Weird Walls: Depth, Height, and Function

Put this in the category of “The Missing Revit Manual” in the same chapter as “View Discipline“.

Turns out, Wall Function isn’t just an extra parameter to filter by. We just came across this one. When you change the Wall Function to FOUNDATION, it forces the placement of those wall types to be “Depth” and not “Height”.

Did you even know that was a thing? I would say that 99.99% of the time when a wall is placed, it is assumed to go in the positive Z direction, or in other terms, “up”. The good old Options Bar lets you change the placement from “Height” to “Depth” meaning you can make your wall go “down”. Who changes this? Does anyone ever change this?

You didn’t even know it was there, did you?

Anyway, if you change your Wall Function to “Foundation”, you can ONLY use “Depth” which can cause some hilarious errors as you place a wall.

I am confident some of you knew this already, but it’s news to me and it was news to everyone who I talked to in real life (or “offline” as the kids say… they don’t really say that).

The HELP file has nothing that lays out what specifically happens when you change the Wall Function. I guess it’s time to dive in and see what else might change when we adjust that previously-thought-innocuous parameter.

Don’t Forget! LOW WALLS! Watch your…feet…

This is a “hiccup” that I forget.  So I’m writing it down here in the hopes that it will force me to remember (hint: it won’t!)

You remember way back when, we talked about how floors don’t exactly follow the View Range rules?  Walls are kind of the same.  Except a lot more confusing.

This is hard to understand, so I’ll point you here and here (I especially like how that last one calls it a “feature”) for some different ways of explaining it.

Here are the criteria for this insanity:

1. You have a wall
2. The top is UNCONSTRAINED and not attached to anything
3. Your View Range cuts through the wall
4. The top of your wall is less than 6′ from the Bottom of the View Range

If your walls meet all these criteria, your wall will NOT show with the CUT style.  It will show PROJECTION.  Yes, even though you are cutting through it.

If you set the top of your wall to constrain to a level, any level, and then offset it, it will then show as CUT.  Or if you drop the bottom of your view range down so the top of the wall is at least 6′ from the bottom of the view range, it will show as CUT.

Seriously, there has to be a secret manual somewhere.  Indiana Jones and I will try to track it down soon.

Walls Have Tops Too

We have settled on never ever ever leaving the top constraint for walls to be “unconnected”.  Even if they are short, like partitions for cubicles or something, we still connect them to the level they are on and then offset them to the proper height.  Why would I be such a wall top constraint fascist?

Engineers.

Isn’t it always that way?

Seriously, they need the tops of the walls to be constrained to something.  For most of the walls.  So, it’s just plain good habit to get into to always pay attention to the tops of the walls.  Or the top of everything for that matter.  Remember, this isn’t CADD anymore.

“Model it right and your documents will follow.”  I think I read that on a fortune cookie once.

Wall Jogs and Tough Clean Ups

UPDATE – Please check out Bjorn’s quick and easy technique in the comments.  It’s one of those things that makes you say “no way!”  You still might need to do some “dancing” with some elaborate stacked walls, but the below tip is an excellent first step that should resolve a lot of the issues.

There comes a point in any Revit wall’s life that it just cannot clean up.  It’s not when the wall is too big, Revit LOVES big.

It’s when it gets too small.

Look at the below two wall strings.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

All set?  Great.  Now, they look fine, right?  Clean up nice and pretty.  But look what happens when I scoot that lower wall in both strings up just 1/8″.

What in the world happened to the wall string on the left?!  That jog got all messed up!  But the one on the right is fine!  What’s happened here?

Well, the overall width on the wall on the left is 1′-1 7/8″.  That’s the key.  Once a jog, or clean up length gets less than the overall width of the wall, the wall gets very confused and mad.  The top two “horizontal” walls are overlapping the lower “horizontal” wall, and making cleanup a nightmare.

Is there a solution?  Sort of.

First thing you need to do is think about how it would actually be built… you know… in the real world.  Would it really be jut the wall walking around this gap, or would it be a different wall type, etc?

From this point, there are a couple options, none of which are ideal.  We have tried them with mixed results.

You can make an architectural column and slap it on the wall.  We’ve done that.  Works… OK.

If you want to use walls, there is a very round about way to try and get these things to clean up.

First we need a frame of reference on our walls.

So, walls 1 and 5 are our major horizontals, 3 is the smallish horizontal, and 2 and 4 are our right and left verticals, respectively.  You’ll see from the above image that I have already started my work. 

The first step is to disallow the join between 2 and 3 and 3 and 4.  On the appropriate end for each wall, you need to right-click on the grip and select DISALLOW JOIN.  You’ll do this for the lower grips on 2 and 4, and both gripd on 3.

Then you need to do some aligning, and you will only figure this out with trial and error and a lot of undos.  For this case I ended up aligning and constraining the left face of wall 3 to the left (interior) face of wall 2 and the right face of wall 3 with the right (interior) face of wall 4.  Then I aligned and constrained the lower face of wall 2 to inside the finish material of wall 3.

The final step is to simply JOIN GEOMETRY on each combination of walls: 2 to 3 and 3 to 4.  And here’s the thing – THE ORDER THAT YOU SELECT WHAT WALL FIRST MATTERS.  In this case, I selected the “verticals” first, so I clicked 2 then 3, and then 4 then 3.  It “feels” like the first thing you select when you join geometry “wins”.  I have zero scientific data to back this claim up, but that’s what my gut tells me.

Poof!  Nice and clean.  And if I nudge or straight out move wall 3 up, the clean up stays with it.

This is definitely one of those cases where no one solution fits all problems but if you know the possible solutions, you can hopefully pick an appropriate response.