Amazing Section Graphics in Revit Tutorial

what's going on guys balkan parkvid here and in today's tutorial i'm going to be talking about sections in revit and we're going to be improving the graphic appearance of our rabbit sections so when you're just new to rabbit sections can be kind of awful when you look at it they can look really terrible so in today's video i decided to create kind of a set of steps that you can take in order to improve the appearance of your sections you can actually make them look quite stunning and amazing with just a few little settings and then you can just repeat those settings for every other project that you use i think it's it's something that can take your projects to another level especially when it comes to presentation it is important to have kind of a clean elegant and stunning look for your sections they show so much of the building so why not represent them really nicely so that's what we're going to be doing in today's tutorial uh now if you're uh interested in a more in-depth tutorial where we show you how to create one small single family home from a beginning to producing all complete project documentation uh well i have a whole five hour course on that topic and actually the actual building that we're going to be using for this tutorial is the building from that course or the house from that course and it is available on my website balkanarctic.com it's going to be the first link just below the video in the description so if you're interested in something like that check it out i have also many more courses beginner courses as well as advanced courses that cover uh numerous different revit topics i've got over 90 hours of content or something like that on my website so check it out if you're interested also if you would like my revit project files those are available on my patreon page so check it out if you're interested in that as well that's going to be the second link just below the video okay also make sure to subscribe like and share this video it helps me out a lot with the youtube algorithm and without any further ado let's get straight into rabbit and here we are in a rabbit so this is that project that i was talking about as you can see kind of the final result of the whole course is a very very detailed revit project and this is the section that we're actually going to be uh kind of improving uh graphically now this is a highly detailed section but of course for this particular tutorial we're not really looking for detail we're looking for a very nice presentation graphics so let's get straight into that now i'm going to go here to the project browser and scroll up a little bit here under sections we have the section one and if you just double click on that as you can see this is that section that we have now uh this as i said is a detailed section and i don't want a detailed section for uh for this so what i'm going to do is duplicate this section and just get rid of all of the detailing now that can easily be done simply by going here into sections going to section one right click and then we have the duplicate view and we have a few options now the first one is duplicate the second one is duplicate with detailing and also we have the duplicate is dependent for this one just duplicate does the job as you can see we no longer have all of that annotation and everything is kind of cleaner right now so this is what we're going to be using to of get started with okay next what i like to do is go here to the properties uh and scroll down a little bit and just go to extends and turn on the crop region visible so we have that little crop that kind of crops out the view and i tend to turn that on when i'm setting up the view because i just want to have an idea of how how large that view is going to be oops i don't want this okay uh so i i want to have an idea of how large the view is going to be uh so now uh let's get started uh by uh basically setting up the uh parts that are being cut so here in this section the parts that are being cut are the walls the the roof the floor below the foundation and so on and now it look currently when it looks like this it's fairly nice for a detailed view but for just a simple presentation view it might be a bit too much and i don't like this level of detail for something like that so what i like to do is use one of two approaches so the first approach would be to go here to the detail level and set that to course now when i do that as you can see we lose all of the layers but also you're going to notice that things like walls go into this black display now the reason why walls are displayed as black is because if i select any one of these walls and then go into edit type here we have the option for graphics or the kind of set of parameters for graphics and here as you can see the course scale fill pattern is set to solid fill and then to black so this is basically a way of telling revit that when this is in the course view mode uh it's going to when one being cut it's going to show as black so that's one option that we can use and for example if i select the floor here go into edit type i have that same option so if i just change here the course scale fill pattern by going here to this builder button and change it to solid fill click ok apply now as you can see the floor will do the same here we have a different floor so we have to kind of repeat that option applied there we go we would have to do that then the same thing to the roof now of course we have to do it one by one unfortunately so that kind of takes away a bit of time but the the good part about this is if you set it up as part of your template or something like that it is going to kind of work at all times and this is something that's included in the template which are for sale on my website now when we go here to the foundation for example and go into edit type we don't have that we don't really have that that graphics set of parameters if i select this beam again we do not have that option here if we go again no that option is not available so that's not something that's going to be available for everything it's only going to be available for these architectural elements but but because all of the foundation and beams are considered structural elements while we do not have that option so another way to to do that well there is actually a couple of ways you can either override the graphics simply by selecting the element so you can select for example you can select just the foundation and let's hold the ctrl key select the beam right click and then go to override graphics and view by category and then simply here for cut patterns i would set the color to black and then the pattern to solid fill and when i hit apply click ok now as you can see all of those elements appear as black so that's one way to approach it and that's probably the kind of the the dumb way to approach it so to speak so a smarter way would be if i just go back a few steps and so a smarter way would be to just create a graphic overrides or visibility graphics overrides so that would simply mean that you would go here into the visibility graphics overrides open up that menu and then search for all the categories that we want to represent as that kind of a dark black the fill pattern so you would search for those so for example let's go here to walls select that category hold the control key and then search for let's see floors roofs where the roofs here we go roofs what else structural foundation and framing yeah i think those are the ones and then you would simply go here to cut patterns override doesn't matter on which one you cut probably the last one and then you can go here to the background one change it to solid and then change the color to black click ok apply okay and you get the same effect but i think it's a much easier cleaner and faster solution to to get the same effect so there is multiple approaches for everything in revit so i like to show you what how things can be done and all of the kind of approaches and what's best about this part is now you can change the detail level back to fine and as you can see for example the doors look much better in a fine level of detail than in the chorus level of detail so anyways this is something that they like to do for kind of the the first part next we have this terrain and it seems to be displaying in quite an odd way so for example if i were to select the the drain or go here to massing inside go to model site open that up so here we should have yeah earth is used in the section uh but for example for this earth we don't really have any cut patterns so uh oops so basically if you want to play around with the fill pattern for the earth material you can select that earth or just go here to mask inside to go to model site expand the site settings here under section cut material go to earth expand that and here under the earth material you just have to go here to the cut pattern and change the foreground pattern into that earth pattern and also i tend to edit these so let's go into edit and just change the scale to something like oops let's try 0.5 yeah i like to have it a bit nicer and also i like to change it into this dark gray hit apply okay apply okay as you can see it looks a little bit better i maybe if we just go back here maybe if we change this to let's try 0.8 apply okay okay that might be just a little bit better okay perfect uh next i don't like to show these the grids and levels in these types of views also the sections so you can easily get rid of those again by going to the visibility graphics overrides and simply going to annotation and just killing everything there there we go much nicer next we have this line which looks odd and the reason for that is because this section is cutting uh and we have that little four clip offset which is set to 760 and then if i select this line it's a tree so i think that if i expand this to maybe 1000 okay a bit further maybe it's a big tree i think this tree just isn't in complete view so if i try here 1500 okay now the whole tree appears so you can play around with trees like that or if i just select them and then oops if i just select these trees and go here to hide and view and just hide those elements as something that i prefer to use for for these sections when they try to make them look nice is to actually add in an image as a background i think that usually works a little bit better so what you can do is go here to visual style and then go to graphic display options and here we have the let's see the background option and you can set that to image and you can customize that image so here can i just drag it over let me try okay it's not going to allow me to do so so let's go here to desktop i think this one is called yeah i think it's this one yeah there we go so let's set it to height no width okay click ok apply okay there we go so you can set something like that or i think i have maybe a one that would work a little bit better so let me try that again again image and let's try this one there we go much better so you can play around like that using images uh maybe this one could be set up a bit better so customize image so let's try original size let's try height and let's give it a height offset off let's try 50 millimeters hit apply okay maybe this is a bit better so you can play around like that and add a background i think that can look uh nice as well also while we're here in the graphic display options the option that you do have is here the depth gearing i like to use this and let me just here turn on show hit apply and let's give it a fade limit but for that i think we need to bring this view closer in so here this was set to 1500 let's try back to 700 and now as you can see that that game looks much much better so you do have the option for that as well and it does look a lot nicer now of course if you're not happy with that if it's kind of too grayed out it's basically kind of uh fading out the elements that are further back uh and also if you had those trees back in so let me go here to hidden elements okay where are the trees that's kind of odd let's try that again okay here we have that tree but also we would have to expand this to something like a thousand okay now we have two trees okay so if i just select those two trees and include them so let's unhide them and let's toggle this off as you can see they're kind of uh grayed out a little bit like this and actually like the way this looks kind of looks cool kind of dystopian anyways so we can add those back in maybe if you want or you can just play around get it to exactly what you want to have uh also if i just go back here to graphic display options what you can play around with also are the shadows so i like to add some shadows just to add a little bit of depth as you can see even the trees look better with that shadow uh but also for the shadow i like to go here into lighting and here we have a few options and the main one i like to set these shadows and that i want to be 20 or even less and as you can see everything becomes a little bit lighter and we get a little bit of depth and i actually quite quite like that and if you zoom in it has a little bit of that ambient shadow which is nice to include i think everything looks a little bit better with that and let's just make a couple of more modifications so one really annoying thing that i find when it comes to working in revit is that here as you can see we have this we have a building pad in place uh now you cannot see it at the moment because i have it hidden so if i go here to reveal hidden elements as you can see that is hidden over here also i have hid some furniture but actually when i look at it now let's perhaps include that so i'm just going to unhide these but the building pad i'm still going to leave hidden and then let's just toggle this back off and one thing that you can do is perhaps uh if this is gonna do too protrusive or if it looks a bit if it's a bit too much uh what you can do is just select the elements that you don't like or that you feel like are too much like in your face you can just select them uh right click and then override graphics and view by element and i like to just turn them to halftone click apply and now they look just a little bit nicer we can do the same thing with this one perhaps here override graphics and view by element and then half down as you can see it looks a bit more neutral a bit more kind of it's kind of blended into the whole section and next as i said this hole below the house looks really annoying especially because that you don't really see that in real life there is no hole below your house the earth actually goes up to the foundation uh or the the the floor the main floor the foundation floor uh so uh what you do there is you have uh just a different type of earth so this is like regular earth and then uh the the place where it was gonna dig up and then filled back in that was filled earth so that's just a different type of earth i guess that's how it's considered when it comes to architecture so you can actually create that by going here to the annotate tab and then going to the filled region and selecting that and then you can simply zoom in here and all of these areas you can follow along with lines just like that there we go we have that one here we can follow this one and just basically follow it all the way around close it off now it's really annoying that we don't get those kind of uh regular uh pink lines that we do in revit so that's that i find just a little bit annoying but anyways i can select this one and then go to copy and copy it from here to here and then just select these two lines and kind of drag them there and again select this whole chain by using the tab key so just hover over one of them hit the tab key to select all of them and then you can just simply use copy copy it here and select these two and extend them all the way here and here we have just a little sliver of that as well so let's include that as well like this and then you hit finish and now it oops there we go and now it looks like this so uh the the fill pattern used is just the vertical so if i go here into edit type as you can see the fill pattern are the vertical 1.5 millimeter type uh fill pattern with black lines and of course you can turn that into this gray dark gray that they like to use so i think it looks even nicer like this so it kind of shows that differentiation in different types of earth used and also just looking at it these trees i i both like them and dislike them so i'm just going to select both of them and then right click and override graphics and view by element and just give them like a 80 percent transparency maybe 75 or something like that there we go so we can still see them and we can kind of cannot see them and we can still see the background so perhaps this is the best of both worlds so uh as i said feel free to play around like that i know it might look like a little bleak but actually prefer this style and of course i suggest you figure out a style of your own which you would like to include in your uh in your kind of sections and then you can use that okay so those were some of my tips that is my approach to creating stunning section graphics in revit i hope you have learned something new and i hope you have enjoyed this tutorial make sure to subscribe like and share this video and again as i said if you're interested in this uh whole course on how to create this building it is available on my website so make sure to check that out first link in the description to balkanarchitect.com okay thank you so much for watching and i'll be back with another balkan architect tutorial in a few days thanks for watching and have a nice day

Channel: Balkan Architect

Views: 33,283

Rating: 4.95086 out of 5

Keywords: Revit, tutorial, english, learn, BIM, building information modeling, easy, fast, quick, how to, autodesk, modeling, graphics, presentation

Id: ZNOVHjF4RJg

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2020