Tips and Tricks to Make Your Revit Drawings and Presentations Look Great

STEVE SHELL: We're going to get started. Obviously, my name's Steve Shell. Believe it or not, I'm just an architect. I have no special credentials to teach other than I've been having my own practice now 30 years. And what I've learned is I have the wonderful benefit of being old, and I was taught in college how to draw.

And I don't know about you all, but architecture is an art. What we produce are drawings. They're pieces of art. I know a lot of people don't think of them that way, but they really are. And one of the problems that I've seen over the years is with the advent of the computer, the form of art is kind of disappearing, because they're thinking the computer is doing it all for you.

The reality is, we're still producing a two-dimensional drawing on a piece of paper or up on a screen or on a PDF. And that thing that you just produced has to read, has to be able to communicate your intent, because there are three people that really, really need to understand this stuff-- your client, because he or she is paying for this. It's always nice so you don't hear later, I didn't think it was going to look like that. That's not good to hear.

The contractors that have to build it. Do we have any contractors in here? You've got to read this stuff. This is hard. And then you have building officials. I know we don't have any of them in here. But if we did, they would argue they're the most important people to also understand your drawings, because if they can't understand what you're drawing, they're going to come in with a bunch of review comments and tell you why your drawings are deficient.

And you've got to come back and say, oh gee, I'm sorry. Didn't you see that detail on sheet A-4? And I clearly showed it that were doing this and this. And if you have to say that, you did not clearly show it. So those are the three people that kind of have to be able to look at your drawings.

So the first thing we're going to do is make sure you're all in the right room, because I actually have a slide here-- there we go. No, that's not it. Oh, I guess I didn't do it. No boiler plate here. No boiler plate. We're assuming we all know we're here to make our drawings look good. Is that why everybody's here? Is everybody here a Revit user?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

STEVE SHELL: OK. Is everybody here an artist?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

STEVE SHELL: Thank you. I'm going to let you know right now this is technically not an advanced class. However, I'm going to show you some things that even the Autodesk Revit designers say is impossible to do in Revit, because I was too lazy and too stupid to ever learn how to use Photoshop, because it's kind of hard. And so if I couldn't do it in Revit, I didn't do it. So it made me want to learn this and do it in Revit.

So everything I'm going to show you is just 100% Revit. There is no outside software. You don't have to go buy anything. There are no add-ins. Nothing. This is all 100%. And what we're going to be doing is basically taking everything that the older generation kind of knew to do intuitively and teach you how I do it inside of Revit. And it's all very simple stuff.

Don't knock me down on my surveys, because this is all beneath you or simple. This is simple. I mean, you weren't taught that it's hard to draw with a pencil. It shouldn't be hard. So I'm just here to show you just how easy it really is to make your drawings look wonderful. And when your bosses say, well, I'm not paying you to do that, you can go, look, it was one button. So we're here to defend you.

So Revit basically takes everything on a global setting in your global parameters of your Object Styles. And then depending on what you're doing, you just start focusing it down more and more narrow and more and more focused. So the very first thing you can do that will make your drawings look 1,000% better is go into your Object Styles and add a 1 at least to every single number that's in those tables. I don't care what number is there. Just add a 1 to it. Do we all print to PDF?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

STEVE SHELL: PDFs cut your line weights almost in half the minute you print them on a piece of paper. So even though Revit thought these were really good line weights, your PDF instantly cut them in half. So go ahead and compensate for that at least. And try to remember, do we have any people here that remember rapidographs?

Do you know that a number one line weight in Revit is a 6-ought rapidograph? I didn't even know they made a 6/0 rapidograph, to be honest with you. I thought they went down to 2/0. And that was hell enough, because that would clog up overnight. So just add a 1 to every single number, and that alone will make your drawings look better. But don't just do it to your model objects, do it to your annotations.

In this drawing here, the most important thing on that drawing is not the cabinetry detail or my crappy handwriting. What's important is the callout to reference the other drawing that takes you to a different sheet and gives you the information you're really looking at. That's why this drawing is here.

So go through and literally add a 1 to every one of your callouts, your sections. I mean, how many people see a section cut line on a floor plan? That's probably one of the most important items on that entire plan. And it's given a line weight of 1. So just come in and just be bold. We were taught to draft with Fs and HBs and really thick lead. You know, boldness is a wonderful thing in your drawings.

And then how many people here have ever created a line in Revit? Show of hands. Very good. See, you guys are better than most conferences. Most people I get three or four. How many people just really quickly want to see just how easy it is to create a line in Revit? Does anybody want to go through the exercise? OK.

Revit's one of these things to where I don't know about you, but even when I look at this drawing, a property line. There should be two of them in your repertoire. You should have an existing and you should have a new. Because whatever project you do, you usually have your own property line and then you have the adjacent property.

So to me, just coming in and creating two different property lines is kind of critical. So if you just go to any of your floor plan views-- if I can get my browser to open. Come on project browser. There we go. No. Oh, don't do this to me.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEVE SHELL: Yeah, I'm going to just-- wow. I'm going to split them apart. Sometimes it doesn't like-- no.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEVE SHELL: Where is it?

AUDIENCE: Right at the top.

STEVE SHELL: Oh, there it is, yeah. There we go. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEVE SHELL: No I did not. Yeah, I was a good boy last night. What you do is go into any plan view, and when you go into your Manage, what you'll find is underneath your additional settings you'll see your line styles. This is where all the lines that you use live within Revit. Just come in and say you're going to create a new line weight. Give it a name, and we're just going to go ahead and call it property-- if I could type-- new.

And go ahead and give it a bold line weight, because typically you want it a lot bolder than your existing property line. And rather than it being a solid line, go ahead and give it some sort of dash dot dash. There's usually a dash dot dash, but in this case-- it's there somewhere. We'll just call it a dash double for now.

But what you'll see is you can then come in and when you create now an annotated line, one of the options you're going to be given-- it's weird, because I'm using my out-of-the-box Revit. So if I come in under my drafting lines, one of the things you'll see now under your line styles is you'll see your property line new. And when you draw it--

[PHONE RINGING]

That's a nice phone ringer. So we'll just come in and draw a line. And when you zoom in, you'll see you've got a nice thick line that's bolder than anything you've got. You should come in and basically do a ton of your own personal lines and make the drawing basically be the way you want them to look.

You should not be at the mercy of the way Revit thought they should look. But that's something you can do. And then any time you do this, those are the things you want to add to your template, because there are things that you do all the time.

Now, does anybody remember the word [INAUDIBLE]? OK. When we would do working drawings, obviously we're printing to black and white, shades of gray. But I would also do presentation drawings for clients. So I would want to indicate some sense of color, and at the same time I care about then how they print to black and white.

We would care if we wanted to show like woodwork-- millwork-- and show that it's different than drywall. And obviously, you're noting it, so it's obvious that way. But just from a graphic standpoint, to me the drawing on the upper left isn't nearly as clear and concise as the one in the lower right.

And so what we would do in the old days is untape our sheet, turn the drawing over, take a pink pencil, color it in, and burnish it a little bit, usually with your shirt tail, which usually would piss off your significant other. And then roll it back over, continue drawing, and when you printed, you got these really nice shades of gray. It was a nice way to indicate new versus existing. It was a nice way to indicate concrete. And that's just how we did it back then, because what you don't want to do is just layer your drawing with a ton of notes. And we'll explain why here in little bit.

But in Revit, like everything else, there's a right way and there's a wrong way. But I'm here to show you the wrong way is usually the one you'll use, because time is critical. So what happens is you'll do something because it's late in the day or at night. You're doing a presentation drawing. You're not quite sure what you're doing yet.

So a lot of the times you'll want a quick workaround. And rather than do it the right way, because sometimes you don't even know if it's a real job yet, you'll kind of do a workaround. So one of the things I kind of show when we do this is if we go into the browser, and we open up one of these 3D views again, I'll come in here and basically show like, for instance, if I'm designing this building, I just knew that I wanted something about that wall. I didn't know what yet. It was just kind of boring being stucco.

And I knew that it needed to be something else. So I thought maybe just doing a stucco [INAUDIBLE] grid would be kind of nice. Now, the correct way to do this is to obviously create a new type of wall, come in and create a new stucco material, create your grids, build that back into-- it takes you 5 or 10 minutes to do that. I'm not even sure this is going to be a building yet. I don't want to put that kind of time and effort into this.

So graphically, the only thing I care about is on this one view, I want this one view to change to give me an idea of what it might look like. So I'll just come into the visibility of that one wall and by this one element, I'm going to go ahead and give it just a surface pattern. And in this sense, I'm just going to go ahead and just pick a dark color. I'm going to tell it just give me some sort of orthogonal grid, and boom.

Now, all of a sudden, for this one view I kind of look at that and go, well, that's kind of cool. The client might like that. I don't know what it is yet. A lot of times when you're designing, you don't really know what things are yet. But then I remember how cool it looked when I highlighted it. And we all know how design is a science, right? I mean, it's exact.

So one of the things I learned is I kind of liked the way that looked. And that kind of reminded me of glass block, and I kind of thought, well, maybe that would need to be glass block. And yes, I could model a glass block wall. Has anybody ever modeled glass block? Yeah. It's not hard. It takes about 10 minutes, 15 minutes. But you know, if it's late at night, and I don't even know if this is going to be a building, I'm kind of lazy.

So rather than do that, I've just learned that Revit gives you some really nice abilities to basically take this and rather than using black lines, we'll just come in and use blue. And if I make the wall semi-transparent, I've learned that Revit just kind of does that. And I know it was an accident years ago that I discovered this.

But since we know that this is all a science, I'm OK with this for right now. I don't know if the client's even going to like the building, less the glass block. But to me, that at least shows the client there's something going on, and it opens up the discussion. And I'm going to show you another little trick here. It's a later slide in the project, but has anybody ever used sketchy lines? OK.

Sketchy lines, to me, have a really nice place within Revit and within any presentation. Because one of the things I've learned over the years is if you're working with a client, and let's say you've designed something that's very near and dear to your heart. You think it looks beautiful. You go all the way through the entire design process, the contractor comes back and gives you the cost. It's about 20% over budget.

A lot of your cool really ideas start to get cut out of the project. It hurts. I mean, granted it's just part of the business, and you probably shouldn't have designed something that could be removed that easily. But the reality is, some things are frou frou, and their art, and it's hard to justify that to a client.

Well, one of the things, human nature-- this just goes into basically what we do for a living-- when you're pitching a design, you're basically selling somebody on something. It's coming out of your head. You're presenting it, and you're trying to talk them into it. One of the things you don't want to do is go into a design meeting with a design that is 100% finalized and a beautiful rendering.

Clients have the feeling that it's more hands off at that point. They don't feel like they have input. It's been kind of done, whereas if you come in with a napkin sketch or an early hand-drawn kind of look, clients look at it and go, oh, it's a work in progress. I can chime in.

Then you can start asking him or her, how do you feel about the glass block? Do you like it? And they're thinking, you know, I actually do kind of like it. But would you really do it above the roof? And you'd go, no, I would actually do it below the roof, and I would do something else. I just wanted to see if you like it. And the client's going to go, yeah, you know actually I do kind of like that. It's got the nice view. It'll get sun, and that would really light up the space really nicely.

And he goes, maybe we could even give it like a shape, like a radius or a curve. And I'll go, god, that's a great idea. I wish I'd thought of that. And then I'll come back and say let me make some changes. And I'll come back next week, and we'll have another design meeting. And of course, I'll go back and the change will be done in two minutes.

But I'll come back next week, of course, because it took a week. And I'll then show him the glass block, and he'll go, oh, that looks beautiful. Now, what do you think is going to happen six months from now when the budget comes over and the contractor goes, hell, I can save you 50 grand by getting rid of the glass block. What do you think the client's going to say?

AUDIENCE: No.

STEVE SHELL: He designed it. That's his. He owns that. He or she now feels that was their design. They have become as attached to it as I am. The difference is I'm not paying for it. Doesn't matter if I'm attached to it. I've never had a client sit there and go, I am so sorry Steve. I made your building and made it ugly.

They're paying for this, and they're just like going-- they didn't even know if it would have looked good in the glass block. So to them, it was a no-brainer. They're fine getting rid of 20 grand and making a stucco wall. This method, you come in with a loosey-goosey sketch, leave it to where it feels open, start talking about all your design ideas. Let your client become part of that design process that you're part of.

The reason we're all designers and why we do what we do is because we get to do this. Most clients don't get to actually do it. You know, they approve stuff. They tell you their needs. But it's rare that they get to sit back and tell then their friends, yeah, I came up with that glass block. Isn't that cool?

They've owned it now. And I personally don't care if they say they designed it. That's not what I'm here for. I just care that everybody sees a beautiful building, and it looks nice, goes in my portfolio. And I get to show it off. I never sit there and go my client did that part. You know, that's not what we do.

So I'd personally like sketchy lines. I use them a lot for really early on presentation work. And everybody saw how easy it was to do sketchy lines. Just a couple buttons, cross your lines, you're done.

And then this just shows the cheater's way that I did it. The first slide showed you the correct way of changing a material so that you actually do that. This is a good example of why your drawings are so dang important to a contractor. Where was my contractor? There he is. Does anybody know how contractors really bid work? It's usually subcontractors, not the GCs.

Subcontractors, I feel so sorry for them, because they work all day, they get home, they have dinner, and then around 7:30 or 8:00 they realize they've got to get a bid out. So they're usually on their dining table half lit. They unroll the drawings, they do their very best, and they call in their number in the morning.

Anything you can do as an architect or as a designer or as a drafts person or anything related to what we do, if you can make it easier for them to open up the drawings and assimilate all of this information so that they don't miss it, that's your job.

So this is a perfect example of why graphics is so important. This little triangular ceiling sat in the middle of 80,000 square feet of office. The plan was huge. This little triangle was about that big, and it was all 2x2 tegular ceiling. So all you saw was 2x2 tegular grid for 80,000 square feet of it.

But that happened to be right over the lobby area, and that one ceiling was like a $30,000 add. It had wood paneling. It had really nice ornate intricate detailing. It was a really expensive little ceiling. Granted, I probably shouldn't have designed it to begin with, but you gotta do what you gotta do to be an architect, right? Tried to squeak in design.

The minute I colored it in like that, the contractors eye went to it before it went to anything else on the drawing. And he saw what it was, and he included the money for it. I actually got a call from the guy that got this job. And he told me had I not done that, he would have missed that in a New York minute. You know, because there was a keynote to it, or in my case, a real handwritten note, because I don't use keynotes.

But he said he would have missed that. He would have just seen a huge floor plan. He would have seen nothing but 2x2 grid. He would have assumed the whole thing was 2x2. He would have looked to see who the ceiling manufacturer was. Was it tegular? Was it this or that? And that would have been his bid. He would have missed that entire thing.

Contractor would have been there nine months into construction going, hey, have you got all that wood and trim and millwork ready for our ceiling in the middle of the room? And he would have gone what ceiling? And the contractor would have gone, well, this ceiling right here. See that triangle? And the guy would have completely missed it. And he would have eaten that. There is no way he would have gotten away from just not having that come right off of his bottom line.

So the lesson of this is, if you make somebody's job easier, and he feels you're helping him, he will give you work. Does anybody get work from contractors? 90% of my work comes from contractor referrals. I have my long-term clients from 30 years, but the new clients that come in, they're contractors, because they like the way I do my job. And everybody likes to work with somebody that they think is good.

I surround myself with really good engineers and really good contractors. So it makes my life easier. That's the way they are. They want to be with a good architect that actually takes the time to show them what they're doing, not make them do a lot of coordination on their own, and show them that I really do care about what I do. So to me, the graphics is what's actually driving that little exercise.

Profile lines. How many people know what silhouetting and profiling means? Show of hands. OK. Profiling is Mother Nature's way of letting you know there's something behind something. It's just an old trick that painters have done and cartoonists and everybody else. If you zoom in here, see how this line right here around the perimeter, that is darker than this line right there? That's a profile edge. That tells the eye that something is happening behind it and around the corner.

Watch what happens to the drawing just by turning off the profile line. This is the way Revit comes out of the box. This is the way 99% of all Revit drawings look. Whenever you hear an older architect say that Revit drawings are ugly, this is one of the number-one concerns. This goes back to that whole line weight problem. And as Paul Aubin always says, when did line weight become an IT issue?

So I'm a firm believer of this should always be on. It should never be turned off, and it should be part of your template. Because I've never seen a drawing to this day that doesn't need to be profiled, even floor plans. If you have countertops, it'll automatically highlight around the edge of a countertop so they're not so thin, because there's something happening underneath a countertop.

Does anybody use halftone? Why do we use it? Just yell out.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEVE SHELL: OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEVE SHELL: What is it?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEVE SHELL: See, those are all perfectly perfect answers. In this example, I'm just trying to show the contractor what's new and what's existing. That's the only reason I did it.

Now, obviously there are two ways to do this in Revit. One would be to create a floor that's an existing tile floor that has a slightly lighter line weight. And then you would duplicate that floor, highlight all your line weights, make it bolder, and you'd have a new floor that says new tile.

And yes, that's all well and good, but let me tell you this was probably at 10:00 at night. I didn't want to create that material. So just really quickly, it's just so nice to be able to go into Revit, go into any plan, take an item, whatever that is, and just highlight it and say, you know what? Just make this whole thing halftone.

Now, I'm going to un-halftone it so that we see the difference. It just instantly makes it a lot darker. You can see the difference just by doing before and after here. And that's a graphic trick and, yes, you're right. It's not the right way to do it, but this is drawing, people. There technically is no right or wrong. It's whatever works for what you're doing.

And if you don't have time to create a new material, you just want to show it for this one view, I don't care that the tile is shown differently in all the other views. I'm not using the other views. This is the one view I'm going to give the contractor. I'd rather do that than sit there and start writing a bunch of notes. Existing tile, new tile. I just don't have time for that sometimes. So to me, it's nice just to come in and use that graphic trick.

And then this is just the culmination of everything we've talked about so far. These two drawings are the exact same drawing. The upper left one is pretty much the way most of our drawings look. You might not put your people and your trees in it. You probably don't have that really weird handwriting, which nobody can read but me. But it happens to be my personal handwriting, and I wasn't about to let that go. Sorry.

I still can't tell threes from fives. I have to like zoom in. But the difference is the one on the right, you can start to see that there is a wall back there. That's a little stair-step wall. You can instantly read what's wood and what's drywall, what's cut in section, what's not cut in section. That drawing just reads better, and you saw how long it probably took to do all that. It maybe added 15 or 20 seconds, maybe. I mean, that's on a stretch. That's if you didn't know where the buttons really are.

Once you do this a couple thousand times, let me tell you, that represents maybe six seconds of work. But the difference between these two drawings, to me, is monumental. But it's something that not many people know to even do. And when you hear older generations talk about their drawings are ugly, and they're not reading, this is what they're talking about.

When a drawing is just flattened, nothing but a sea of lines, it's terribly distracting. Yes, I'll figure it out. I'll go back and read the sections. I'll look at the elevations. I'll read the notes. I'll look at all that eventually. But it'll take me a while to figure out what's really going on in my mind's eye. So to me, that's just where graphics come in.

And then this just shows you how to control to what level you see things, because remember I said you can halftone for a variety of reasons? One of the other reasons is if you put something in a drawing, sometimes you want it there to give it a sense of scale. You want it there maybe to give it a sense of place. But you don't want it to be the dominant element. So to me, the trees in the upper left-hand corner are just too bold.

This is the comment I was making to you when you were showing me your elevations. That's out-of-the-box Revit. I applaud anybody for doing it. But to me, the ones that are further down the list that are starting to ghost them and get rid of the shadows, that's kind of doing what I want it to do without taking away from the building. So play with the halftone, and play with your transparency settings. Between the two of them, you'll be amazed at what you can actually create inside of Revit just with those two buttons.

I'm not going to talk about-- your cover sheets. I know this is silly. When you go to Redbox and you rent a video, would you rent a video just by reading the title credits and who did it and all the names and all the abbreviations and all the codes that it met? No. There's a really pretty drawing usually right on the cover. Books do this too. Video stores used to do this. The cover on the box was always really important. I can't tell you how many cover sheets I see on drawings that are nothing but text, names, typing.

This is your first impression, folks. When someone's unrolling these drawings for the very first time-- a contractor bidding them, a building official, a client-- this is your first presentation. And you're giving them nothing to look at. There's no sizzle. There's no excitement. There's no nothing. Revit is wonderful for generating 3D views, even if it's just a colored-up floor plan or a colored-up elevation. I don't care what you do. Put something on your cover sheet that gives someone a little bit of excitement. It is kind of your first introduction to a project.

This is the exact same principle as taking the wood and the drywall and giving it a different color. Do this on the outside of the building. Has anybody ever seen presentations, and it's hard to describe, but when we used to do presentations, we would do them on Mylar. And when you did a Mylar, they were always really slick and really pretty.

But one of the things that was really sexy about a Mylar presentation is you turn it over and take a prisma color, the wax pencil, and you'd spread it on the back. Now granted, it took forever to do. It was a pain in the butt. You didn't want color up the whole drawing, because it looked cartoony. But you'd come in and just do a couple of things, and they spread like butter. So you get this really smooth transparent feel. They are wonderful techniques.

PDFs and slide projectors are just the same way to me. So I'll take a drawing, and I'll just highlight what I think is the most important part of the drawing. And in this case, it was those two are the same exact view. I just wanted to show the difference of where there was glass and what that upper stucco thing was so it kind of threw it in the background more, and it made the drawing a little more 3D, a little more interesting.

Both of those took, I don't know, four or five seconds to do, just overwriting. On this one, I'm showing you how to actually change it the right way by editing the material and going into the glass. But at the same time, you can come in here the same way and just go, you know what? The drawing on the bottom doesn't really read. I mean, yeah, it looks like there's something going on there, because there are some lines.

But the one up above, the minute you give it a color, your brain perceives it as glass. And it took no time at all. Now, granted, I didn't know what color the glass would really be, and I didn't want to go into that. So I just did my little stupid trick and just overwrote it. And does everybody acknowledge that even though we call them black and white hidden views, you're getting color? Does anybody think that's kind of weird? OK. Not just me.

I just was impressed that in a black and white hidden line view you can still get color. So to me, that was something that most people don't even know they can do. They just say, well, I can't do color because the whole view is colored. And that's not what I wanted. So to me, this was a nice way of mimicking what we used to do in the past with the graphics. And then that just shows the difference between profiling and silhouetting. The one on the bottom doesn't have any. The one on the top does, I think, if I can read it right. That was the sketchy line example.

Anti-aliasing. Does everybody know what that is? I know you read about it. Anti-aliasing is that really annoying thing that your drawings do whenever you have an angle or a circle, and you get the little stair-step effect all the way down your drawing. And the computer gurus at your office will tell you, well, leave it that way, because they don't want to take a performance hit. Ignore that. Ignore that IT guy behind the curtain. Revit really does want you to change this.

You really do want to clean up those lines. And basically, there are two ways to do this. It's kind of hidden inside of Revit, the way you'd control this. But basically what happens is, if you come in here, and let me see if I have any angles. I really don't. Oh, there we go. Maybe this line will show it. If you come in here under the Visibility Graphics, there is actually a line in there that says smooth lines with anti-aliasing.

Normally this is unchecked, and you would just check this box right here. And that would clean up this one drawing. Unfortunately, if you're like me, you do something and then you forget to do it later on other drawings. And then you print them, and you don't see your mistake until you've printed it. And it's kind of too late to fix it. So I just learned to hedge my own bet.

So if you go into-- rather than doing it by just view, if you go into your Revit Options up here, and you go into your Graphic tab, you will see there's a thing in here that says-- where is it? Here it is. Smooth lines for anti-aliasing.

If I check it here, and say use for all views, once that's turned on, then you never have to go back in and worry about doing your individual view, because you won't even have the ability to change it, because it's ghosted out, and you don't have to ever worry about making that mistake ever again. And if you're like me, that's kind of nice. So I tend to make that boo-boo a lot.

Transparencies. You've seen a couple of things I do with them. Does anybody else use transparency for anything? Show of hands. What do we use it for?

AUDIENCE: Glass.

STEVE SHELL: Glass. What else?

AUDIENCE: Water.

STEVE SHELL: Water. Anything else besides transparent materials? What is it?

AUDIENCE: X-ray vision.

STEVE SHELL: X-ray vision. That's right. If I'm designing Barbie's house, X-ray vision, man. It's nice. Or Ken's house if that's the way I swing. There is another reason to use transparency. Believe it or not, it makes you a better designer and a better architect. One of the problems we have as architects and designers is sometimes you can't see everything when you're working on it, no matter how much you peel away items.

So in this example right here, my number one screw-up, I mean literally, my number one screw-up as an architect for years was cabinetry and millwork and coordinating my electrical so that I wasn't putting outlets behind drawer bases or I would forget to put a grommet in the countertop if I had an outlet in the data. I see all the smiles. I'm like, OK, I'm not alone in this.

One of the problems we have is when you're looking at a floor plan view of anything, the countertop is hiding a ton of stuff that's happening below it. Now, we all have our work-arounds. I've seen them all, doing this 30 years. The number-one thing I've seen is you take the countertops, you tend to make them disappear at the moment. You then take your line work tool, and you take all your base cabinets, and you use that to turn them into dashed lines. And then you put your countertop back, and now your dash lines are there.

And that's a great way to show where your cabinets are. But the really quick way and that keeps you from putting things behind things, just take your countertop family and just set it to slightly transparent. No one will ever know. No one will ever sit there and go you really want transparent countertops? No. They know it's laminate. But you will always see what's happening underneath.

And I guarantee you, I've never had a contractor ever miss a keyboard pull-out drawer. They are now on every job. I've never seen a change order for them. They made every job, because now they clearly show up. I now know where all my outlets are. So to me, that's one of the tricks of using transparency. And then of course, in this case, getting rid of walls that are blocking your view. I always like using it for that.

Ambient shadows. Ambient occlusion. Does anybody know what that is, to begin with? I never knew what it was until I started using Revit 7.0, because that's when they introduced this. You can see these are the same drawings. Just one click, one little button, changed it between the two views without doing anything on my own.

Mother Nature, whenever you see lighting, takes into account that yes you do have sun and shadows. But there's also a ton of other light hitting objects, being bounced off of other items. And whenever an item hits a corner, one side of that corner is going to be slightly darker than the other side. This was Revit's attempt at trying to duplicate that little thing that happens in Mother Nature.

What I like about it is it just makes a drawing really look nice. And I'm going to show you just how easy this is and how obvious it is. So we're just going to focus in right now on the way that wall meets what I'll call sand. If I turn off ambient shadows, and you come in-- it's under Shadows-- and if you just turn off Ambient, see how everything just kind of flattened out?

I don't know why it works, and I can't explain it other than this is what Mother Nature does. But I haven't found a drawing yet that doesn't benefit from ambient shadows. Even elevation views, section views, perspectives. I mean, in this case, it's actually mimicking the radius of that wall up above. It's just something that it does in Revit. If you have two walls and one's right behind another, it will automatically make the one behind slightly darker.

And I don't care who you are, that always makes the drawing look better, because it layers it. It does what I would have spent a lot of time cheating to make it do. And the fact that Revit will do this on its own, and it's rare that I ever don't like it, to me, that's kind of a freebie.

And then realistic views. Most people have never used them. Most people don't like them. Does anybody use them? Show of hands. Six. One of the reasons we don't like them, OK? We're architects. If we were all water colorists, we would love this, because water colorists don't see lines. Water colorists see sky behind a white wall. There is no line. That's something we as architects draw, because that's just the way we're taught to perceive.

Well, Revit finally figured that out several years ago, and they gave us the ability to put lines back into these drawings. So now when you use realistic, you actually have the ability to have line work show up. But now that's not the only reason to use realistic views now.

How many people know what RPCs are? Show of hands. RPCs are-- you know in Revit when you hit Entourage, you know your buddies Ron, YinYin, all those, Alex, those are RPCs. They're rich photographic content. It's what you use when you want to render something, and you want to put those in your views. It used to be they were only visible when you rendered, full-blown rendering.

Now, if you just go to Realistic View, they automatically show up now, which is really nice, because there are a lot of times where you'll be working on a project, and you want to be able to sit there and show, like for instance, if I come in here-- and I'm going to cheat here and give you a sneak preview, because I'm going to tell you to ignore this. But if I set this drawing to Coarse, those are my RPC trees.

Those are what come in in Revit natively. They look like this, because they're little placeholders saying that you're going to render this. And when you render it, they're going to look like-- (SINGING) do do do do-- this. So that's the way they look when they render. But you used to only see these when you did a full-blown rendering, which is a pain in the butt.

Realistic views are now clouding the separation between your hand-drawn look and full-blown rendering. So not only can you do RPC plants and trees and cars and people, guess what? You can also do your lighting now. You can actually model your lights, turn off the sky, make it dark, and your lighting will now show up in a nonrendered view. That's huge.

When you're a designer, and you're playing with your lighting, that's a wonderful ability to do. And that's only because now in realistic views, they've given you that ability. This just shows you all the different RPC content that is now visible.

Backgrounds. We all generate camera views, agreed? Perspectives? We all do isometrics. We all do elevations. Sections. How many of us put backgrounds behind all those drawings? Show of hands. Wonderful. There were about five or six of you. Revit has always had this, and this is one of the joys of Revit. I don't know how long a lot of you have been using it, but I'll tell you something-- I've been using it now for quite a while.