Opening with Varying Widths Throughout Revit Wall

It is common to have openings in walls that are not of a consistent width all the way through the wall.  An example of this is when a door is recessed into a brick wall and the brick opening is wider than the stud/masonry wall opening or the door.  The following illustration shows a door opening in a stud and brick wall with the brick opening wider to allow brickmould casing around the door.

Revit doors and windows, by default, have an opening that goes straight through the wall with a completely rectangular opening.  If you just use the default Door.rft or Window.rft with the default opening to create your doors and window families, you will not see the above jogged offset opening.

The secret to getting the walls to cut as you desire is to NOT use the Opening Cut that is in the family template, but use Voids instead.

The following is the process to get the void opening to cut the wall as you desire.  The default Door.rft family template is used as an example in this article.

• Delete Existing Opening Cut

  • Since the existing Opening Cut will not be used, it needs to be deleted in the family.
  • The following shows the default Door.rft family template with the Opening Cut highlighted.

• Define New Opening Edges

  • Create new Reference Planes for each edge of each opening portion.
    • Go to the Create tab, and select Reference Plane from the Datum panel.
  • In this illustration, I will add one additional Reference Plane on each side of the door to show a jog in the opening.
  • In this illustration, I will also add one additional Reference Plane inside the wall to represent a point within the wall where the jog will appear.
  • This illustration only shows the Reference Planes in plan view, but it may be desired to add additional Reference Planes in elevation views to adjust the various voids to have different heights.
    

• Create Voids

  • Add Voids where needed to get the opening to appear as desired.
  • Go to the Create tab and select the Void Forms command from the Forms panel.  There are various options for Void shapes, so choose the one that works best for your situation.
    • This illustration is simply using the Void Extrusion.
    • 2 Voids have been created since it is desired to have the wider void (2ND VOID) be higher in elevation that the 1ST VOID.
      • If the heights are not desired to be different, only one void could be used to accomplish the same result.
        
  • When you create the void in the wall, it will not automatically cut the void out of the wall.  This step is very important.
    • After creating the Void, go to the Modify tab and the Geometry panel.
    • Select the Cut Geometry option from the Cut command.
    • Select the Void first, then select the wall.  The wall will now show the void space in the wall.
  • Go to an elevation view and lock the top and bottom of the Void(s) to Reference Planes to ensure the heights change/remain as desired.

• Final Result

  • The following image shows the result of the above illustration when the door family is placed into a wall in a project file.
    

Notes:

• An existing door or window family can be modified to use this function.  All steps above would be the same.  You would just leave everything in the family except the Opening Cut.
• Multiple jogs can be created in the wall.
• Parameters are typically used to control the 2″ dimensions shown in the illustration.
• it is best to lock all void edges to Reference Planes.

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