Revit’s structural features allow users to place rebars in concrete walls for reinforcement which is a great tools for various reasons. It is a typical situation to have holes/openings in the wall which interrupt the rebars in the wall since you do not want the rebars going through the opening. Depending on the method of placing the rebars, the reinforcing may or may be interrupted. It is important when rebar is interrupted at openings in order to create an accurate model.
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Placing crown molding at the top of cabinetry is very common in residential design and can be easy to do in Revit. Ideally, I would like to use a sweep with a crown molding profile, but Revit utilizes sweeps only for walls when not in the family editor. The trick to making this an easy process for the user is to create a specialty wall that has the desired sweep profile built into it. This allows you draw the “wall” to follow the front edge of the cabinetry at the desired elevation for the crown molding.
The following image shows the resultant crown molding.
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.
When placing components on the face of a wall in Revit, the same component may move differently when the wall base offset changes. This can cause frustration to the user by not understanding why it is happening. No one wants to see their component change elevation when they don’t expect it.
Walls can have the bottom offset either up (positive dimension) or down (negative dimension) to raise or lower the base of the wall. While the majority of the time the wall will be at the floor level, there are many times when the wall needs to be above the floor. A couple of examples are a wall that sets on a concrete curb, or a wall which serves as a soffit. The Base Offset parameter for the wall is modified in the Properties palette when the wall is highlighted. Continue reading
When designing buildings, we all know that we often get walls that are non-orthogonal and at various angles to the sheet. With those walls, we often want to get an elevation that is parallel to a particular wall. It is actually easy to do.
I was recently asked about instance parameter grips for a Revit family that was placed in a Revit project file. The family had an instance parameter in it for a dimension and the user was expecting to see grip arrows so that they could manually adjust the size by dragging the grips. The arrow grips did not exist and the user was curious why that was the case.
The answer to the user’s question is actually very simple. When creating a dimension that will be referencing an instance parameter, it is important to dimension between two Reference Planes for the grip arrows to appear.
Architectural drawings have been created throughout the years with the intent of accurately and effectively conveying the design intent to the builder for proper construction of the building. Utilization of CAD made it easier for the designer to show the various components that made up the wall by showing lines representing the edges of each of the wall components. When showing the multiple components of a wall, we have traditionally shown the lines representing the two faces of a wall as darker lines than the interior linework of the wall. When using Revit, this same appearance can be easily accomplished.
External References (xrefs) are an important part of working with AutoCAD and its vertical packages. I consider xrefs a critical and key feature of AutoCAD in the AEC industry and encourage you to look into them if you are not currently utilizing them on your projects. There are many aspects of good utilization of xrefs, but I thought I would list a few tips in this article.
Architectural design software is renowned for being expensive for the major products that are on the market, especially the packages considered as Building Information Modeling (BIM) software. Many designers are looking for something less expensive. That may be due to limited financial resources to spend on software, or to the lack of a need for something more expensive and powerful. This article is devoted to mentioning some architectural design software packages available for less than $2500.
In January 2011, I wrote an article about Autodesk releasing the Roombook Extension for Revit Architecture 2011. Autodesk has now released the Roombook Extension for Revit Architecture 2012.
According to Autodesk, “The Roombook Extension for Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2012 software helps calculate the surface area of walls, floors and ceiling elements, room circumferences and the total number of furnishing elements within a project.” It appears to be unchanged from the version available for Revit Architecture 2011.
The Roombook Extension can be downloaded from the Autodesk Subscription website for subscription members.
Read the previous article on the Revit Architecture 2011 Roombook Extension.
Autodesk has released an extension for getting more information out of Rooms in Revit Architecture 2011. The Roombook Extension was made available to Revit Architecture subscription members on December 9, 2010. According to Autodesk, the extension “helps calculate the surface area of walls, floors and ceiling elements, room circumferences and the total number of furnishing elements within a project”. This is a nice utility to get quantities for room-specific information that exists in the model and is valuable for quantity takeoff analysis.
If you are accustomed to using the Ortho (F8) setting in the AutoCAD -based products to get perfectly vertical or horizontal lines, walls, etc, you can do the same thing with the Revit products. Hold down on the SHIFT key while you are placing walls, grids, lines, or most anything else to force it to be orthogonal.
Applying Technology to Architecture 