For many years I have been asked the question “Is there a way in Revit to only show the core of the wall?”.  Recently this question came up yet again during a session of Revit Radio, but this time it came up right after an example with parts.  So this got me thinking could we break up a wall into parts and then use filters to somehow turn off those parts.  Ironically at the same time Dezi was working on a similar situation to only show the core of the  Architects walls through a linked model.  So we sat down and worked on this together and came up with a solution, YES you can only show the core.  Finally the answer everyone has wanted to hear to this question over the years.

The first step to this procedure is to send Dezi and I some nice bottles of wine as a thank you….  Ok just joking I am writing this while high in the mountains of Alma Colorado while having a nice evening and running out of drinks and not wanting to drive into town to get more…

The real first step is to select the walls and select the Create Parts button.  This will divide the layers of the wall into individual parts.  It will also set your view properties  “Parts Visibility” to Show Parts.

The next step is to create a filter so that the other parts of the wall can be hidden. On the View tab, Graphics panel, select the Filters button.  Name the filter, assign it to Parts for the category, set the Rules to be Construction >> does not equal >> Core.

Add this filter to your view via the Visibility Graphics >> Filters tab and un-check visibility

It could also be filtered by materials or whatever else is needed, I just used Construction property for this post.  Dezi also found out that this will work nicely through linked files to turn off certain parts of the Architects wall for her Structural model.

If you want to display all the layers of the wall you don’t have to edit the Filters again just change the “Parts Visibility” property to “Show Original”

Of course there are limitations to this system; the lack of stability with parts in the 2012 release,  join conditions can be funky, some walls can’t have parts applied to them period.  So when I say yes we can use this to display only the core I guess it will depend on the stability of parts and wall joins.  Just a thought for everyone to try let me know how well it works for your conditions.