How to Make Stunning Elevations in Revit

what's going on guys Balkan arced it here and the topic of today's tutorial is going to be elevations in Revit and how to make them look absolutely stunning elevations in Revit can look terrible and I wanted to create a tutorial that shows off all of the little tips and tricks and all the features in Revit that you can use in order to make them stunning for example making the glass transparent and just playing around with the shadows with the lines everything like that things that I really can't find like one single tutorial that goes all over that here on YouTube so I decided to make one okay and just to make this introduction quick this is what we're starting off and this is what we're going to be creating so that's what this tutorial is going to be all about now just quickly before we get into that I just like to ask if you like this video it helps me out a lot and if you haven't already I suggest you subscribe because I make useful Revit tutorials each week and also I make some advanced courses all of those can be found on my patreon first link in the description I've got over 40 hours of content over there okay with that out of the way let's get into the tutorial this is the project that I'm going to be using for this tutorial this is one of the buildings that I model in my advanced courses this I actually have 12 hours of content just in-depth modeling this building with like very very detailed plans sections we have some we have some details things like that so everything has been modeled perfectly just as it would be in real life so that's what this project was all about and if you're interested to check out my patreon first a link in the description now let's switch to the elevation and I'm going to be working with the South elevation so this is the starting point and it's pretty ugly if you agree okay so the first thing that I like to do is kind of crop things out just to make a decent selection so what I'm going to do first is go here to properties scroll down and then just check crop view and we can't really crop the view until we can see the regions so just turn the visibility of that and here we go and I'm just going to crop it like this let's say this works kind of like that and let's give it a bit more sky and a bit less here on the bottom and now the first thing that I'm going to be doing is just kind of setting up some of the basic things so for example these levels and these grids we don't really need them they're not necessary we're trying to create a nice looking elevation and this is not the technical plan so first to turn those off I'm just going to go here in the properties into visibility graphic overrides or VG is the shortcut and just go here into annotation categories and just create get rid of all of those so you just uncheck this and you're just as you can see you turn everything off and I'm just going to click OK and as you can see now they're gone ok the next thing that I kind of find annoying with rabbit rabbit elevations is well the fact that the rabbit elevation cuts through the ground it simply works as a section so as you can see here we have this cut through the ground and the problem is usually if you have a something underneath it's going to appear here below the ground it has only just a little bit of depth and then you can see the rest of the building below now I really find this annoying but luckily there is a solution to this so in order to fix this you just need to go here to massing insight and go here to topo surface so that's under the model side panel and you just click this here a side Settings button and here we have these simple this elevation of both base so that's this here and we can just change that from 300 to I don't know like 500 hit apply and there we go it's almost covering it so let's do 550 and I think that will do the job apply and there we go now as you can see here it's kind of blocking off the the whole building ok the next thing that I'm going to do for this view just to make it look a bit nicer is gets the detail level set to do fine this will add some elements here on this building and just looking at this I'm just going to move the car a little bit out of the way here so it doesn't cover the bulkan architect sign which is very important to me okay so now let's turn on the shadows okay looks better already and now these shadows here in Revit are nice these regular shadows but it's really cool to go ahead and turn go to graphic display options and turn on the ambient shadows and when I apply that as you can see it gives a little bit of depth to the to the drawing it looks really nice so I'd like to add those ambient shadows and now this can make your your model quite dark so in that case let me go here back to graphic display options and into lighting so the first option here for shadows I like to keep it anywhere between a 10 and 30 so something like this maybe 20 maybe 30 for this one or 25 there we go looks a lot better and now here we have the options for Sun and for ambient light so here if you change it just like this it doesn't really make any changes what this is particularly good for is here if your style is perhaps realistic and if you hit apply let's wait for a second you're going to notice that these Revit elevations I tend to be really dark so when you when you turn on realistic here I tend to turn up the Sun and then the ambient light and as you can see it kind of lights up everything now in this case I'm just going to be working with your regular headline elevation so I'm not going to be messing with this okay moving on we're happy with this next we have the option for silhouettes now what silhouettes is supposed to do is gonna make well silhouettes the outside of this building should kind of pop out now if I turn this into maybe why the lines and hit apply it is going to make a change but that change is rarely visible here we have some declines but they tend to look really weird for example here we have for the column but then for the walls we're done because this is are your regular like curtain walls now here it looks kind of weird so I tend to not use that option so I'm just going to check it to none and then I intend to do this manually now there are a couple of options to go about this you can either go here to modify and then use the linework tool which can be done you can just use wide lines and then you click here and then it turns this into a wide line but as you can see this will take a lot of time and you would have to go ahead and pick each line so what I tend to do is is let me just uncheck all this there we go I tend to go here to the annotate tab and then use detail lines and here I go with wide lines and then I just go all the way around the building so each part of the building is kind of highlighted I like to go like this then perhaps do one over here for the whole ups not there that should be here let's do one line here go all the way up next we should have some separation going on over here and then probably something like this and I'm actually just going to go like this just to highlight the bulk an architect's sign perhaps and then go from here to here there we go looks nice and then of course you can go ahead and add these parts and maybe this could look good and then perhaps if I just go with split element there we go I think this looks nice so you try pulling around with these detail lines and then you can get to something that that looks nice maybe move this down a bit and then I'm just typing in SL for split line and then TR for trim and extend so those are these tools so trim and extend the AR and SL for split element anyways so we add the outline and if you can see the outline maybe your tan lines are turned on so make sure that those are turned off so this isn't highlighted anyways moving on the next thing that I like to do with these models and oops I just figured out that it here this is kind of going through the tree and it should go to the outside of the tree there we go the next option that I like to do is to add a little bit of depth here to this to this elevation now you can do that by using the depth cueing option so here on your graphic display options we have depth cueing and we can just turn it on and as you can see we have these two sliders and we can play around with those and now this tends not to be that accurate and people tend to just play around with these and it's kind of hard to kind of guess what should you set it to and what I found the best option is to first set the just the view depth for your elevation and then this can this this depth cueing it will work a lot better so let me show you how that works so here for this elevation if we go to extents we have the the four clip offset is just not highlighted because the for clipping is with no clip now you can turn it on with out clip or with clip line I'm just going to do with out clip line and click ok and now this number can be edited now to edit that number what we need to do is go here into ground level go to this to the elevation symbol select it and then as you can see you get this little slider now I like to slide it just past the building so just make sure it goes just past the building and the end doesn't go any further just because that depth cueing is going to take that that slider so this slider over here the back part the 100th part is this part over here the back of the build or the back of the elevation symbol so that's why it's really important than that that's here at the back of the building so that's 100 in that depth cueing he's going to represent the back of the building and as you can see it's changed a little bit so let's go back here do graphic display options to depth cueing and yeah so we can just move this back maybe even further so just like that so now as you can see this part kind of gets a little bit of faded and you can play around with the fade limit so this if it goes up to here that means it's dark and if it goes up to here that means it's light so that's basically what that controls and this controls the beginning of your of your faith so you want that beginning part of the building to be really kind of dark and then you want this far away portion to be kinda lighter so there we go this looks nice it adds a little bit of depth to your model especially with these silhouette lines I really like the contrast so yeah let's leave that as is so once we have set this up the next thing that I like to play around is transparency so you're going to notice that in these elevation views windows don't really have transparency now I find that extremely annoying so if I go into maybe the 3d view here we go you're going to notice that yeah we have some stuff inside of this office so we have some tables and chairs offices so we have a lot of all of the families a lot of furniture inside and we can't see that inside of the elevation and that's really annoying so let's go back into our South elevation and let's see what we can do so unfortunately we can't turn on transparency for the whole curtain facade just because these here parts so these panels over here are not transparent only these ones are so how do you make them transparent here well do only when the best option that I found so far is the option to turn on temporary just a temporary VG override or visibility graphics override do these windows now it would be really hard to go ahead and try to use the tab key to select each panel as you can see it takes a lot of time to make that selection so this be really annoying so in order to create a selection of just these panels over here what you can always do is go here to your project browser scroll all the way down to families open that up now here we have curtain panels open that up here we have occurred the system panels and let's go with deglazed one that's the one we want to edit and you just right click here and then you go with select all instances either visible in view or in entire project we can go entire project and as you can see it just selects all of those items and then you can just right-click override graphics and view by element and then let's give them like 40 percent transparency and as you can see this is what you get now I'm just going to click OK now as you can see everything is transparent and it looks a lot better now these windows are not transparent so that's a bit annoying so I'm just going to select those panels they are a lot easier to select keep that in mind so let's just go like this there we go and this door panel as well and then you just right-click override graphics in view by element and then let's go with 40% of Y there we go and now as you can see we have transparency in this building not too much it still has that little reflectiveness appearance reflective appearance but it's still it still looks good I still like the way that this looks the next thing that I have to do is I have to change the way that this tree and this here car look it's really annoying to have a black and white elevation with just these two colored elements so I'm going to select the tree first and then just right-click go to override graphics and view by element now you might be tempted to change the pattern but if you take a closer look at this tree what gives it its color are these outlines so it's not the actual fill pattern we have to change the actual lines so let's let's select it again right-click override graphics in view by element and open up the projection lines and change them to solid and then the color I'm going to go with this a light-gray hit okay apply okay and there you go I think this looks really elegant I really like the look and now for the car I'm just going to do the same thing right click override the graphics in view by element just for the car I'm going to make sure to go to projection lines and then here change them to solid and for color I'm just going to go with the darker one just because the the way that the car looks I think it's going to just look better if it's a bit darker maybe let's try something else let's try black completely maybe that would look even better yeah it would so just because of the the dark background of this wallet it makes sense for the car to be either black or just to try something else out let's try white yeah this can look interesting oh it does so there we go I think this looks even better so you have to play around a little bit with these elements but in the end that's this is what we get the next thing I want to do is I want to play around with the background a little bit especially for student-student elevations or for trunk Tim plans and press the client it does make sense to make a bit of a more interesting background so for the background here I'm going to go here and open up the visual visibility graphics here or the graphics display options and here we have the option for background and here we have the sky option but if we hit apply you're going to notice that this sky looks kind of weird I don't really like it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go with a gradient and then let's hit apply now this looks a lot better now here you're going to notice that this says ground color and here we have it now the reason for that is just because a level zero zero so the ground level is here at this height and our ground is kinda a little bit underneath that so that's why this looks this way so in order to fix that what I'm going to do is just let's open that back up and then here for the background let's just turn this to white and that's going to look a lot better and also I'm just going to make this a bit shorter just like that and for this ground I want this line to be a bit thicker just because I think it would look a bit better a bit V a ground a line so what I'm going to do for that is just go here to the manage tab and then head over to object Styles and here you have to find typography there we go typography currently set to six let's try ten there we go head okay now that's a bit too dark perhaps so let's go back to object Styles let's do eight okay I think that's the perfect balance okay so one more thing that I would like to add is something in the background just in the background sky now luckily you can insert images over here so let's see how that is done so we have the option here to go to insert and then image and then you have to find it now here I luckily on my desktop I have this birds image so if I open that up it's going to look like this and as you can see it's not visible now the reason for that is here once we've placed this image it's currently the draw layer is background so we just have to flip that to foreground and here we go now it's still a bit large so I'm just going to kind of resize it a little bit and here I have this really cool PNG image of just birds now this might be too large as well there we go this looks nice now you can find these online and these will be included in my patreon post so you can download them there I just first a link in the description also I'm going to add a hot-air balloon just because a an elevation is never complete without a hot-air balloon so let's go here to image let's cancel them this for now and I'm just going to load this image and place it here again it's not visible just because it's in the background so just head over here to properties and change this to foreground hit apply there we go that's a large balloon let's move it up a bit resize it okay it's kind of awkward working with this crop so let's undo the crop for now there we go now oops I've moved something else there we go I think this looks really cool now and now we can just reset the crop so just go here find extents drop view turn it on there we go and there we go looks perfect they really like the way the way this looks and we can just filter this a little bit there we go that's the spirit so there you go so this is what our I want our cool elevation looks like and maybe we can just go ahead here and turn off the crop region visible and there we go this is now a really elegant and really nice-looking elevation in Revit and we got to do it from that really ugly elevation so I hope this was helpful now if you want to download the project file again as he said first link in the description you can get everything that they used here both these images the whole project file everything else plus a lot more content a lot more courses just advanced courses things like that they've got over 40 hours of content up on my patreon okay so this concludes this today's tutorial thank you for watching I hope you have learned something new if you have any questions comments or suggestions make sure to leave them in the comment section below thank you for watching and have a nice day

Channel: Balkan Architect

Views: 72,239

Keywords: Revit, tutorial, english, learn, BIM, building information modeling, easy, fast, quick, how to, autodesk, modeling, elevation, view, presentation, shading, architecture, family

Id: _KGxDSGBGxg

Length: 21min 51sec (1311 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019