Description
Key Learnings
- Explore and take full advantage of Revit software’s powerful graphic tools and capabilities which you may not have known even existed
- Learn how to use a variety of presentation techniques to help you develop your own artistic style
- Learn unique “out of the box” tips and tricks to prepare better-than-ever presentations more quickly and efficiently
- Learn old-school hand-drafting techniques to make your construction documents communicate better and look beautiful
Speaker
- Steven ShellMr. Shell graduated from the University of Arizona in 1982 and has had his own Architectural Firm in Tucson, Arizona for over 37 years. He has been using Revit Architecture® exclusively for 20 years and is the co-founder and co-chair of the Southern Arizona Revit Users Group and is professionally certified in Revit Architecture. He has presented at Autodesk University and lectured at the University of Arizona and is an Adjunct Professor at Pima Community College. He received the Top Rated Speaker Award for his Round Table Class at AU in 2015, 2017 & 2019 , RTC-Europe in Dublin, Ireland, all five BIM Workshops held in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Omaha, NB and Anaheim CA. He has presented at the Central States Revit Workshop, Midwest University and 6 Revit Technology Conferences (RTC) events (North America, Canada, Australia and Europe) and he has been ranked in the top 5 at every speaking event. Mr. Shell was also the Chairman of the Board of Adjustment for 26 years and was the recent Zoning Examiner for the City of Tucson.
STEVEN SHELL: Has anybody ever seen me speak or heard me speak? A couple. I am not your traditional teacher. I'm just an architect. And I just happen to have been raised in a hand drawing environment because I'm old. And that's what we were doing back in the '70s. We hand drew.
And we used exacto knives to make models. So our models, although they weren't very smart, they'd really cut your fingers up. So you get blood on your stuff. So you personally were invested.
But I did come from a hand drawing background. And because of that, when Revit presented itself to me, it was amazing how ugly I thought it was. Because I'd been looking at everybody's CAD drawings for the last 20 years. And I was always amazed how ugly a lot of those were.
And so I kind of just put it upon myself, because of the way I am, I just wanted to make Revit do what I did by hand. And I just kind of did it naturally. It didn't take any work. And what you're going to find out is Revit's an amazing tool. And it can duplicate everything I ever did by hand.
And just to show you how serious I was with it, I actually, when I first got Revit in like 2001 2002, the first thing I did was found some people in Australia. For like $1,500 they turned my hand lettering into a font. Because this is before you could actually do it yourself. You actually do pay people to create a font.
So I was really worried about making my drawings look like my hand drawings, to the point even my own lettering, because that's how obsessive I was about all this. How many architects do we have in the room? How many engineers? Contractors? Educators? CAD or BIM managers? Did I miss anybody?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: I put you with architect, sorry. Interior designers? See that's how important I think you are. No, I haven't been doing this a while. You don't see top speaker on that badge for nothing.
Revit, just so you know, is extremely friendly to just everyday graphics. And one of the things that we have to really be careful about, although the model is really, really smart, you still are presenting to the world a two dimensional representation, be it a PDF, be it a piece of paper.
It doesn't matter what it is. What you're submitting and what you're handing out to everybody are still two dimensional drawings. They still look exactly like I did with vellum and pencil. The only difference is you're creating them differently. But the drawings still have to do the same thing.
The client has to understand it. We all agree that, right? Clients need to understand what they're looking at. Nothing worse than having a client come back and say, gosh, I really didn't think it was going to look like that. Not a good thing to hear.
The contractors that are going to build this stuff, it's kind of important that they can understand the drawings. And then of course, have we all submitted building safety for permits? We all know how lovely that is. They have to understand our drawings.
So you have some people that really graphically have to get this stuff really, really quickly. They don't have a lot time to digest these drawings. So it's our job to make sure that this stuff reads just from a pure graphic communications standpoint.
And the first thing I'm going to tell you to do, just take a leap of faith. We all print to PDF now? Does anybody do anything else? PDFs lighten up your line weights by about half, maybe. Have you seen that?
So the very, very, very first thing you should do the, minute you get back in your office, go into your template. We all have a template, please? Take almost every line weight in Revit. I don't care what number they have, add 1 to it. That at least will take care of printing to PDF.
It'll still mean your drawings are too light. Because Revit is very timid. And those of us that hand drew with graphite, we learned to press down on it so that it really reads well. But it's imperative that this stuff doesn't fade in the sun and get just to where you can't see it.
So just between the two doors there, I mean, you can see there's a difference between the actual door panel. Just go ahead and start adding one or two to every single object style in your entire project. And make that part of your template. Because you'll tweak this as we go.
And do the exact same thing with annotations. Because like on that sheet, the only thing that's really critical is the call out bubble to take you to a better view. And callouts in Revit are 1. And 1 is what you use for like the crack in a sidewalk. So not exactly a hierarchy thing.
So just come in and do the exact same thing to all of your annotation families. Just come in and add 1 to everything. And then come in and start getting bold with things like your section call out. Because a lot of times, the section call out is still a 1, believe it or not, in Revit out of the box.
I'm going to blow through a couple of the real assemblies. I'm assuming we're all Revit users here. Show of hands, who's using Revit? Perfect.
The difference between these two drawings, I was just trying to show that the property that was my project was my project. So I just created a little bit of a wider property line. Does everybody make his or her own lines in Revit? Does anybody want to see how to make a line really quickly?
And just so you know, I'm a real Revit user so I got Revit ready to go. So we're going to do all of this stuff for real here. This isn't just PowerPoint.
I'm going to show you how to create a line just really quickly because you should be doing this on absolutely everything within Revit, even the center line. The center line in Revit's hideous. The property line in Revit is hideous. But just from a line weight standpoint, just come in here and go into-- you have to go into a different [INAUDIBLE].
But if you go to your Manage tab inside of Revit in like a floor plan view, if you go to Manage, you'll notice under Additional Settings, there's your line styles. Go ahead and just open up your line styles. And these are all the lines that come in Revit that you have. Go ahead and add a new one.
And in this case, we're just going to call it a wider line. I can spell. Anybody ever worked with a blonde? Not fun sometimes.
Go ahead and create that. And then what you'll do is you'll now come in here, and for an example, we're just going to go ahead and make this thing really read. We'll go ahead and give it a 7. Leave it black. Leave it solid.
But this is where you would change the line type. Rather than doing a solid line, these are all the different kinds of lines that Revit comes with. And there's a bunch of them. You will always find something that looks a little more presentable.
But once you've created a line, look at the difference. If you just come in here and create a drafted line or any kind of line work tool, if you come in here, and right now we'll just say here's just your traditional wide line that comes in Revit. There's a wide line. Not very wide.
And now if we create another one, you'll see now you have access to it. It's called a wider line. But see the difference? It takes about 10 seconds to create a line. You should not be at the mercy of a Revit, ever.
So change your line weight to create your own. It's just part of Revit. And it'll be forever within your template. And it's something that you should just be doing.
Do we have any hand drafters in the room? Anybody? One, two, three. Three out of 250. We're not a dying breed.
All drawings that most people produce look like the upper drawing there on the left. That's pretty much stock Revit. And that actually has a little bit of [INAUDIBLE] on the drywall, which is probably a cut above maybe a few people's drawings. But to me that doesn't read.
The drawing in the lower right hand corner is pretty much the way they looked when you would get your prints made. We did blue line prints. But what we would do in the old days is we would untape our vellum drawing, we would turn it upside down and take a pink pencil and just start shading it in. And depending on how much lead you spread, you'd get dark or light gray.
So what I learned to do is, clients still like color. I mean, they still like to see color. So when I'm showing the interior elevations to go over all my cabinetry with a client, I'll actually come in the upper right hand corner there and I will assign families that have all the colors that I would expect to see within cabinetry. If it's a wood grain, if it's a laminate, the metal filing cabinets, the wood of a door, those are colors that I will approximate.
The reality is I kind of don't care about the color. What I care about is how does it print to gray. Because everything I do is black and white still. So I am constantly looking at just the tonality so that when they do print, I'm just getting shades of gray. And to me, everything I do has tone. Because that's the only way I know to separate colors, separate materials.
Because yes, you can note the heck out of it, and it reads. But graphically, it's nicer just to look at it and instantly have it grab you. And like all things in Revit, will we all agree? There's the right way to do it and then there's the way most of us do it. Because we're all in a hurry. We don't have time to do it the right way.
The way you do this the correct way is you actually create a new cabinetry family. And you give it a material. And you give it a surface pattern. And you then can use that for all eternity. And everybody in your office is happy. They have a brand new cabinet they can use. And you're a rock star.
Problem is when it's late, I really don't want to do this. So I do this. How many people use graphic overrides? In 2007, when graphic overrides were first invented, we were very happy in the Revit community. Because you never used to be able to do this.
This is a cheater's tool. For all of you BIM managers and CAD managers-- raise your hands please. I want to see who you are. I now know who you are. When I read your evaluations and you mark me down for this, because you say I shouldn't be teaching this, because this goes against the grain of a CAD manager, I say wrong. This is still art.
There is nothing wrong with spending 10 seconds to make a drawing look good that should not be categorized as a BIM standard. There is no such thing as a BIM standard for what looks good. This is art. I hate to say this, but it really is.
Paul Aubin says my favorite phrase ever, when did line weight become an IT issue. I heard that and it summed up my feelings on CAD in a heartbeat. Because line weight should never be an IT issue. It's a graphic issue. It should be, how does it look relative to the rest of the drawing.
So to me, coming in, and on this one view-- now, granted, I mean it is the wrong way to do it, folks. I'll admit it right here. It's wrong. Don't do it. But when you do it, go ahead-- just remember all you need to do is right click on anything and you have this wonderful little dialog box that lets you change all of this stuff on the fly.
And just to show you just how fast you can do this-- and I'm going to show you another reason to do this. And I know the BIM manager is going to hate me again. Do we have any designers in the room? Have you ever been working on a design and you think you came up with something that you like, and you spent hours and hours and hours on it only to find out either your boss hates it or the client hates it?
If you know you're designing something that you don't know if someone's going to like, if you can do it in less than a minute, isn't it worth trying? To me, it is. And I might get yelled at by a BIM manager. But I won't get yelled at by the client if they like it.
So I'm going to give you an example. This wall right here, I'm designing this building. It's 10 o'clock at night. I've got it ready to go. I'm really happy with it. But that wall bothers me. It's like a missed opportunity to me. It should be something. I don't know what. But it needs-- I mean, even turning it blue like that looks good.
So to me, I'll come in here and I'll literally just right click on this bad little guy. And I'll say, override in group just this one little element. And I'm just going to kind of come up on a whim and say, you know what might actually look really nice is maybe just a grid. So I'll come in and just do a little grid pattern. And for right now, I'll just make it black because I really don't know what I'm doing, kind of like maybe just an [INAUDIBLE].
And I can kind of, as a design study, I can look at that and go, well that's starting to kind of look cool. I kind of like that. I don't know what it is yet. But you notice I said it looked really good blue? When I highlight this, that kind of made me think of glass block. And although I know I wouldn't take glass block above a roof line, you never know. I could put a light up above the roof and it'd look really cool.
But it's so easy for me to come in here and just explore this. And I'll just override the thing again, just by that one element. And I'll just take that surface transparency and I'll make it slightly transparent. And I can start to create the illusion of a glass block material.
Now we all know we can create a glass block material in Revit. You go into the Family Editor, Edit Masonry, change it to a transparent material, turn it to glass. It'll probably take you half an hour maybe, if you're really good. Or if you're Jim, it might take you 10 minutes.
Me personally, that just took me two seconds. I don't know if the client's even going to like the building yet. So to me this is worth it. When we go into production and the design gets approved, of course I would change it to the right material. But for design purposes, early graphics, this is a wonderful little trick.
I might even come in here and change that grid pattern and actually make it more glass block. Because now I'm convinced this is what I'm going to do. And I'll actually change that color to a nice blue and kind of pull off the effect just even a little bit more so that it starts to even get that effect of glass block.
So to me, that's a perfect excuse to start using graphic overrides to not only make something look good but also to start using it as a design tool. It's absolutely the wrong thing to do. We'll all admit that. Don't get mad at me.
This is why we post shade with pink pencil. The little story that goes behind this story, that's part of a medical complex that was about an 8,000 square foot floor plate. It was a two by two Tegular ceiling throughout the entire floor plan except for this little triangle over the little reception desk.
And I made this really cute wood grid with this recessed paneling. It was a nice little ceiling. That little ceiling's probably $50,000. But on that floor plan, in a sea of 8,000 square feet at a 1/16 inch plan, no one would have ever known it except for the keynote or the little note that called it out.
Well, has anybody ever watched a subcontractor bid a job? I know this is a graphics class. But I'm going to turn it into a marketing class 101. If you ever want to get a lot of work, make contractors happy. Get the name that you can make contractors happy, you care about them, you want to see them do well. You don't want to hide things from them. You want to make it painfully obvious.
Because what happens is they come home from dinner. At work, they have dinner. Then around 7:30, 8 o'clock they unroll this on their dining table usually because they're doing this at home, nine times out of 10. And they're bidding a job. And when you've got something so obviously out of place, why not just call attention to it?
And I guarantee you the guy would have missed it had I not just colored it in. But the minute I colored it in like that, he just instantly-- his eyes went right to it. Boom. Done. A lot of times they don't even know that I helped them. I know I helped them, though.
Profiling, silhouetting, how many people know what that word means? Show of hands. Profiling a drawing is why sketch up looks good. Does everybody like the way sketch up looks on the screen? It has a cartoon effect of bolding out the line that goes all the way around the object. It's just a graphic trick that every cartoonist does. We do it. And here, anything that you want to call attention to, you just profile it.
But that actually goes a step further. Because on a drawing like this, do you notice how the line that comes around that one wall is a lot bolder than any of these other lines? What this is doing is this is mother nature's way of pointing out that there's something happening behind it.
If it's a thin little line, your brain does not perceive depth or surprise or anything. If you make something a lot bolder next to a thinner line, your brain will start to want to see what's around the corner. That's what we're doing here.
Believe it or not, people used to spend hours profiling a drawing. I mean, it took forever to come in and use a different pencil and figure out how to do this. What Revit does is you come in here under your graphic overrides and you click on that little button here and you go to your overrides, and you get to this screen.
It's my favorite little screen. And you'll notice they have a thing that says, Silhouette. Silhouette is profiling in Revit language. If I turn that off, you'll see the difference between these two drawings. See how it just flattened out? I'll turn it back on again.
It makes a big difference. And it's a one-button feature. To me, every single drawing needs to be profiled. I haven't found one yet that doesn't need profiling. Floor plans, your kitchen counters, there's actually space behind it, down below. So profile the edge of a kitchen counter. Because normally in Revit, that's a line weight 1, a projection line for a counter top.
So to me, you should always be profiling. You notice, this was part of my template. I had to actually undo it for you to be able to see what to do. So that should be a given in your template is that you should be silhouetting absolutely everything.
And depending on the scale of the drawing, you can actually widen that up a little bit. That's why, to me, I actually have profile lines within my family template. Because if you go into my line styles, I actually have profile, profile heavy, profile heavier. Because sometimes with scale, I need to bump up that.
Half tone, does anybody use half tone? Why? Just yell it out.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: I didn't hear existing and new yet. Just kidding. I got my hearing aid turned up. I can hear.
This is a floor plan. As an architect, I'm paid to do interior space planning before there's a lease. The tenants will come into one of my office buildings and they'll want to see a little floor plan to see if they like it. We'll get it to a contractor so he can budget it within a day or two. These things take no time at all, a couple of hours, I'm done.
I don't have a lot time to note it up and do a lot of things like that. So anything I can do to help the contractor understand things, I do that. So to me, those two floor tiles, yes, in a perfect world-- and of course in my template, it's there-- but in a perfect world, I would have two floor tiles, existing two by two, new two by two. And one would be dark and one would be half tone.
But as we know, when it's late and you're tired, you sometimes don't have time to do it the right way. And you'll apologize to everybody. But you'll just come in here and instead of doing that, it's just easier to come in. I'll bet these are already half toned, if I know me. But you'll just go ahead and click on this floor and just override this by element. And just hit Half Tone.
And what happens is if you have another floor that's next to it that isn't half toned, it's painfully obvious which one's new and which one's existing. So to me that's just a little slam dunk thing that doesn't affect anybody, but it gets the point across.
And then yes, distance, showing things further beyond, and this slide right here will kind of show that. This is a culmination of everything we've just learned. Everything we've just talked about for the last 15, 20 minutes is in that one drawing right there. That's the way the drawing looks of a teller line without any graphic work.
With a little bit of work, it takes maybe an extra minute at best, you can get to a drawing that starts to show layering, depth, materials, profiling. It took no time on your part. And I guarantee bosses will get mad because they'll say how much time did you spend on that.
And you can go, a minute. And he'll go, oh, OK. If you had spent five hours doing that, even I'd be sitting here going, it's a little much, for a design drawing. But to me, it's critical to put that kind of effort in a drawing.
And then using half tone and transparency just to show or de-emphasize something. A lot of times you have something on a drawing that you have that you just want to downplay or de-emphasize. Start playing with half tone and then start playing with transparency. Because just one or the other sometimes isn't enough.
So by time you go from the way it looks out of the box to the time you completely ghost them, this is how you start making people in a sea of people, when you have a crowd of people in front of a building, you don't want your eyes going to the people.
You just want them there for scale and for sizzle and all that. Start playing with their transparency and half tone quality. And you can start de-emphazing things like that. And it takes no time at all.
Your cover sheets, folks, this is the cover of your drawings. How many people just have code information and client information on their cover sheet? Most drawings, I know. We're all down here. This is like a book. This is a contractor or a client's first peek at your drawings. And we are coming in without any sizzle whatsoever.
I mean, even video covers, back in the Hollywood video days and Blockbuster, you picked a movie sometimes by the cover. God knows I bought a lot of albums in the '70s because of the cover. Didn't always work out for me. But we did.
So to me, Revit gives you all these wonderful views. Just slap one on the cover. If you're not doing an exterior of a building and it's all interior, just go to Google Earth. Go get a street view of it. You'll at least tell the inspectors and the subcontractors which building it is. So that's always kind of a nice thing to do.
This goes back to the little teller and coloring in wood. Works on the outside of buildings too. These two buildings, same drawing, same view. The only difference is the one on the bottom is a little bit flat. And back when I was doing presentation drawings, you would have these beautiful mylars. And we would turn those over and take prismacolor. Anyone ever used prismacolors? They're like wax. When you'd put them on the backside of a mylar, you've got this really rich color.
Revit duplicates that. Just come in and do graphic overrides. Or in this case, you actually see I created a green glass. I did it the right way. But there's the wrong way again, because I can.
My first house in 30 years. I don't do houses. But my dentist really begged and I found out they get their way when they have a tool in your mouth. Word of advice, don't ever let your dentist put tools in your mouth if they want something from you.
But to me, these two drawings are identical. But it took me less than maybe 10 seconds just to make the glass green. And I don't know why used green glass. I probably should use blue but I got a thing for green glass. I've never used it in my life. None of my clients have ever liked green glass. But I still like it.
That's an example of profiling. You can see the line weight difference as it goes around the building. So profiling should be on absolutely every drawing.
Sketchy lines, how many people use sketchy lines? Show of hands. I got to ask, yell it out, why do you use it?
AUDIENCE: Looks cool.
AUDIENCE: It softens the [INAUDIBLE].
STEVEN SHELL: Softens it. Anything else?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: The owners don't mind changing it.
STEVEN SHELL: Oh, you've heard my speech before. But this-- see, Jim's old school like I am. Now we've already touched on marketing 101. Now we're going to touch on architectural design sales. How many agree that architecture is just one hellacious sales job? I'm talking a client into spending a lot of money and I look like this telling them, oh, it'll look great. You don't even buy shoes on that kind of recommendation.
So one of the things I learned a long time ago, I used to go into design meetings with more finished drawings. And clients would look at it, and yes, they loved them. It wowed them. And they were impressed. But then when it came time for the contractor to bid it, it was really easy to whack off that really pretty thing that I designed because it saved the owner $50,000 and it didn't seem to make that big of a difference.
Versus come in with a napkin sketch. And show it to your client. And I swear to god that client will sit there and just go, cool, it's not done yet. Can we do this? Can we do this? What if we did this? They look at a napkin sketch as a work in progress. And the fact that I was willing to share it with them means I'm willing to share the design with them.
So I'll ask them, I say, so is there anything-- so, I know we've talked. Is there something that you really like. And you get them to be part of the design conversation. So you show them this building and they come back with, well, that wall in front of the stair is kind of boring. I don't know. It just stands there.
I said, you know, and it's funny because I was thinking about making it some sort of tile or something. Yeah, that would be nice. And you know, glass block looks really good on your other building. You know I love last block. I said, yeah, I know. You used it on a lot of your buildings.
You know, I'll bet I could probably do something with glass block. Tell you what, let me come back Tuesday and let me see if you like it. And I'll come back Tuesday with the next drawing that doesn't have sketchy lines. And it has this really nice grid that's kind of transparent and blue. I put a lot of work into this, folks. Come on. Work with me. I'm billing for this here.
And suddenly, the client looks out and goes, oh, my god, you're using my glass block. Guess what will never be cut out of that budget ever, ever, ever? They will lose the air conditioner before they lose their glass block. Just food for thought.
AUDIENCE: In Tucson.
STEVEN SHELL: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely And speaker 101, always remember to hit the start button. I got my watch down there. So sketchy lines is nothing more than a wonderful way to let your client know this is a work in progress and they can make changes. It's not a solid drawing and it makes a huge difference to clients.
Anti-aliasing, I didn't even know what this was until computers. I didn't know there was such a word. I didn't even know how to pronounce it. Does everybody know what anti-aliasing is? Isn't it annoying to see the little stair steps on all your angles or your curves?
Revit, believe it or not, gives you a choice. You can come in within Revit early on and you can either come in and under this little file button, there is a thing called options. And if you pull that up and underneath your graphics, there's actually a little thing in here that says smooth lines with anti-aliasing.
Do yourself a favor. Click it here. Because if you don't click it here, you'll have to remember to click it on every single drawing you ever do in Revit. Yeah, I know. I can't tell you how many times I've printed things and come back from my printer to unroll them and go, d'oh. I forgot my anti-aliasing in my lines.
So just do it here. Because if you do this here, what happens is if you then come into the project environment-- and I think it's under graphic overrides. I haven't actually used this in a long time. There it is. Smooth lines with anti-aliasing. See it actually ghost it out?
You can't even uncheck it. Because they just assume, well, if you checked it off in the big box, you know what you're doing Revit does that a lot. Have you noticed that? Check it off in the big box and they just assume you know what you're doing. And you never have to mess with it ever again.
Transparency, this is different than ghosting. Does anybody use transparency? Show of hands. Why do you use it?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: To see through stuff.
STEVEN SHELL: To see through stuff? Wow. I'm a blonde and I understood that answer. Really, Jim? You don't say. I use transparency. Let me just say why I use it. As an architect, I traditionally screwed up cabinetry more than most other things that I could screw up as an architect.
We'll all agree. It's a hard profession. You can't do all this right. But I would manage to screw up cabinetry more than most. And I would always forget to like put outlets not behind a drawer base. That was always a good one. Make sure and put your grommets in the counter tops when your outlets are below.
But I kind of forgot where they were sometimes. Or putting in keyboard pull out trays, yeah, they might be in your family. They might be in your detail. But if you don't see this stuff right in front of you, sometimes you miss it.
So every counter top family I've ever done in Revit are all set to 50% transparency. Because the contractors don't care. They know it's solid. But I always see where my outlets are. And I always see where my cabinetry is below the counter top. So I can always come in and see this.
And the other really nice thing is how many have spent a lot of time in a floor plan view doing what you need to do to dot in where all your base cabinets are? You have all kinds of cool techniques for doing that.
The reality is, just set your counter tops to semi-transparent. You'll never do that again because all your base cabinet shows through. And they look really cool that way. And contractors, go, wow, you actually drew in all your base cabinets. Bonus points. So that's why I use it.
Ambient occlusion, used to be called ambient shadows, came out in 2007. This is mother nature's way of how we actually see things in the real world. There is no such thing as a shadow or a shade and then no shadow or no shade. There's always little, tiny reflections coming off of other walls, floors, ceilings.
These two drawings are the same drawing only with ambient shadows on the right. They add nothing to your model weight as far as I'm concerned. They should be part of your graphic template. You should always use them. They make everything look better.
Has anyone ever used this on a building elevation or section and notice that all of the sudden your walls that are in different planes actually are darker or lighter than each other? I mean, that was an accident on Revit's part. But it works.
But just to show you, this is another one-button thing that you should be doing on every job. If you just come in here under your shadows, see it's in my template to be on. So I have to turn it off.
Go ahead and turn it off and watch what happens to this drawing. I'm going to zoom in now. Hang on one second. So we'll actually zoom in so we can see this better. See where the sand, or whatever that material is, hits that wall? Watch what happens when you turn on ambient shadows.
And every drawing is a little bit different. So you don't sometimes know what all your results are. I just know I've never seen a bad result in all my years of doing this. See? It just adds a little bit of depth to everything. And I can't explain why it looks so much better on everything. So just leap of faith, turn it on, leave in your template that way.
If you really want to turn it off, you can. And then you can go, that long haired guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Looks better this way. So that, to me, is something that should always be in your template.
Realistic views, does anybody use them? Show of hands. Three, four, five. Do you know why we don't like them? We're all architects, engineers, contractors.
AUDIENCE: Interior designers. They're here.
STEVEN SHELL: And especially interior designers. We don't like them because they look more like a watercolor. We learned to draw with line work. Water colorists learn to draw by not drawing lines. They put skies behind nothing. And our brain goes, oh, look a wall. That's not what we do. We like line work.
Revit finally added line work to realistic views. So I'm going to try to convince you all to start using them. Because one of the other things they do now is realistic views. And I think it's the next slide. Yes, it is.
Realistic views are now a great way to see all of your RPC content. Does everybody know what that is, RPC content? Show of hands. All those wonderful people inside of Revit-- Yinyan, and Ron, and Lee Ray-- they're family. Come on. Believe it or not, there's a Steve Shell in there now. He's hidden. But there's actually a guitar player in Revit now.
All of those are called RPCs, because there's only one company that makes them. It's called Rich Photographic Content. All your trees that render out, those are RPCs. The one Volkswagen they give us-- any Autodesk people here?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
STEVEN SHELL: Oh, good. Come on, guys. Most people have two cars. Give us at least two so we don't own two VWs. Yellow ones, at that.
So to me, coming in and being able to now have trees, the VW, people, to have all-- oh, and decals. Does anybody use decals in their drawings? Yeah. Those were only visible in renderings. Well, they're blurring the lines now between rendering and colored views. And they're starting to bring in your rendering materials in these non-rendered views.
It's just a very light way of semi-rendering. Because Autodesk knows just how much we all love rendering. That's really important. So please start using your RPC content. Start using these realistic views.
Backgrounds on anything, does everybody know that in whatever view you're in-- elevation section perspective, camera perspectives-- there's actually backgrounds? Show of hands. So over half of you don't know this. So this is actually worth the price of admission right here. So if you don't get anything else out of this class, you'll at least get this one because this one, to me, was really nice.
If you come in here on any drawing inside of Revit, doesn't matter what it is, if I come in here under my Graphic Styles and I go into Backgrounds, what you'll see is a pull down that says, none, sky, gradient, and image.
So the very first thing I played with was gradient. Gradient is this wonderful two-color faded sky that out of the box it's this really pretty little green blue, the color of your shirt. Just a nice color. And the bottom is white.
And I can guarantee you this. It's never looked bad with anything I've ever designed. Whatever it is I've designed, that little sky background looks good with it. Can't offend anybody.
But then I learned, wow, there's colors here. I wonder what happens if I click on those. I thought, well, Revit's nothing more than pix, and I [INAUDIBLE] can't break it because they'll give me a new version.
So I just wanted to see what happened. And sure enough, I learned that all these colors are changeable. And then I thought, well, that looks good. But what if I have-- we all know that if you have a light colored roof and a dark colored building, you don't want a dark colored sky. You want to contrast your roof line.
Those watercolorists actually did know something. We may not like drawing like them, but they're very smart people. I can come in here and just switch these two. I can make the top white and I can make the bottom black. And by doing this, look at the difference that it creates.
Now I'm not saying one is better than another. Because let's face it, this is just drawing. We're playing with crayons here. This isn't life or death. But it does make a difference. This is a very subjective thing.
So to me, these two drawings are very different. And how you choose to show your building is entirely how your client is going to read. So has anybody here ever done a design competition? A couple of you.
The rule of design competitions is-- I've judged a couple of them now. I can actually speak from experience. Sometimes it's not that we picked the best design. We picked the most memorable design. Because we've seen 200, maybe. And after 200 of them, you're kind of sick of it.
But you always remember that one thing. I don't know what it is you remember. It might be weird. But that's the one you go back to and say, hey, can we go back to that one. And it's amazing how the human eye does this.
So there are times I would be an advocate for coming in here and going, that's a nice color. That's pretty gutsy. That's even gutsier. So blue is not the right color. Maybe we go with a dark green. That's OK. There we go. That looks just gross enough to look cool.
But you know what? After 200 of these, someone's going to go back to, what was that one that had that really ugly sky with the green and turquoise. And they'll all go, yeah. We got a winner.
So I'm telling you. Sometimes it's not a matter of what's good or bad. But sometimes it's just a matter of they hadn't seen it yet. And that alone is worth-- I personally love that argument.
So is this all stuff you were hoping to be learning today? Good. Because the other comment I don't ever want to see is, I didn't think I was going to be learning graphics. Believe it or not, I still get that.
Does anybody know that inside of Revit, without the use of Photoshop? You can put any photograph into any view. Does anybody do retrofits, remodels, or additions within an existing site? Wouldn't it be cool, without any effort, to be able to take a photograph of the real world and superimpose your rendering on it, and have the real world back there with absolutely no effort? I mean, my kind of idiot proof. Steve Shell kind of technology.
So what you do-- and I actually have an example of this later in my slides. But within Revit, when you see that background, one of the backgrounds that you can pick is called an image. And within an image, I can come in and start browsing my computer for any kind of photograph that I happen to have in there.
So for the purposes of this exercise, I'm just going to go into my pre-made wonderful photos that I've taken over the years of skies. And as long as my computer doesn't freeze up, which one do I want to use? I like the orange one.
Now believe it or not, you're not totally at the mercy of just bringing in a photograph. Now obviously, you've got to be a little bit careful here. If you don't want to just use a generic sky, you want to put context in, you would actually go out to your project site.
You'd figure out where you're going to be rendering your building from so that you kind of know where you are on the ground. You'd measure that off. You'd take a picture of your beautiful, existing campus. And then you'd go back within Revit, take the rendering view, the camera view from that exact same spot, and they'll actually register on each other.
And then, because Revit gives me a little bit of [INAUDIBLE], do you remember that photograph? There was actually some really nice sky and some like mountains. I can come in here and customize this image.
You notice my horizon line is almost a fourth of the way up the drawing. So if I just come in and just raise up that whole photograph maybe a quarter of the way-- oh, went too high. So you just kind of bump it down again. Let's see if I got it. It's a trial and error thing. There it is.
So now all of the sudden-- don't do that either. Speaker 101 again. Hang on. But the ability to take-- I broke it. It's getting done. Hang on.
I was able to just raise that entire photograph. So even if you took your own personal photo, you could start moving it around just within this one image. And I don't know about you, but that takes a lot less time than going into Photoshop, especially if your design is not solidified. You're coming in with a really down and early, early design for the client. But it does personalize it.
We all saw-- I forget, there was a presentation earlier with the Cadillac dealership that they did. And they took beautiful shots out of the high rise of New York skyline. And that's what the client focused in on. They said, wow, I can actually see the view from my office. [INAUDIBLE] And the architects went, uh huh. Nothing wrong with that.
This just talks about using dark skies and light skies over the color of your building. But those are just the difference in kinds of gradients. This shows you the variety of skies that are in Revit-- photos, none.
There is a Revit sky. But it's awfully boring. But I've seen one or two jobs that it actually kind of does look nice in. If you just want to come in here and get rid of all that work we just did and come in under your background, you can actually pick sky. And in some instances, it kind of looks OK. Not many, but a few. That one doesn't look all that great, makes the horizon look like it's on a beach.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: No, no, no. That's sky. That's not even a photo. That's actually the horizon line. See if I came in here and under the graphic overrides, if I changed the color of the horizon, I can actually make it-- oh, it doesn't let me. But if I did this under gradient, you can see I can turn the horizon purple and it'll look really pretty. This is what happens when you see a Beatles movie in the '70s. Whoa.
Play with your sun angles, folks. Those are the same drawing. They're night and day difference by just working with the sun. OK, day and day difference. Speaker rule number three, don't let Jim [? Bolling ?] sit in the front row where he can mumble. I can hear you.
But do change your sun angles. And this is not rocket science. We're all intelligent people. If you have a big building with a great, big, massive overhang, where do you not want the sun? Straight above you. Not hard.
If you have a building with big overhangs, do your sun settings either late afternoon or really early morning when the sun's nice and low. If you're building looks better on the east than on the west, don't do a morning rendering. Do an afternoon rendering. Light up the pretty side of the building. By the way, you know that's why there's bushes on renderings? Cover up the bad side of the building.
Design options, does anybody use them? Good. The rest of you that didn't raise your hand and for those that did raise your hand, did you know the design options are also a really affordable way of keeping track of your alternates on your working drawings? They're live. They're within your one model. They're within your one set of documentation. And you can have as many as you want.
So if you're doing alternates in your bids, go ahead and create separate views for all your individual alternate bid items. And they just live within the job. Because I've watched so many people create four or five, six copies of the job to make alternates. And then if one or two is accepted, they've got to go back in and remodel the other job that didn't have the alternate. So just keep it within the job and you never have to do that again.
This is a perfect example of take the right drawing in for the right meeting. If I'm going in my very first design meeting, the last thing I want to come in with is the last drawing and have them start picking apart my brick and the fact that they didn't like the brick I picked. I'm still trying to figure out if they like a sloped roof.
I'm going after the bigger picture here. Do they want parapets? Do they want a sloped roof? Is the square footage right? Did I orient the building right? So I'll come in and I'll do a little bit of graphic override to give it a little bit of wood. That's the only sizzle I added. But it also goes back to the ability of-- I would probably then allow changes at this point. This is the time you get to discuss it.
If you come in with a more finished view, the clients don't do that. Same with this. On this design, I didn't know what the metal band was that was going to go around that roof line. Next thing I know, it isn't until we got into design development that I start realizing it was going to be a perforated metal maybe. And that's when I started adding and making the materials start to look a little more realistic. So coming in with the right level of drawing for the right meeting is critical.
And then, when you look at your drawing, you're looking at your building, there's something called dynamic tension. Have you ever noticed that some of the car ads, the cars look so dang good? But the only time you'd ever see that angle is when it's actually running you over. It's true. The car looks really good from that angle.
Well, I do that with my buildings. I literally take views that they probably will never really-- they're not good renderings. They're not really good drawings. But boy, they really give you an emotional kind of sizzle. Because there's other drawings that are more traditional-- elevation sections, traditional perspectives.
But I like coming in with drawings that are a little more warped and twisted, and they create this dynamic tension. It's a way of shocking the client just a little bit. But it also shows them maybe what it looks like firsthand.
And then, the rule of interior perspectives as well as that. Put yourself in the drawing. Whatever you got to do to pull that drawing around you, warp your perspective, force it a little bit, shove yourself further into where it's immersive. Obviously, we all want immersive because everyone's doing VR. We're all doing optic. I mean, all that.
My clients wouldn't put up with that. They're all the three B's-- be brief, be brief, be gone. That's why they hire me. They just say, just give me a building. I'm good. But it is important to put yourself inside the drawing.
And then, this is probably my favorite technique. This is something that usually requires Photoshop. Has anybody done a presentation where you had like maybe two or three boards? And you were trying to tie all your boards together with maybe a band along the bottom or maybe a sky or some form of thing? Or just putting a background behind a drawing, have you ever tried to get a background behind an elevation? All you get is the big square. Because Revit doesn't know how to alpha on their views.
Believe it or not, this is all simple Revit. And it takes no time at all. It takes about a minute. It might take five minutes the first couple of times. But it's a really nice technique. So we're going to go through the trouble of seeing-- does anybody want to see how to do that? I don't want to waste your time. But I do want to show you this because it is fun.
So we'll come in here. And we'll open up the east elevation. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to duplicate this elevation. I could have duplicated any. But I'll just choose this one. And I don't care about detailing.
So now I have a copy of it. And I'm going to come in here. And I'm going to rename it. And I'm just going to call it background with a V. I now have an elevation that is basically what I'm going to call background. And you'll notice in this drawing there's nothing here. So I'm going to go ahead, go into my graphic overrides. And I'm going to give it a background of a gradient.
And obviously, I can use the one that I said looks great straight out of the box. But we want something a little bolder than this. So we're going to come in and pick some sort of a background that's a little more graphic. So let's go ahead and pick some nice colors that actually do go together.
If I go with a nice purple and say a nice sunset orange, we'll see if that looks too obnoxious. Is that too obnoxious? I'll tone it down. We'll do a sky. See? You guys intimidate me. So we'll do a sky with a little bit of blue. And then we'll come in here with a little bit of green. And we'll see what that looks like. That's pretty.
So now we have some sort of background. But that's not what I did yet. So what we're going to do is we're going to come in here and we're going to tell it not to crop the view. That's first. Then we're going to come in and we're going to say, show me the crop region. And there is my crop region.
And I'm just going to take that whole crop region and I'm going to move it over here. And then I'll Zoom All, and voila. And I'll go ahead and re-crop it.
What I have here, I'm looking at another elevation. As far as Revit is concerned, that is a building elevation. Because whether or not you like it or not, you cannot place a drawing on a sheet that has no model geometry. So you can't just come in here and fake Revit out with a colored field.
But Revit will overlay as many elevations as you want. You can put 15 elevations on this thing and do this really cool animated look if you want. So I learned a long time ago, if I come in here, create another elevation, and just get the geometry to where it's not in the view. What that allows me to now do is I can come in here, I can now go to my sheet view. And I can drag this wonderful background right onto my sheet.
And I can right click. I can go to its properties. And I can actually get rid of its title view. So I don't actually want to see the title if I don't want to. And now what I have is I have just a beautiful elevation. And I'm just going to go grab another couple of elevations here.
Are you starting to see what's happening? Revit actually will create alpha channels as long as it's an elevation on an elevation, a section on a section, a section on a floor plan, a floor plan on a floor plan. If it's a Revit geometry-driven item, Revit will actually alpha it and get rid of that white border that goes around every drawing in Revit when you put it on a sheet.
So you can start to now see, this is how you get the background behind this. Can you also now envision, what if that wasn't a colored background. In Revit, we now know we can put photographs behind our drawings. I could have very easily taken a photograph of the campus, wherever you're doing this building, and laid all four elevations right on top of it as a presentation.
And yes, you can do that in Photoshop. I've seen it. I can't do it. But I've seen it. But I can do this in Revit.
And then, I can now play with this drawing. I can activate this view, grab the grips, and I can start to play and make this thing start to cover up the drawing. Oops, I don't want to uncover my one-- there we go. Don't want to uncover that. And I can bring this over.
And I can move the whole thing down because I want to kind of do that maybe. And I'll bring this up a little bit more. I'll cover up that ugly thing. And I'll deactivate it. And I'll move this one onto here. And I'm going to play with-- I'm going to show-- we'll make a little sky.
So we're starting to see. We've got a couple of things here on the drawing. But I can now go further and start creating some shapes. So if I come in here, activate that view, notice how I get masking region? It's one of the few graphic tools you can do on a sheet view.
I can come in here and grab, say, just a nice, simple curve. And then I'll go ahead and complete my region because we all know how much it's unfortunate when you hit click and it says it's not a region. And if I get rid of my crop view, see how I suddenly created a shape there?
This is where we get into the art. Your own imagination is the only thing now that's going to limit you. You can now create masking regions to your heart's desire of anything you want to do. You can write text across this. You can do anything you want to create something.
If you want to come in and underneath this thing, put in like a spline, you can. You can actually come in and add a masking region that is a spline and start. See, I didn't close my loop. I don't think I can trim to a spline. Yeah, I knew I couldn't do that.
This is how you can start to create a sky that goes across all your boards, all your elevations. You can do this to a photograph. You can crop out whatever you don't want on a photograph just by doing a masking region. You can start to do all kinds of presentation techniques with this.
And nobody will really know how you did it. The Revit developers had no clue how I did this. Because they said what I did was impossible to do in Revit. But it just had the virtue of not having been tried. So to me, this is where graphics is merely an exercise of you pushing the envelope and seeing what you can do.
This is an example of compositing three or four different drawings that I then filtered by new versus existing. And I just started creating transparency so that I kind of created the illusion of dropping this thing onto the roof. Because believe it or not, the building that's underneath all that is an old Jack in the Box. And I couldn't mess with the roof.
My structural engineer said, whatever you do, do not cut into this roof, period. So I did like build everything around this old roof. And I kept explaining to my client, it's kind of like dropping a balsa wood model right on top of it. And then that got me the idea of doing that presentation, to kind of drop this thing down on top of it. So this is where your own graphics, sometimes it's a matter of what it is you're trying to show.
This is another example of what to do with multiple views in Revit. Technically, you shouldn't be able to do that. But you can start overlaying all kinds of different views on top of floor plans, 3D views, sections, elevations. Because they will all alpha. And then you can start setting them to transparency and start playing with all kinds of ways to create that assembled look to try and explain to the client what it is you're trying to do, without doing this all in Photoshop or creating really strange models.
This is just the example of how I use AutoCAD. I'm not an AutoCAD user. But I use AutoCAD every day. My clients, my contractors, my landscape architects, my interior designers, everybody gives me CAD files. So I've just learned within Revit what to do with them.
And this is where the BIM managers and CAD managers are at least happy with me. Because I do it outside of my project. And I do it in a dummy project, get it as clean as I can. Then I bring in my CAD data. But a lot of these are just simple CAD blocks that I needed for my landscape architect. And I didn't want to recreate it all. So part of graphics is just laziness. It's true.
Trees, I still have some time for trees and people. How many people are happy-- no, I go an hour and a half. Yeah. Because my watch says 4:30. I have my watch up. Thank you.
How many people are happy with the way your trees look in your non-rendered views? Show of hands. Those lollipops, the little paper cut outs, come on, you're not happy with those? With what you paid for Revit? Don't get me started on their trees.
But everyone will agree that out on the real world, there are some really cool CAD based trees. There's all kinds of really cool trees out there. So one of the things I do is, if you look at this drawing, you'll notice there is a couple of trees here on this drawing and then there are a couple of different trees on this drawing. And that's because I use trees for different purposes.
So to show you just how I use trees, I'll come in here and undo all this. Boy, we did a lot on that model. Wow. Hang on, got to undo all this.
So if I come to this, here we have what I will call a CAD based tree. This is a DWG block. Everyone loves them, right? We've used them for years. Well, you guys have used them for years. They're new to me. I think they're really cool.
But of course, Revit people hate him because they're CAD. But they have a purpose here, folks. Because for presentations, this looks a whole lot nicer to me than-- watch this, wait for it, wait for it-- than that. That's our wonderful RPC placeholder that we were given in Revit. They gave us little cotton balls or they gave us those.
Now those actually have the merit of can be made to look good in certain drawings. I have used them. But the reality is the only time I use those is when I'm going to render something. Because they render. I mean, they turn into beautiful palm trees.
Has anybody seen how beautiful they are? If you go to realistic, did you know that realistic views will now crank out your RPCs? If I come in here and change this to realistic, watch what happens. Come on. Oh, there they are. Those are RPC trees, rich photographic content. It's what you use in all your renderings.
So to me, those ugly little pieces of paper have a huge purpose in the world. Problem is, not when you're not rendering. So part of what I do is for every one tree-- let me just undo this real quick. For every one tree I put in a drawing that you see, there's actually two trees coexisting.
And I went into the Family Editor-- see I can edit some families. I went into the Family Editor and I basically created parameters to where if the drawing is set to fine, which nobody cares about in a perspective view or things like that, I have these DWG files. If I set it to coarse, I have my RPC content. And if I set it to medium, I get to see both.
Because there are times I like both. I might want to see a real tree in one place and I want to might want to see those ugly palm trees. I want to be able to pick and choose and say, you know what? I don't like that one there. So I'll go ahead and hide that one. And I'll just see the one behind it. Because I want to control what it is I see.
And if you look at a floor plan of this thing, you'll actually see the same exact thing. If I come in here and zoom in on that tree and I set this drawing to coarse, all those palm trees turn into what you would expect to see the way you use trees throughout Revit. But if I set it to fine, then I get the trees that, to me, look nicer.
And this is where you kind of come up with this look. That's the Revit tree out of the box. Those are my trees. I know it weighs down a model. And typically, by time I go into working drawings, I no longer need these trees in my model. So I typically will get rid of them. Or I'll just hide them and they won't exist.
But I know from a bloating of a model standpoint, sometimes it's best just to copy the project out, leave my design the way it is because I still might need to go back and render it. And I like that. And then I'll have the second job. And that's actually what I do my working drawings off of.
Because I don't want to lose some of this stuff. But at the same time, I want to keep some of it. So I like the fact that I can come in here and do this. And just to show you just how easy this is to do, when you're inside, if you come in here and go into the Family Editor on any of these trees, if I just edit this tree, this is the RPC that actually comes within Revit.
You'll actually see if I highlight this and go to its properties. I actually have a visibility parameter that I added. And it basically allows me to then come in here and decide whether I want to see it in coarse, medium, and I don't want to see it in fine. And that's how I set the RPC tree.
And then I come in and I do the exact same thing when I set this to-- I want to see that palm tree right there. I'll come in and edit that family. And I'll go into that. And I'll go into its visibility. And I say, I just want to see it at fine and medium. But I don't want to see it at coarse. And that's how I control how it is I see these trees.
And I did this for all of the trees within Revit and all the families in Revit. Because, you know, you use a lot of trees and shrubbery. I love that word shrubbery. Like Monty Python almost. So to me-- it was Monty Python. Duh. Yeah. So to me, that's how I control my trees and deal with that.
But then, the other part of Revit that I don't know if it bothers any of you, but I zoom in here. You know these wonderful people that we have inside of Revit? This is what Revit gave us. Hang on. We're going to come in here. We're going to show the RPC. We're going to turn off all my stuff. There he is. Oh, we love him, don't we?
He looks so good, Dwayne. But he dances. So he does have a little bit of talent. And you know, there might be a time and a place to use Dwayne in his little paper cut out form. I guess if I oriented him just right to hold one of the paper seams, I could make him look kind of good. But then he always has a shadow cutting across. And he kind of reminds of the Star Trek character, half black, half white. Not good for your renderings.
So one of the things I figured out to do, the same way I messed with trees. In the Family Editor, I added some parameters. And I actually created some really cool things that I decided were out there on the internet because I used to use them before they were on the internet. We used to call them chart pack.
They were wonderful both rubber stamps and rub on items. You could get rub on cars, flags, boats, people, trees, you name it. It was for all of us that couldn't draw originally. And you'd have them at all different scales. They were really cool.
Well in your AutoCAD era, somebody decided they were really good looking people. So they created them in AutoCAD. They just traced all those chart pack people. They're all in there. Everything that was ever made by chart park is now a DWG block somewhere.
So what I did, I came in here and basically edited my family. And I'll just break it apart. This is the RPC content that came inside Revit. That's little dancing Dwayne. He doesn't twirl in the Family Editor. But that's the guy that came within Revit.
This is the CAD block that came from other sources. But I didn't pay for him. I probably should. But that's a really cool tool. But it's a flat, dumb little thing. I mean, it's flat as a pancake. He has no personality. But the good part is he looks good.
Then I came in and I took that thing, and I created a little Revit mass that's nothing more than a material. I think I even called it flat person mass or something. I can't remember what I called it. But it's nothing more than a generic material.
But what it does is it gives me all the tools within Revit to assign it whatever attributes I want. So once you put this all together, you have this single item, the same way I have two trees. But remember, I was controlling my trees with coarse and medium. So I couldn't use that to also control people. So I had to come up with another way. So that's how I came up with these three things with all these yes or no parameters.
So what this has allowed me to do then is I can come in here in any view. I'm not going to save you. Sorry. I can come in this one view. And I can take just this one person. I'm going to go to a different view because I have a better view for my people. There he is.
So there's my crowd of folks standing out front. I can come in here, and because he's my RPC guy, if I set this now to a rendered view or to a realistic view, you get what you expect. I turned him around accidentally. Sorry about that. There he is.
That's what you get out of the Revit box, your typical RPC content which is actually really handy. You've got to have them. But when I'm doing these non-rendered views, sometimes I want to see these non-rendered views. But I can also tell you, sometimes back in the old days, we would draw people completely differently.
We would come in here-- let me get rid of my realistic view. We would come in and take this person. And I would get rid of my visibility. I would get rid of my CAD. And I would just leave them what we called ghost people. And it was nothing more than just a silhouette. Because you're just trying to show scale and create a look.
And typically, because that's a little too bold for me and the shadow is annoying, I would just come in here-- because this is a Revit object now, I can just right click on this one guy, override the graphics. And I can make him a little half tone. And that kind of looks nice.
But I can also come in, get rid of the half tone, and I can make him semi-transparent. And what that does is that allows me the ability to downplay this person. He's still there. He's still what I want to see. And yes, I do have to orient them to the view. Because if I rotate him, he'll disappear. He'll be that two dimensional person.
But in the old days also, I don't know why we did it, but sometimes we would actually assign color to these things. I mean, I was amazed what people did when they drew a crowd of people. Sometimes they made all their people yellow or red or orange.
So I can come in here and basically just take and turn it into a solid color. Because it's a Revit material, it gives me all the options to do this. And I can start giving these things colors. And this is how a lot of people used to do renderings. This was a really common thing to do.
And sometimes there's something about coming in with a very old timey way of presenting that just makes you stand out from the crowd. Because the one nice thing is, I can tell you this, nobody's doing this. In today's world, I don't see this. So at least your drawings will look different from everybody else's.
And these really don't take long. And in a perfect world, I would have given you my data sets but Autodesk, for some reason, doesn't let me upload Revit files to my data sets. So I'm going to figure out how I can do that. And you all will be able to get my Alex and my Dwayne.
So that way, you guys can re-engineer them yourselves and play with these. Because this is not rocket science. But it helps to have an example so that you yourselves can then turn around and play with this. And this is not an effort to bribe your votes. Trust me. I love door prizes.
So that takes us through the people and the trees. Is this something you think you'll use? Cool. Did trees and people bother anybody? Show of hands. OK. So let me undo all this. Man, we did a lot on that. Look at all this. OK. Good enough.
So we blew through that, blew through my trees. There's my people. You can see my three people. And by the way, all this is in the handout. Everything you've seen here, 78 pages or 60 pages of handout. So you can show it to everybody. You had a question?
AUDIENCE: Yeah. [INAUDIBLE] Is there a reason that you haven't done that with your trees?
STEVEN SHELL: No. I just didn't think of it back when I did my trees. I'm not going to lie. Wasn't that smart when I did my trees. But yeah, now that I think about it, and it was pointed out to me, I might do that. Because you're right. Coarse, medium, and fine, I like being able to do them individually without having to do what I do with two trees--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: Exactly. That I don't know if I can do. I still like my ability to leave half of them half way, half of them the other way. So I'm not sure I'd do that. But on the surface, it sounds like a good idea. But then I do question myself and go, well, I haven't done it. So maybe I am smarter than I thought I was. I don't know.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: I could. Absolutely. I just prefer check boxes because I'm visual. But yeah, it could have been a yes or no. Yeah?
AUDIENCE: How do you get rid of the base [INAUDIBLE]?
STEVEN SHELL: You can't. You can't. RPCs are locked out. You have no ability to get into them. I just bury them in the ground. I sink everybody about four inches. Rather than lifts, I do sinkers.
How many people say you can't render in Revit? Oh, you all can render in Revit? I'm proud of you. Believe it or not, Revit can render beautifully. It's no comparison to 3DS [INAUDIBLE]. I'll be the first one to admit it. But guess what? I'm not a professional renderer. I'm an architect.
I'm not here to produce a drawing. I'm actually here to produce a building. The drawing is just something I have to put up with to get to the building part. So when people criticize my renderings because they're not photo accurate and they don't look like what they did in the movie, I go, yeah, big deal. I don't care. I'm not a renderer, folks. I'm an architect.
I can't draw people either. In the old days, I drew these really funny little things with arched legs and children always had balloons and men always had hats. Am I lying, Jim? Hell, no.
But Revit is here to give me the tools to create a mood and to create an image that hopefully will sell a building design. And I can tell you something else. Don't do these unless you're getting paid. Come on. This is a lot of work. I'll do pretty pictures all day long outside of Revit, non-rendered views, black and whites, coloreds, realistics, I'll do those.
To do a rendering, man, that's a lot of time. And the building has to be basically designed, done, into working drawings. Because you've assigned all your materials. You've done a lot of work doing this. That takes a lot of work. That should not be just given away. That is a very, very chargeable service that clients have no problems charging for.
Architects and engineers and interior designers, sometimes we undervalue ourselves. Don't feel you have to give this stuff away. You can charge for these, and charge well.
The other good news is, it actually does nice rendering. To me, that's a nice interior. I've seen better, absolutely. But to sit there and show a client what their space might look like, it has their little Statue of Liberty that the federal government required. And they were really happy with this.
But can you imagine how long it took me to get the sun to cross the radius where it crosses and still get that shadow over there where you could see there's like a bar across the window? Rendering takes a lot of work. It's a labor of love. It's truly a labor of love. You'll get out of it as much as you put into it. And yes, they do take forever to do correctly and right. But to me, they're worth it.
But now here's something nobody will tell you. Once you do a rendering-- oh, play with your sun angles again. Same view, same materials, same everything, just an hour difference. That's what an hour does to your materials inside of Revit. The glass is now transparent in one of the views. The concrete looks completely different. The stucco, completely different. That's an hour.
| didn't even know this until I started playing with my sun angles. And then suddenly I noticed that it was changing all my materials. And I wasn't messing with the post material renderings or anything. This is just Revit out of the box doing it. So do take the time to play with your sun angles and experiment. Do a lot of draft versions and a lot of region traces so that you're just doing that one material and seeing what it does and you're not wasting your time doing this.
But it's also a perfect excuse of why you should be rendering in the cloud. I don't do it still, because I'm such a small office. I don't really have to worry about it. I've got a good enough computer. I can get two or three renderings cooking in the background of my computer and I can keep working.
But here's what they don't tell you. Once you've gone to the trouble of setting up your rendering, you've got your view exactly the way you want it, you've got your trees exactly how you want them, you have all your materials, you have everything done, they're beautiful. You get four for the price of one.
Each one of those took maybe a minute in between, to create four renderings from one rendering. All that is changing the sun and the post render settings and on the last one, turning on the lights. That's it. That's how powerful rendering you can do with Revit with no extra time.
And to me, when you look at these, not on a projector but actually on a screen, you should see the way these look here. I'll turn them around. And they print beautifully. Print them on photographic paper. Clients go berserk for this.
And the nice thing is I've charged them. And sometimes I'll come in with like an extra for free. I want to look like a nice guy.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: Yeah. But this, to me, is critical because if I'm going to go to the trouble to do a rendering, I really do want to see more than just the one rendering. So I found out you can actually leverage this. And this is straight. There's not a single ounce of Photoshop in any of that. I don't even know how to use Photoshop.
I bought Elements thinking I could learn it. But don't buy Elements. That's your other takeaway. Don't buy Elements thinking you're going to learn how to do Photoshop. That doesn't work.
That's that bank that had that metal perforated screen around it. We didn't know what it was going to be until we actually got into the design of the bank. But believe it or not, there's actually a Jack in the Box under that. That was a fun remodel. Of course, it was done in 2006 and the recession came and guess what's still a Jack in the Box.
This just talks about how to composite different skies for different purposes. That's the same rendering. I just changed the background. I just grabbed a different photograph that was taken later in the day. But those are actually photographs taken right where I live. And I just went out and photographed it and liked it. But to me, those are kind of a critical way of getting it.
And then this is that composite in a different way. Believe it or not, before Revit introduced putting photographs behind something, one of the things Revit would allow you to do-- and this is where I have to apologize to everybody because practicing for this, believe it or not, I actually did practice this one. I've done it a bunch of times. I still like to rehearse it.
I found out I had an error. 2018, they changed something pretty radical. So my handout's wrong. So when we come in here, we'll play with this.
But one of the other ways you can do a really quick way of very accurately playing with this is-- and I don't recommend ever doing this in a class. Right, Jim? We're going to render this. I'm an optimist. We're actually going to render this. Come on, baby. Come on. You can do it.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: I know. I'm right there. This is worth it, though. Oh, good. So there's our beautiful rendering. I'm not going to waste any time doing any post-processing. But one of the things you can now do, in my handout, I tell you that if you export this-- we'll come down here under Export. You can actually export this as a JPEG, a TIFF, a bitmap, or a PNG.
In the old days, the way this worked, you would export it to a TIFF or a PNG. Because that would automatically create an alpha channel for your sky. And it worked beautifully. Revit didn't even know it did it until I pointed it out to them. Now they came back in 2018 and said, really? Cool.
What they did was they got rid of my little work around and under your-- what is it? Adjustor? Adjust exposure? Nope. Hang on. This is all new to me. There it is. No. [INAUDIBLE] Hang on. I'll find it. It's under-- show the model, export. No, it's not there. Saved a project. No, it's not that one. Hang on. I'll find it. I just discovered this this morning, literally. It's a way of saving this out.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: Say again?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: No. It's when you save it out, they now let you do it as an alpha. And I don't know where it is. God, I just found it.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: Under Tools?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: Hang on, Export. Thank you. Nope. That's not it.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: No, that doesn't work. I already tried. No, they've actually added a new button. And I can't remember now where this-- there it is. Nope. This is going to drive me crazy. I will send out an email to everybody. But hang on. I'll find. This is going to drive me crazy. Because it's not here.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: No, it's not under that. Hang on. There it is. No. Custom? Nope.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: Nope. That's not it. It's a simple pull down. And it's going to drive me crazy. I thought it was under Export.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: Nope. It's not there. No. It's not. Because I've tried TIFFs, JPEG. It's actually in here, there's a dialog box that says alpha channel. It actually specifically says alpha channel. So I will email everybody because I have all your email addresses. I'll tell you where that is. And I'll update my handout and I'll repost it.
But what you do is if you export this out-- we'll do it as a JPEG because now it doesn't matter. But what will happen is it will actually save this out. And then you can come in under a drafting view, go ahead and open up a simple drafting view. Doesn't matter what you call it.
Bring in one of those wonderful skies that I was showing you. And then import in that JPEG. There it is. And in a perfect world, it would have alpha skied that because it actually now, in my way, it turns them into TIFFs or PNGs.
But what happens is, you end up with this slide right here. And as you slide that background underneath your photograph, you can then start to move it around, composite it. And you can actually-- it's another way of getting your photograph underneath a rendering.
Because you can do it underneath elevations and all that. But there was never a way to get under a rendering. Until I discovered that PNGs and TIFFs alpha skied. And then I told Autodesk. And now Autodesk made a pull down that I can't find.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
STEVEN SHELL: You know, I thought that's how you did it. But it-- man, it's going to drive me crazy. But I will update you all. You will have it. And life will be good again.
I think that was my last real fun trivia. Oh yeah, render your elevations, folks. Render your floor plans, please. Makes for great presentations. Do black for a sky and invent a white text. You'll do a negative presentation. They were very popular in the '50s.
And that was my very first presentation in 2002. So practice does make better. Fill out your surveys, please. Very critical. [APPLAUSE]
Thank you all for coming.
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