Tag Archives: Tips

Show only Core of walls

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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.

Rotate with Origin

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I was asked the other day by a user, a frustrated user, how come you can’t go right into the rotate command and place the center rotation point?  Well you can easily do this with a keyboard shortcut by default the keys are R3, if you want to change the default the command name in the Keyboard Shortcuts (KS) the command name is “Define a new center of rotation”.

Select by ID

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A few days ago, a coworker asked for a way to locate every instance of a family (in this case it was a detail component family).  His goal was to delete all instances and the usual process of selecting all instances in the project and hitting delete occasionally does not in fact delete all instances so he wanted another way.  He had considered scheduling the instances and then deleting, but not all elements can be scheduled.  This particular issue gave me a chance to suggest one of the useful command that I believe tends to be forgotten.  The following is the procedure I suggested for locating all instances of a given family, regardless of the ultimate goal (deleting, changing or simply finding them all).

 

Start by selecting one instance in the project or the family in the project browser, right click and select all instances.  Then, in the Manage tab, select “IDs of Selection”.

This will bring up a window showing the element IDs of all of the selected elements.

Highlight all of the IDs and copy using Ctrl + C.  Then click OK and go back to the Manage tab and select “Select by ID”.

In the window that appears, paste the IDs that were copied to the clipboard using Ctrl + V.

Finally, click Show and the project will cycle through the elements, locating them and showing them.

Side note: if these items are needed for future selections, and you are working in Revit Structure, you can save the selection (also on the Manage tab), or if you are not in Revit Structure, paste the IDs into a text file for future use.

Rotating View Title

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When placing a view on a sheet there is the option to rotate the view 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise, unfortunately this also rotates the view title.  So how do you rotate the view with out rotating the title?  The answer is to not rotate the view but to rotate the crop region of the view back in the original view, then when it is placed on the sheet it will work the way you were wanting.

Revit Basics – Selecting a Detail Bubble

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For several reasons Revit users will often want to show only the bubble portion of a section cut or a callout.  For example, they want a bubble shown thus:

This is normally achieved via pulling the tail in very close.  Unfortunately, that part of the bubble is what one would click in order to select the section cut (since clicking on the bubble itself will not work).  There are a few ways to get around this, some more common than others.

First, one might draw selection/crossing window to select the bubble.  This will work, but might cause other objects to also become selected.

Second, using the omnipresent tab method to tab to the bubble will work.

Finally, perhaps the least known solution, holding down the control button will allow the bubble to be selected by clicking it.

This works with all veiw types including Levels, Sections and Callouts.