Revit Massing Tutorial - Form Manipulation Tools

what's going on guys balkan architect here and in today's video we're going to be talking about form manipulation tools in revit so when it comes to revit when it comes to advanced modeling creating those unique advanced shapes it's not only important to know how to generate the shape but also then how to modify that shape it's all about uh designing editing and then revising our designs so in this video i'm just going to be showing you some of the tools that private has to offer when it comes to form manipulation i'm going to be showing you how to create masking and then how to edit that masking how to manipulate that form i'm going to be showing you how to edit the profile how to use the x-ray functionality uh how to add edges and profiles and then also how to dissolve the shape in the end if you want to well start again or make some some changes to the elements that form that shape so that's going to be the the topic of today's video now just quickly before we jump into the tutorial i would like to take a moment to talk about today's video sponsor and that is snaptruth so snaptruth is a collaborative 3d bim tool for conceptual design with just the right amount of automation so you don't have to really install anything to use snapchat it works straight out of your web browser and you just open up the web browser and it's there you can use it right away this tool gives you the ability to perform complex massing quickly with automated areas auto bim climate studies and so on you also get real time feedback during your concept development you can also use it as a collaboration tool so you have the ability to invite either your professors clients perhaps consultants and they can come to your model and help either review or provide feedback for that model also it includes a vast parametric library of things like furniture windows doors and so on and most importantly to the revit community you have the ability to export native revit files out of snapchat so you can open them straight into revit without any loss of parameters or functionality also it allows you to export to all common formats like ifc fbx obj dwg and so on so if you're interested in checking out snaptruth i'm going to be including a link up in the cards above this video and then also down in the description below now before we get into the actual video i just want to tell you if you're serious about uh learning more about massing in revit i have an entire course for advanced modeling in revit and mass in revit i'm going to include it just down in the description below this video and also up in the cards above it's on my website balkan arctic.com there you can find all of my revit courses but then also you can find my revit templates as well as some high quality revit families and a plug-in so make sure to check it out if you're interested so now without any further ado let's jump straight into rabbit and as you can see here i am at the home page so i'm just going to go here to the new project and for this particular project i'm just going to be using my custom balkan architect template the metric version and then just click ok as i said that's available on my website i'm going to include a link to that as well up in the cards above so anyways as soon as revit starts up in order to create massing we have to go here to mass insight and before we create a new in place mass we have to turn on uh mass visibility so this is show mass once we turn this on then masking is visible inside of rabbit so it's like a global massing on off switch then you go to in place mass here you can name it i'm just going to leave it as mass 1 and now we can get started so the first thing that i'm going to do is just create some 2d geometries so i'm just going to go here to the line tool and just create one simple line next i'm going to go to the circle tool and then let's create a circle here and then let's go to a rectangle and create our rectangle here there we go so now we have these three basic shapes so all of these shapes this line here and let me just go to the default 3d view there we go so this line that we have here i'm going to turning be turning that into a surface the circle is going to become a sphere this is going to become just like a box shape and then also i want to show you a shape which you can create out out of kind of combining multiple profiles and for that first we have to well create multiple profiles so for that my favorite approach is to go and first create reference planes for each of the profiles so you can create one reference plane here like this then you create another one and then finally the third one hit the escape a few times and then uh what you want to do is name all three of these so you select them and then you can click here to name them and this one is going to be number one this one is going to be number two and this one is going to be number three now you can also name them by selecting them and then going to the properties and entering the name here and then hitting apply and as you can see it's the same result it's called three this was two and one okay once we have this uh this is now in the floor plan view this is the south elevation so if i open up the south elevation i'm looking at i add these reference planes and they're all one in front of the other so now what they can do is simply go here to perhaps the rectangle tool and then because we don't really have any reference plane selected in this particular view we can go here and we can specify by name and then let's use that reference plane number one so once i specify that i can just click ok and i can come here as you can see this is kind of showing me the border of that reference plane obviously i can create things outside of the border that's that's not a problem but it's just showing you kind of kind of where that's currently placed so anyways let's create like a i don't know like a simple rectangle here uh hit the escape key a few times and then i'm just going to go back to the 3d view because i just like to include one more trick here because i think it's really cool so you can select a shape that you have created like this and then you can go here to the clipboard click on duplicate go to paste paste it to the same place and now basically we have two rectangles kind of over each other so now i can just go here to host and change the host because the second one is selected and the duplicate and if i place it on reference plane two it's going to jump on that second reference plane and then i can repeat that paste aligned to the same place and just change it to reference plane three and now we have three in a row on these three reference planes so that's really cool and now obviously we can select them and then we can edit them if we want so you can make this one i know like wider like that you can make this one i don't know more narrow you can use the tab key to select individual edges or sides and so on so i know we can we can make it like that that looks good okay so let's say we just wanna have a show yeah these three profiles are going to be gener creating our shape okay so now let's create those shapes so for shapes i like to go here and switch to shaded mode shaded view mode just because it tends to look a little bit better it's easier to see what's going on and now let's zoom into our align element go to create form and it's just going to create basically a simple surface oops i've moved it a little bit so let's yeah let's just leave it like that okay then let's go to the circle you click on create form and it's going to give you this option do you want a cylinder or a circle or a sorry a sphere and then i'm just going to select that sphere and there we go and see when it's shaded it gives it that little well shade so it's a bit easier to see what's going on uh then for the rectangle let's go to create form so it creates a box and then finally you want to select all three profiles go to create form and then it creates like a blend uh from those profiles yeah just like that perfect okay now it's time for form manipulation and i want to start with this with this surface so i can select it and then extend it like this and make it larger or i can select this side and then extend it there and this little tool that we're using that's called a gizmo so i can do that but what if i want to change it even further well let's now explore uh when we select this and make sure to select the whole thing so when the whole thing highlights not just one edge but the whole thing if you cannot get to that use the tab key once or twice and then it's going to highlight the whole thing you click the select and then here you get the form element tools so these are kind of for form manipulation so what you can do here is go to perhaps add profile and now profiles are horizontal lines so basically what the profile is revit looks at this surface as a blend between a line at the bottom and a line at the top because we had one line on the bottom and then it's just kind of extruded that line so basically it looks as at these horizontal lines as profiles so if i want to come in and place additional lines here i can place them and those are additional profiles so if i come to the surface again go again to add profile i can get an additional profile but it cannot be vertical so it can only be placed here on the kind of horizontal axis hit the escape kick a couple of times and then i can select those profiles and i can use them to well change the shape of the surface see that's quite cool so you can actually edit this and then you can even move it side to side like that you can move this one either to that side or to this side so you can create some funky geometry really quickly simply by adding that one uh that one or two profiles now also what you can do apart from profiles uh is you can come in here select the entire shape so again using the tab key and you can add edges so edges run alongside the extrusion so in this case this is a horizontal line that has been extruded up so that up motion that's your edge so edge is vertical in this case and now if i go here to add edge if i just come closer as you can see it can add multiple edges here now the downside of the edges if you select an edge and if you want to move it like this it's going to kind of break that surface i guess you can say so that's that's the kind of annoying part with the edges but yeah that's that's how it works now also one quick dimension when you have an edge like this you can see that this gizmo it's basically showing you well x y x y and z axis now if i hit the space key it's going to flip so basically it's going to have the same z-axis but the x and y-axis are now kind of following this shape so see how it's kind of following this direction and this orange arrow continues that and then this orange arrow contains this so you can toggle between these with the space key and then you can kind of extend this a bit further if you want and yeah there we go i actually have a whole uh lesson inside of my uh my massing uh or advanced modeling and massing course where i explain all of this so that's something that if you want to check it out it's included there as well kind of a bit more extensively okay so now moving forward for the sphere what i just want to show you is if i select the entire sphere if i go here to edit profile it's going to basically show us what this is made out of so it's basically we have this access and then this is the profile that's being rotated around that access so if i make any changes so for example if i make a change here just like that and then if i use the split element tool and then use trim and extend to corner like that kind of looks like a bomb from a cartoon but then as you can see i can change that profile and now it looks well like this so you can play around with that shape by editing the profile same thing goes here with the rectangle so if i select the whole thing and then go to edit profile so again not the line but you have to hit use the tab key to select the entire thing go to edit profile and then you can select if you select the line or an element on the bottom it's going to allow you to edit that bottom element but now if i go again to edit profile and if i select something on top it's going to select that bottom of that top profile so you can now make some changes here so it's a really unique way of editing your kind of geometry inside of revit and then finally for a situation such as this one and then if i just select it for this i just want to show you the x-ray feature just because uh in this case as you can see we have three profiles one on in the beginning one in the end and then we have something in the middle but it's really hard to see as you can see when i hover over it we can kind of see it's there but it's really hard to pinpoint so if i just select this entire shape and then go into x-ray mode now i can easily make changes to all of these elements i can select this point here for example i can stretch it out i can use the the space key if i want to kind of pull it in i don't know so i can make any changes that i want and then if i just select that shape again and go to x-ray i can turn it off also one important thing to note only one element can be in x-ray mode at any given time so if i want to go to this and if i want to turn this into x-ray mode you can see that this is no longer an x-ray mode so that's just important thing to note and also if at any point you feel like well this that they have created the i i don't like it i want to go back to the beginning i want to go back to kind of the original shapes that uh that this is made out of you can always go to dissolve and it's basically going to dissolve that and in this case uh it we started with a circle but because we have modified that it dissolved it into well this and also it's going to add this little point and whatever you dissolve it's going to include those points so if you dissolve this it's going to include all of the points on each profile so that's just something that you'll see i don't i'm not really sure why it does that but it does that so just keep that in mind and there we go those are form manipulation tools and rabbit i hope you have enjoyed this and as i said if you're interested in learning more about this i have an entire course on creating numerous different interesting shapes in rabbit and just how revit approaches really complex geometry and turning that into actual buildings so i'm going to include that just below this video in the description and then as i said up in the cards above thank you for watching guys make sure to check out my website balkanarctic.com for more uh 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: 13,744

Keywords: Revit, tutorial, BIM, building information modeling, autodesk, massing, mass, in-place, conceptual massing, form, manipulation

Id: q9jzGVFuIBo

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021