Mastering Graphic Elements in Revit Tutorial

what's going on guys balkan architect here and in today's video i'm going to be showing you how to uh solve some annoying graphics issues in revit and mainly what we're going to be doing uh is resizing elements such as sections level heads and grid heads so you know those little graphics for sections grids and levels you can actually modify them but it is a little bit difficult it's not kind of straightforward so i want to show you the whole kind of process for modifying those because they do get that question quite a lot and it's not something that's well commonly known so that's going to be the topic of today's video and now before we jump into revit i would just like to take a moment to ask you to check out my website balkanarctic.com i'm going to link it up just below this video in the description and then also up in the cards above there you can find all of my revit courses i've got over 130 hours of content and i'm adding more each month also there you can find some of my customized ready to go revit templates you can find some high quality revit families and also there is a plug-in that you might find interesting okay so now without any further ado let's jump straight into a revit and here is an apartment that i've been working on an apartment project and i'm just going to be using this as reference and or as a project so let's first start with the simplest one and that's going to be the grid so i'm just going to go here to on the architecture tab go to the datum panel and find the grid tool and let's just place one grid over here uh so this is orange um so that's a kind of a simple modification here you can go and turn this into orange that's basically what they did and this is part of my architecture design template so again as i said that's something that's available on my website so you can find it up in the cards above so anyways let's first modify this so let's say you want to make this smaller depending on the scale you might find this a bit too large especially if i go here from 1 to 50 to 1 to 100 you will see that this starts to get really large and you might not want that so let's see how can we make it smaller but before we do that let's just add something kind of as a measuring stick here just so we know the original size so if i go and let's place a simple wall here so i'm just going to grab an interior wall and let's place one here one here so just so we can have something there as a model element just kind of that gives us the size reference of this thing okay so as i said the grid is the easiest one to modify because you just have to select the grid and then you'll see if you go here into edit type that it's actually using a family for this grid symbol so as you can see here symbol and then it's called the m grid head circle so you just have to modify this family now you don't have to edit the family and open it up and so on there's just one parameter for that family that you can modify now you cannot do it here when you select the grid but what you can do is go to your project browser scroll all the way down and find families now once you find families you can expand that and then the first one here is annotation symbols and then you can expand that and here you can search for let's see the grid perhaps it was up here so it can be okay here we go so that's the one with the circle and then you can expand it and then here's the type of that so the this is the family this is the type so if you double click on the type you can actually adjust the radius so here if i just come in here can i make the smaller okay i can so if instead of 65 i make it point 45 and then click ok as you can see that's going to become smaller so it's a simple and straightforward adjustment okay now let's move to levels so for levels uh we're going to do something a little bit more interesting so let's open up that section now you may have noticed that the section is gone it was here and now it's gone uh well that's because some sometimes sections have an adjustment here so when i select the section i've dropped it down to one to fifty scale and then the section is there so the reason for that why it's there at one to fifty and it's not there at one to one hundred is because let's go back here select the section uh here when you select the section you have this option our parameter called hide at scales coarser than and then you have the scale so i like to have this at at least 200 and it's really up to you so i'm just going to set it at that and now if we go back to 1 to 100 it's going to be larger so we're going to be leaving the scale for the last one let's just open up or the the section head for the last one so let's just open up the section here and let's now play around with this symbol here because i really hate it and it's not the correct symbol that we use in my country uh or in my region so how do you actually replace this uh well again if you select the level and you go here into edit type what you'll see here is that it's using a symbol for that which is m levelhead circle and you have the option of a circle and no bubble now you can resize the circle and that's pretty straightforward but i don't want to do that i want to do something way more interesting and i want to replace it with a different family now luckily with revit we do get different families they just they're just not loaded in so let's load in a different family so i'm going to go here to the insert tab and then i'm going to go to load family which is going to open up our uh just the family library so i'm using the us metric one and then you just go here to annotations and what you'll see here is that here we have m level head and then you have multiple options so we have the circle and no bubble which are the ones that we already have but we also have triangle and triangle spot so i'm going to hold my ctrl key and select both of these and then i'm just going to open them up which means that they are now loaded into the project so now i can go and select my level uh here i can go into edit type and then here i can oops not that here i can expand the menu and as you can see we have additional options so if i select the triangle and then hit apply it's going to look like this which in my opinion looks a lot better but in the end i really prefer the triangle spot and if i hit apply that's going to look like this so that's another option that we have so i'm just going to click uh okay here uh now for this you can turn it on on both sides so for example we can have one here and then one here now the problem is uh this is not the correct representation that i want and that that they have in my country it's closer to it but it's not exactly that uh and again still it works so if you open this up it's going to open up that level so let's go back to the section and let's modify this even further so how can we make additional modifications to this well we can again find it here in the project browser so if i just collapse this so that's going to be level head triangle spot now if you want to edit this family so not just adjust the parameters as we did like this i don't want to just adjust the parameters i want to edit the family so you don't click on the type you actually leave it you can leave it just like this non-expanded right click and then go to edit which is going to open up that family as you can see and now you can add it to the family now one thing that they like to do here is just go to the view tab open up the vg graphics and then go to annotation categories and turn on the reference planes just because it's going to make it a bit simpler to see what's going on and then here the first step is i want to get rid of this filled region because i just like to have a gap there that's the first one and then the second one i want to select this whole thing and then move it off to the side as you can see here in the section the level line is going to go all the way here to the center well i want the level one the level line to shoot past that and kind of be aligned here at the edge so we can achieve that by selecting the whole thing like this select the these um how do we call these labels yeah labels yeah so select the labels select the line work and then you just go here to move and then you move it from here to here now revit is going to go crazy it's going to say we have some constraints okay remove the constraints if you if you have a problem with that i don't mind and then let's just adjust it like so and then connect this here and there we go so once this is fixed i can now load it back into the project override this and as you can see it's going to look like that so it's just going to be the other way around and i actually prefer this presentation and this is actually what uh what's kind of required in my country for these uh symbols for the levels and then it's still clickable so you can still double click that and it's going to open up that level so that's how you modify these and then for the last one the most difficult one and that's going to be the section one because it's well it's so massive so how do you modify the section heads uh while sections have two heads so it has this one and it has this one i'm just going to be showing you how to modify this one because it's more complicated and then the same approach applies here so if i select the section and go into edit type what you'll notice is that here we have the section tag and what you'll see here is that we have actually two families so we have the section head filled and then we have the section tail filled and there's a comment between this so this means that this is actually two families if i click on this little button it's going to open up another type properties menu and this is that actual family and then here we have the section head and the section tail so this is this family and then this is this family uh and now uh let's make the modifications so first i'm just going to duplicate this type so just duplicate and then let's call it dash new okay and now i'm just going to okay out of this menu and i'm not going to make any changes there so the next step is going to be to find this section head here uh i want to find it here in the project browser so i'm going to click on the section head field uh now i'm not going to again expand this and use this i'm just going to right click and then go to edit and that's going to open up that family and here we go this is the family so now the next step is going to be to view the reference planes because those tells tell us the relationship between this section head and the lines so the lines the section line that comes to the section head so you just go back here and you go to the view menu you go to visibility graphics and on the annotation categories you just turn on the reference planes hit apply okay so the vertical reference planes are telling you up to which point the the section line is going to go basically okay so now let's make this smaller so i'm just going to reduce this to four millimeters and then this one again to four millimeters now i'm not going to adjust this yet uh now here this text is now a bit too large so this number one here i think it's going to work if we just bring it a bit lower it works perfectly fine but this is way too large so let's edit this label by going to edit type duplicate and let's call this one i don't know let's go with 1.5 okay and then let's just change this to 1.5 and now it's smaller and now it fits and then we can just bring it up okay so once we have this in place uh now it's time to adjust these here filled regions so just because of the the way that this is constructed this is actually four different filled regions that we have here now if we want to scale these filled regions and let's say i want to select all of them and then scale them at once what you'll notice is that well if i go to the scale tool well i cannot do that now what they can do is select the individual one and then again well the scale tool doesn't work well the reason for that is when you have these sketched elements with the sketched boundary you cannot scale them like this what you can do is go to edit sketch and then you can select all of the elements and then you can scale them so select the boundary basically so i go here to scale i can then click in the center go here bring it down hit finish there we go super easy select this one again edit sketch scale enter and then just bring it down like that hit finish and then i'm just going to repeat that for the rest of these so just like from here to here perfect and then the last one is this one here edit scale you can select it and this is it okay perfect and then we're just left with this big triangle so let's select that hold the ctrl key select this line and this line and now we just want to scale that so that's going to be easy to scale so from here to here perfect and then you also want to modify these lines so you want to make sure that they go up to the bubble because that's basically up to the the line where this is going to be uh going to okay and we want to make this smaller and this as well okay so you basically select the reference plane and i think we should be able to just move it in like so perfect and then this one as well okay there we go so now we have this new section head that we have created now it might make sense to save that family so let's go and i'm just going to save it on my desktop section fill the dash new okay so once i have this saved i can then load it into the project uh project three okay and then i'm back here in the project and nothing has changed here and again because we're now going to be making this change uh let's add some walls so i'm just going to grab this wall here and then let's just add those walls like so and then let's just adjust them to be at the edges so we can see if we're making a difference okay so now we can again select the section uh we can go here into edit type and then we can go to section tag it's this uh open that up and now for this one we can just find the section head and select our new one click ok click apply okay and as you can see now it's smaller and that's exactly what we wanted to see we wanted to adjust at the section head and we did and it's a lot smaller and then you can just repeat the same process for detail but that's going to allow you to well make some modifications and make all of these uh elements that maybe have seemed like you cannot edit them at all while you can actually edit them and this is exactly how you do it now if you want to get this project file this apartment that i'm working on you can find it on my patreon page which i'm going to include the link to just below this video in the description and then also up in the cards above on my patreon page you can find all of my revit project files i have over 400 project files there so far thank you for watching guys make sure to check out my website balkanarctic.com for more revit courses there i have over 120 hours of content and i'm adding more each week make sure to subscribe for more videos and also i've added a video over there that might interest you as well

Channel: Balkan Architect

Views: 31,356

Keywords: Revit, tutorial, BIM, building information modeling, autodesk, graphics, section, level, head, grid

Id: euL4OFzVyEg

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022