If there is not one created, click the Default 3D View button in the toolbar at the top of the screen.. Open the default 3D view and choose View Orient To Other View, and select our Su
Trang 1Chapter 18 Advanced Detailing Techniques
Chapter 17 covered the transition from design to construction documentation In this chapter, you will continue building your skills and learn some additional techniques for more detailed construc-tion documentaconstruc-tion As your project experience grows, your library and detailing capacity within Revit will grow with it This chapter is dedicated to tools and functionality that you can employ after you become comfortable with creating details in Revit By building your library and knowl-edge of detailing workflows, you can cut down the time you spend detailing, leaving more time for design
You will acquire the following skills:
◆ Create 3D details
◆ Add detail components to 3D families
◆ Export details for use in other Revit projects
Creating 3D Details
As building designs become more and more complex and the construction industry continues to specialize its assembly methods, it has become imperative that information be communicated effec-tively between designer and contractor A technique for showing construction assemblies that goes way back in the history of architectural representation is the use of 3D detail drawings (Figure 18.1) that show a sectional cut through the building in a 3D format (axon or perspective) This type of drawing has been used to convey detail and constructability information rather than create a mul-titude of abstract sections and elevations In recent years, this documentation technique has fallen into disuse because it has been difficult or time consuming to re-create such axonometric details in
a 2D CAD-based environment
With Revit’s 3D modeling capabilities, it is easy to create such 3D details By using the 3D views and orienting to other views, you can quickly generate 3D views that focus on a construction condi-tion These can be for constructability or to demonstrate critical building concepts Figure 18.2 shows a detail of a sustainable solution employed on the Foundation project In this sectional axon,
we are able to demonstrate many of the green building concepts simultaneously while also show-ing dimensional depths of both sun-shadshow-ing systems
Creating this kind of 3D detail in Revit is quick and easy to learn There are two methods you can use:
◆ Turning on the Section Box tool, and then adjusting the section box to focus on your detail
◆ Orienting a 3D view to an existing view, which in turn enables a section box for the view
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Figure 18.1
Hand-drawn perspective detail 44831c18.fm Page 582 Friday, October 12, 2007 9:08 AM
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Figure 18.2
Sectional axon showing details of sun-shading solution
Enabling a Section Box in 3D View
Take the following steps to enable the Section Box tool in a 3D view
1. Start by creating or opening a 3D axon of the building If there is not one created, click the Default 3D View button in the toolbar at the top of the screen Make sure to name your view something unique
2. Open View Properties and enable the Section Box parameter A large section box that sur-rounds the entire model will appear in the view This is a 3D clipping box that will cut the model from six directions
3. By clicking and dragging the blue arrows, you reduce the size of the box to be more precise (Figure 18.3) Manipulating a section box can take a bit of trial and error, regardless of your experience with Revit Later in this chapter, we’ll discuss some ways to make this quicker and more accurate
Figure 18.3
Use the blue arrows to size the section box 44831c18.fm Page 583 Friday, October 12, 2007 9:08 AM
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The Second Technique: Orienting to View
An alternative for creating a 3D detail is to orient the 3D view to an existing view Do this by first creating a detail callout in a wall section (Figure 18.4) By selecting the callout and editing its prop-erties, you can give it a recognizable name, such as Sunshade Detail Having a recognizable name will be important because the number of details in a project can become quite large
Figure 18.4
Creating a callout detail in section
1. Open the default (3D) view and choose View Orient To Other View, and select our Sunshade Detail from the list (Figure 18.5)
Figure 18.5
Selecting a view from View Orient To Other View
2. Once you click OK, the view will reorient and appear as a section—just like the detail callout However, this is a 3D view By orbiting the view (using either the Dynamically Modify View button or combining Shift and the middle mouse button), you’ll be able to visualize the sectional detail in 3D (Figure 18.6)
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Figure 18.6
Top: Oriented To Other View detail looks like a flat section; Bottom: the rotated (orbited) view reveals a 3D detail
The crop boundaries of the 3D detail correlate to the boundaries of the callout, so there is no need
to alter the section box The depth of the section box in this view will be defined by the depth of the view you have used to orient You can of course edit the section box using the grip controls To hide the section box lines but keep it cutting the model, select it and choose Hide element in view from the context menu
Adding Annotations to the 3D Detail
To add dimensions to a 3D view, first define the work plane the dimensions will appear on, as they can not “float” in free space and need a workplane to be drawn on (See Chapter 6 for more on work planes.) We are showing our dimensions at Level 3 in the view Click the Work Plane button on the toolbar and select Level 3 from the drop-down menu Using the work plane visibility toggle, you’ll
be able to see what plane the dimensions will be created on, as shown in Figure 18.7 Dimensioning along this plane will be very similar to dimensioning in any plan view By selecting parallel ele-ments, we can apply the necessary dimensions
You can then begin to add notes Note that in a 3D view, you can add text and dimensions but not keynotes or tags Also, be careful not to rotate the axon after you apply your notes Text is placed perpendicular to the view you have created, and rotating the view will make the text difficult to read
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Figure 18.7
Setting and visualizing the work plane in a 3-D view
By turning on the shadows in the view, you’ll be able to give the view a better sense of depth,
as shown in Figure 18.2 earlier
Be sure the ground plane is enabled in the Sun And Shadows Settings dialog for the view A good choice is either Sun From Top Right or Sun From Top Left See Chapter 12 for more detail on presentation techniques
Embedding Details within Families
In the previous chapter, we investigated how to add levels of detail to a detail component by cre-ating one detail out of a number of separate components, making it easier to replicate a detail con-dition across various project views Again, this idea of “drawing it once” is a core theory in Revit Combining these principles, we can extend this information into family creation, allowing you to turn details on or off within a family depending on a view’s Level Of Detail setting
When we explored the notion of the view detail earlier, we mentioned the ability to show dif-ferent levels of detail at Coarse, Medium, and Fine settings Combining this with detail compo-nents, we can embed details for typical conditions directly within the families themselves Figure 18.8 shows the same window family in coarse, medium, and fine views All of the detail has been added to the family itself, and the detail is activated by switching between View Detail set-tings Note that the Fine detail level in this series shows the actual CAD detail from the manufac-turer’s website and is not modeled in detail in 3D Modeling this in 3D would be a huge
performance killer Because we have created this as part of the window family, this highly detailed information will be displayed each time we cut a window in section, regardless of where the win-dow is placed in the model
Building this type of window family is not complicated, but it does require a bit of knowledge about how a family is created and assembled For our purposes, we are going to assume that the window family has been created correctly and we are simply trying to apply more detail to the win-dow itself so that it displays much more detailed information in fine view Since we have already created the sill condition, we will now focus on creating the head detail
Start by locating the family within the project using the Project Browser Select it and choose Edit Family from the context menu In the Family Editor, open a section view (or if there is no section view, create a new one) The sectional view of the window family head looks like Figure 18.9
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Figure 18.8
The same awning window shown in (A) coarse, (B) medium, and (C) fine view
Figure 18.9
Sectional view of the window family head
In Chapter 17, we discussed how to insert default Revit detail components For the blocking above the window head, we can load a detail component from the Revit default library
1. Navigate to File Load from Library Load Family Then, once the browsing window opens, you will need to follow the path Detail Components Div 06-Wood and Plastic 06100-Rough Carpentry 06110-Wood Framing and choose Nominal Cut Lumber-Section.rfa
2. Insert this component 11⁄4˝ from the exterior face of the wall This will ensure that it ends up
in the right location relative to the wall it will be inserted into If this window was going to
be inserted into a variety of wall types, you could make the 11⁄4˝ dimension a parametric fam-ily parameter
3. Once this is inserted, lock it to the reference plane that is at the window head This will ensure that as window sizes are changed, the blocking moves as well
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4. If we also know, based on the window type, that the blocking needs to always be set 11⁄4˝ from the front face of the wall, we can add a constraint there as well Add a dimension to the left edge of the blocking and the left edge of the wall and lock it into place (Figure 18.10)
Figure 18.10
Adding a dimension and locking it into place
5. We want to create a new detail for the window head showing an added level of detail at the head condition For this, we’ve downloaded the manufacturer’s standard CAD detail and
we want to incorporate it into our window To begin with, you need to create a new detail component using this CAD detail Choose File New Family and choose Detail Compo-nent to open the Family Editor
6. To import our CAD detail, follow the steps we discussed in the previous chapter Choosing File Import/Link CAD Formats will bring up the dialog to insert the CAD detail This time, you’ll want to choose slightly different options than we did last time Accept the defaults for all but the following:
◆ Select the “Black and white button” in the Layer/Level Colors area
◆ In the Import or Link area, change the Layers setting to Select (we want to pick the layers
we will import)
The dialog will look like Figure 18.11 Click Open
7. A dialog similar to Figure 18.12 opens, asking you to choose the correct layers to import Hatch is something we do not need, and typically, manufacturers are fairly good about keeping their layer management for CAD details simple and easy to understand We want
to deselect any layers that reference Hatch Simply uncheck the box and click OK
8. With the detail inserted, position it using the reference planes in the detail component While you can reposition things within the Revit families fairly easily, these reference planes provide invisible lines to snap to when you import the component into the model Because the top of the head and the face of the glass are key to this detail, use those to place the imported file, as shown in Figure 18.13
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Figure 18.11
Importing CAD detail into a detail component
Figure 18.12
Selecting layers
to import
Figure 18.13
Aligning the reference planes 44831c18.fm Page 589 Friday, October 12, 2007 9:08 AM
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9. We are nearly done with this component Because this detail has such a simple construction (very few lines) and we have removed the hatch, we are going to explode the detail Select the detail and click the Full Explode button on the Options bar This will convert the detail into Revit detail lines and allow you to modify some of the line weights and the detail geom-etry to better fit the family
10. With the detail exploded, you can now remove the glazing, which is only partially drawn
We have modeled glazing in the family itself, so including it in the detail as well is a bit redundant Select the lines shown in Figure 18.14 and delete them
Figure 18.14
Select the lines for the glazing and delete them
11. The last thing we need to do before we save the model is change the line weights Select all
of the lines in the detail by creating a selection box around them, and while they are selected, choose Detail Items from the Type Selector We could keep all of the lines the way they had been imported from CAD and simply change them to the appropriate line weight using Settings Object Styles However, this is a little cleaner for future tweaks
12. Save the detail as Head.rfa in your project folder or library and import it into the window family using the Load Into Projects button
13. Back in the window family, place the detail component over the existing extruded window frame and lock it to the reference plane that defines the head opening (Figure 18.15)
Figure 18.15
“Family element visibility settings” dialog 44831c18.fm Page 590 Friday, October 12, 2007 9:08 AM
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Visibility Settings
With the detail components in place, you can now establish rules for when each of them will be vis-ible when loaded into the model In the next steps, visibility settings will be applied to some of the model elements and detail components that will link these items to the detail level setting For this family, we need the detail component to be visible only in fine levels of detail and the 3D solid form window frame sweep to be hidden in fine levels of detail
1. To start, select the Detail Component In the Options bar, click the Visibility button Clicking this button will open the Family Element Visibility Settings dialog shown in Figure 18.16
Figure 18.16
The “Family element visibility settings” window
2. This is as simple as it looks, but it’s quite powerful at the same time By deselecting any of the boxes here, you limit the visibility of components to specific detail levels For this example, clear the Coarse and Medium check boxes and click OK
Now you will notice that a funny thing happens—or actually, doesn’t happen If you change the visibility of detail levels, the detail component still looks the same, as if it ignores the visibility set-tings you just made You can quickly confirm that you deselected those view levels by checking the visibility settings Don’t worry You have done nothing wrong It’s just that the Family Editor always shows everything in each view detail level Only when you load the family in the project environment will you really understand if you have modified the visibility correctly
So, our goal was to see the highly detailed representation of the window when we switch to fine detail view At the same time, we don’t need to see the original 3D window frame because the lin-ework of the frame will overlap with the linlin-ework of the newly inserted 2D detailing components
We need to turn off the visibility of the window frame when a section is displayed in fine view
1. To do that, select the 3D sweep created to represent the window frame and click the Visibil-ity button in the Options bar The dialog that appears is the same dialog you saw previously when you selected the 2D detail component, but since this 3D element appears in more views, you now have more visibility options (Figure 18.17)
2. We still want to see the window frame in plan, reflected ceiling plan, and elevation, so leave those boxes checked for now and just uncheck the “When cut in Plan/RCP” and Fine boxes, mirroring the settings for the detail component above
Controlling Visibility in Plan Views
The same rules can be applied to plan views using this technique, so that the sweep does not show up in
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