes.  It is quite safe to do so.

There is a possibility that the Update Available message, will keep appearing.  If it does follow this simple process:

The reason it’s appearing multiple times for you is because it has not yet been correctly applied – The plugin detects that the running version is older than the latest available, and will thus ask you again until such time that the version matches.

A potential point of confusion is the phrasing of ‘when you next restart’ in the update dialog – The way the update mechanism works is that when ‘yes’ is selected in the dialog, the plugin will download and unpack the update package, and then starts a small worker process which in turn waits until it detects that Revit has been closed, before applying the update package over the installed older version. If you (for example) shut the machine down entirely at the end of the work day without first closing Revit, this worker process will not have time to apply the update, and you will get the prompt again when you next start Revit.

We would suggest the following steps to resolve-

  1. Start Revit, and wait for the update prompt to appear
  2. Select ‘yes’, and wait for QARC and Revit to fully start up
  3. Close Revit
  4. Select ‘Yes’ on the yellow UAC dialog that will next appear (This can take up to 30-60 seconds, depending on the specs of your computer)
  5. Restart Revit. The update prompt should no longer appear.

What do I do if the material is not showing correctly?

We have written a Tutorial on this.  Please go here for the PDF

Revit is crashing after I installed QARC4Revit. Why?

This can occur if you have installed Revit onto a drive that is NOT the C: drive.

Please contact us straightaway, and coding support will help you directly by running a short routine on your computer to ‘tell’ QARC4Revit where Revit is located.  07 3356 9051 or support@qarcsystems.com.au

If you want to have a go yourself, please follow these instructions from Justin, from Orbis who coded QARC4Revit.

 

The command I used was ‘mklink’, which I used to create a directory symbolic link that our software can use to find Revit’s API DLLs during its startup process.

As part of the plugin startup process, our plugin creates a set of lightweight linker files that allow Revit to properly load and reference our plugin modules (This is so we don’t have to send out a full update whenever we make a small change to functionality within e.g. the browser), however in order to do that, it requires access to the ‘RevitAPI.dll’ and ‘RevitAPIUI.dll’ files, located within the Revit install directory. It searches for these files within the “C:\Program Files\Autodesk” directory and all its subdirectories, which can cause issues when Revit isn’t installed in this location.

There are two potential solutions-

Create a subfolder within “C:\Program Files\Autodesk” (the name doesn’t much matter), and copy ‘RevitAPI.dll’ and ‘RevitAPIUI.dll’ From your Revit installation directory to this folder.

Create a directory link using the above command from a directory within “C:\Program Files\Autodesk” To your actual Revit install directory. This is what I did on Bryce’s machine.

The exact command would be something to the effect of ‘mklink /D “c:\Program Files\Autodesk\Revit 2020” “d:\Program Files\Autodesk\Revit 2020”’, with the second parameter pointing to the actual Revit directory. This command needs to be run in an administrator command prompt, otherwise it will fail.

 

If any of the above is unclear or you’d like me to provide a demonstration to help clarify, feel free to get onto us.

What is the hourly rate for QARC Systems to assist me?

In the occasional situation where you need assistance with something related to your use of Revit, QARC Systems charges $180/hr +GST.

This is also the rate if a Manufacturer needs assistance beyond the creation and hosting of their content.

Why is the QARC Content Browser not appearing?

Very occasionally our QARC Content Browser struggles to appear.

You may see this error message.

In short, like everything in Revit, it is best to shut Revit down, and restart.  But here is a better, technical, description from Justin, the coder of the QARC4Revit plug-in.

The most often cause of this problem is when Revit is launched by opening an RVT project file from File Explorer, rather than launching Revit first and then opening the project file. For some reason Revit runs plug-in loads differently in this scenario, and the browser pane registration is delayed.

There are two solutions-

  • Close Revit, Re-launch it, and then re-open your project.
  • Close the project document in Revit, returning you to the start page, and then re-open your project.

In both cases, the browser should work properly afterward.

The lesson here is that Revit really dislikes being launched as per most software – by double clicking the file in File Explorer.  Our recommendation is always load Revit first, then load the Revit file.

See all the Support items within QARC4Revit

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