Showing posts with label Materials. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Materials. Show all posts

Monday, August 12, 2013

Phase and Poche Materials

As you're likely to know already Revit provides a feature to change the appearance of elements to distinguish between phases of work. When you examine the Materials dialog the "Phase-X" materials were created by the development team and they exist to support the way that feature is intended to work. The templates are configured (OoTB) to automatically "work" if you use the phase features.


When I visit the 2014 Architectural template I find three "rogue" phase materials in the dialog (image above). The four highlighted in yellow are assigned to the Phases Graphic Overrides.


I've no idea what these three other materials are assigned to. When I examine the Materials dialog and the icon for "asset use" (highlighted with the red circle in the first image in this post) the four "good" materials report that the associated asset is shared with 8 materials. The three rogue ones are not using an asset shared with any other materials. Easy enough, I deleted them. Revit will let you delete any of the phase related materials even though the Phase feature is technically relying on them to work as intended out of the box.

In general nobody will use the materials for anything else, not really suited for anything else. They "work" as intended and are preset so they do. The only real interaction anyone needs to have with any of these materials is if something about how they look isn't quite what we want. If we don't think demo elements should be red we can change the material to use something else or increase or decrease the transparency for example.

The other material highlighted in yellow is the poche material (pronounced Poe-shay). It's also a feature that was originally tied to the graphic display of the model when Coarse Detail Level is in effect. However they've made the Poche material assignment a Type Property of 3D views.


You have to assign a material to have it take effect. In the past Poche was hardwired to the effect. Now you can technically use any material in the library instead. Poche isn't required itself to work anymore. Here's an example of it being used on the section through a pavilion model.


Thursday, July 19, 2012

Reference Planes and Wall Closure

Daniel Stine wrote to let me know that his new Interior Design book is now available for 2013.


It covers the new Materials and uses the new stair tool to create the stair shown in the image below (actually, the reader creates everything in the image).


He was also worried about me not posting as much lately so he shared something that's part of his book too...so I could post it here. Cool, I don't have to be creative and come up with something to post on my own! Aah...I feel so relaxed, thanks!

Control Wall’s Material Return

A door or window family has the ability to control the return of materials (i.e. Layers) for the host wall in a project. The exterior and interior materials can be controlled separately. These adjustments change the 3D model, not just the 2D plan-view. A single door family is controlling the various conditions shown below.


Note the two “wall closure” parameters (shown below) need to be “locked” so they stay positive (in the correct direction) when the host wall thickness changes. Also, these values can be set to 0’-0” for the default instance value.


You can set two Reference Planes to “Wall Closure” in a family.


In plan you get something like this.


[Edit: added this section 08/18/2013 - realized I didn't mention this part]

It is also significant that the Reference Plane setting works together WITH Wall Type Properties. If you don't tell the wall to allow the wrapping at inserts it won't do anything. I've added this image below to help explain.