Make Your Model Look Like a Model

I saw a Tweet recently (I think it was a Tweet, I can’t find it again) that had an interesting workflow to make your Revit model render in a single material. The post had a rendering look like a hand made model fashioned out of wood. It was a neat idea, but it implied that the single material rendering inside Revit was not possible, mainly because you can’t override materials with View Filters. And while that last part is true, that doesn’t mean you can’t do it right inside of Revit. It takes a little cheating, but it’s cheating in a way that probably won’t hurt anything.

While View Filters don’t allow for material overrides, Phase Filters do. Taking a look at my Phases dialog box for the default Revit template, there is no default Phase Filter that has the New phase state set to overridden; and that makes sense because when do you want to override thew new work? You just want it to look like it normally does.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. I made a new Phase Filter called Single Material and set the New phase state to “Overridden”. Then for quick access, I went to the Graphic Overrides tab and opened the “Phase – New” material. My project didn’t have an appropriate material, but the installed asset browser got me a “good enough” chipboard material from the Autodesk material library. I didn’t bother making a new material, I simply replaced the asset for the “Phase – New” material. I did tweak the bump map, dialing the scale up to 40’x40′ since I was applying this to my whole model and I wanted it to look like it shrunk.

Sidenote – decades ago in architecture school, I was working on a model for a project up to the last minute (shocker) and I took a nice slice through the side of my thumb with a utility knife. I wrapped my thumb in those crappy brown paper towels you always had in school, and taped it up with masking tape. I did my charrette for that project with a hack job wrapped up bleeding thumb! Immediately after I presented I asked my professor if I could go to student health. She hastily agreed and I went and got stitches! You can still just make out the scar…

Back in 2016… In this specific case, my entire model was in the New Construction phase so it was pretty straightforward, but the same could be done to the other phase materials because honestly, when do you ever need to use those materials.

The results weren’t half bad:

Chipboard! I usually don’t say this, but it actually does look better full size, so click away!

Apply a touch of tilt frame effect…

Blurry chipboard!

I was pretty happy with the results considering the minuscule amount of time I spent on this thing. If I understood how exterior shadows worked, I could probably get those adjusted to look more appropriate. There are a ton of tweaks you could do if you wanted to apply this process to your own models, but you can easily start right in Revit for your rendering.

Quick Tip – Smile for the Camera!

I am always surprised when I find a very experienced Revit user unaware of some feature or function in the software.  I shouldn’t be surprised, because I’m often finding new things and a piece of software like Revit is amazingly complex, and knowing every single facet has to be a Herculean effort.

In this light, I teach a class for our firm called “The Top 10 Things All Revit Users Should Know” where I spend a couple hours going over some tips and tricks that can get forgotten or overlooked.  Can you guess how many tips and tricks?  That’s right!  64!  Why that many?  Why not 10?  Because there are WAY more than 10 tips and tricks that I expect all our users to know.

I am going to drop a handful of those tips throughout some upcoming blog posts.  There’s a good chance you know the tip.  If you do, don’t roll your eyes and make rude noises, just let the rest of the folks out there go “huh, I didn’t realize that.”  Hopefully, everyone will learn something and we will (checking business-speak manual) “raise all the boats together.”

(Just shut up and get to the tip)

You place a camera view in your model.  It’s just slightly off kilter, maybe not looking far enough up, or maybe not looking enough to one side or another.  You could select the view, click SHOW CAMERA, go back to the plan view, spin it, change the properties to adjust the height, etc etc.  But it would be a lot easier if you could just pivot that camera on its tripod while you are in the view.  I’ll break the tension.  You can.

Here’s the trick.  To simply “pivot” and “rotate” the camera on its tripod, you need to select the CROP REGION BOUNDARY for the camera view (so it’s highlighted), then in the view, use your SHIFT-middle-button pan and rotate to simply look around.  If the crop region is NOT selected, then you will just be doing a typical rotate where you move around the model.  This will work for any 3D view, not just a camera view (it’s just more impressive in a camera view).  Give it a spin to see how it works.

Get it?  Give it a “spin”?

Sorry.  Next post I’ll try to be pun-free.

Gridline Gridlock

A question I find myself answering a fair amount is “Who put the cat in there?!”; more Revit related, I get asked “what the heck does that little ‘3D’ by my grid bubble mean?” a lot.

What the heck IS that?

The “3D/2D” button by gridline heads is often a source of confusion, partially, I think, because of the nomenclature they used for the system.  It’s a good system, but really has nothing to do with the traditional definition of 3D and 2D.  Semantics has often been an issue in Revit (looking at you, “Save to Central”) that often the team does a good job of fixing (looking at you, “Synchronize with Central”).  So far, the 3D/2D toggle is not one of them.

So, if you click a gridline, you will see a tiny “3D” up by the grid bubble.  The terminology is flawed.  Essentially, what the “3D” means is that this grid bubble position is shared throughout the project, and if you move it, you will move it in other views as well, and wherever you put it, that’s where it will show up in any view where that grid bubble is marked “3D”, or just outside the annotation region, depending on which is shorter. 

When you click it, it changes to “2D”.  This basically means “View Specific”.  So, if you move the grid end now, it won’t affect any other views.  This view is it.  You will see a ghost grip where the “3D” of the gridlines is.  Dragging the head back to this will reset it to “3D”. 

Now, let’s say you click the 2D on for some of your grid bubbles and you move them and you really like the positioning in this view, so you want to copy it to other views.  That’s where the “Propagate Extents” button comes in to play. 

Select the gridlines you want to copy and click “Propagate Extents”.  You will be prompted with a list of parallel views.  Select the views you want to copy to and then the gridlines position settings will be copied onto those views.  It’s a one-time thing for the “2D” gridlines, so if you were to tweak the position after propagating, you would need to re-propagate to get those new settings pushed over.

Do I have a solution for the 3D/2D terminology fiasco?  Not really.  The only better icon I could think of would be a little chain to replace the current “3D” and a broken chain or chain with a slash through for “2D”… for “linked” and “unlinked”, get it?  Is it better?  Who knows.  Will it ever change?  Who knows that either.  But hopefully the above clears it up.