Modeling to Construction Documents: Creating Construction Details in Revit

MATT DILLON: OK. I've got 1 o'clock, so I say we start.

Good afternoon. Hi. My name is Matt Dillon. I'm with Applied Software. I'm our core services director, which basically means I have about six people that I manage that do Revit, and Civil 3D, and basically all kinds of architectural engineering consulting services.

I've been working in the Autodesk world for over 30 years now. My background is architecture. I like to refer to myself as a recovering architect. I actually surrendered my license back in 2010. And I know it sounds crazy, but it's remarkably liberating.

But I started off using, just like a lot of us in here, plain AutoCAD years ago. Saw everything evolve from 2D drafting, to 3D modeling, to now with Revit, and other applications, what I like to refer to as building simulation. But we still have construction documents that we have to get out, so that's what this class is about.

Before I move on to the next slide, and don't worry, this is not death by PowerPoint, how many of you are brand new, or say, a year or less experience with Revit? OK.

How many of you have 10 years or more? Really? You all want to come up here and help me teach this?

How many of you have seen this session from me in the past? I've taught this at AU in previous years, not last year, but a few years past. OK. It's the same class, just so you know. Nothing new, nothing's really changed as far as what I'm going to be showing you today.

Well, basically the agenda we're going to go through is the process of creating what I call hybrid details. So these are details that are based on model geometry, but using 2D tools to embellish them to make them suitable for a construction detail.

Because typically, you're not modeling at a level of detail that you need to show say, an inch equals foot, half inch equals a foot, inch and a 1/2 equals a foot, something like that, right. So you need to find some way of embellishing that, or you have to model that, which can be counterproductive.

So we're going to kind of take it in four main areas here. We're going to talk about, basically, how do you determine what to model and what not to model.

And actually, before I go too far, I'm by no means saying that you should not have 2D details, right. There's a place for 2D details, and there's a place for these 3D hybrid details. We can talk about what that is.

But for example, how many different ways are there to detail a door jamb, right. Do you really need to detail that off the model? So I'm sure all of you have a lot of standard details that you still use, nothing wrong with that. OK.

But there is also a time when you might need to detail something unique that's in the model, and that's where this particular approach comes into play.

We're going to talk about, again, what do you model? How do you make that decision about what to model and what not to model?

And then, real quickly, just a couple of the view properties that you'll probably need to modify when you're creating your callout views, your detail views, one in particular that's pretty helpful.

Then we're going to talk about what usually trips people up when they start trying to do this. And that is to take that model geometry that looks fine at say, 1/8 inch equals a foot, or the equivalent metric scale. But then when you start looking at it at say, inch equals a foot, or inch and a 1/2 equals a foot, not only are there a lot of things missing that you just don't model, but there's little warts in the model that you need to fix, right.

Suddenly all the little errors or inaccuracies become pretty obvious. So how do we take care of that without actually having to go back and do it in the model itself?

And then we're going to talk about all the various tools we have to start embellishing the model, and how you assemble those together.

If we have time at the end, I'll also show you a process for converting an AutoCAD detail to a Revit detail. So if you've got a lot of AutoCAD standard details, I'll show you how to convert those to Revit standard details so that you don't have to be importing or linking them into your Revit file anymore. OK.

If we have time, that's kind of a bonus. Like I said, I do have another class right after this one. So hopefully we'll have time to get to that.

OK. So how do you determine what to model, what not to model? Basically, what I use is a litmus test. The first litmus test is what phase of the project am I in, and what is the scale of the view that I'm working in.

So if I'm in, say, schematic design, I'm going to model at a pretty low level of detail. First off, I probably don't know enough about the building yet to be modeling at a high level of detail. But a good example might be this column right here. You know, I know there's going to be a column there, but I probably haven't-- the structural engineer hasn't sized it yet, so I really don't know how big it's going to be.

I don't know if maybe there's going to be a little chase there for maybe a roof drain or something, but there's going to be some kind of enclosure, so I'll probably just put an architectural column in there for now, for a place holder initially. Just a plain old square round architectural column.

Once I get more information about that and I know more about that, I'll probably replace that architectural column with actual walls to represent the furring, or whatever it is that the enclosure is going to be made out of.

So again, phase of the project has something to do with it, but also the view itself. So in an overall view, so just an overall framing plan, 1/8 inch equals a foot, I would suggest, and this goes against the way some people have worked in the past, that you show it at course detail. Don't show the internal components of the walls.

No contractor is looking at your overall plan to see how the walls are constructed. That's where they go to the details for, right, or your wall schedule, or your wall type legend, or whatever.

So if you can keep it at coarse detail, then you don't need to worry about all the little warts that really show up in this area where this column is kind of embedded into that wall. There's a lot of things that go on there that you're not going to be modeling, and that if you turn on those internal components of walls, you'll see things that are clashing with each other. The column looks like it's embedded in the wall when it really wouldn't be.

And then when you get into the detail view itself, that's where you add the detail components to flesh it out and maybe do some modification of the model geometry to take care of those little warts that I just talked about. And you'll see what I mean when I get into one of these-- the sample detail that I want to put together.

So what phase of the project are you in and what's the purpose of the view? What's the scale of the view? That's the first test. And the next test is, OK, do I really need to model this? Would it be visible at 1/8 inch equals a foot, for example? If it's not going to be visible at 1/8th inch equals a foot I'm certainly going to think twice about modeling it.

But maybe I'm going to see it in five or six different views in details. Well maybe at that point I'll go ahead and model it. But if I'm only going to see it in one view, one detail view, maybe two, I'm going to think twice about modeling it. How much trouble is it going to be to model it? What is my skill with Revit?

So those of you that have been using Revit for a year or less, for example, if you had to model a brick lug on a slab, how many of you would know how to do that right now? And actually have the brick on the exterior face of the wall drop down into the brick lug? I didn't know how to do that for the first year or so that I used Revit. So I didn't model that. I showed it a different way using the tools I'm going to show you now.

And then one day I figured out how to make the brick drop down into the lug, and I learned how to do a profile for a slab edge style, and I could model it very easily. So now I model that part of the model. So that's a decision that's going to be changing as your skill level with Revit grows. How much trouble is it to model? How skillful are you at it?

But one thing you want to be careful of is this third item here. You don't want to start modeling so many things that you're spending all your time on the model. Now again, there's no hard and fast rule here. A lot of it depends on how your company works.

One of our customers is a design build firm that does model pretty much everything that's in the building. I mean, they model at a ridiculously insane level of detail. But the reason they do it is their job supervisors are actually pulling the data for the project off of iPads out in the field. They're not looking at construction documents. They're pulling it out of the model itself.

So it kind of determines-- what are you planning on doing with the model? But for a traditional, say, architectural or engineering project, I would suggest that you probably don't need to model again most things that you wouldn't see an 1/8 of an inch or a 1/4 of an inch equals a foot. Because remember, you know, BIM is more than model. A lot of it's about the information and what happens to that model downstream.

So phase of the project, what's the overall purpose of the view, and then how much trouble is it going to be to model it versus the rewards you get back? Risk versus reward or return on investment. So once you've decided what you're going to model and you need to start creating your detail and you've done some modeling, then you're going to create your detail view. And there's two primary tools to modify the detail view to make it suitable for doing the detail.

One of them pretty much everybody knows, and that's visibility graphic overrides. But there's another one that a lot of people aren't aware of, especially the newer users of Revit. So I'm going to start off in the section view. And I'm going to create two details using a call out tool. So I'm going to go up here to the View ribbon, click on the call out tool.

And one thing you want to watch out for-- and this is something I harp on whenever I teach Revit fundamentals, especially, is-- yeah whatever. What's life without a few good viruses [INAUDIBLE]? So one thing I always focus on or harp on when I teach Revit fundamentals is there's three places you want to look whenever you're creating something or modifying something-- you want look the ribbon, because you've got options for a lot of times for doing things on the ribbon. You want to get the Properties palette, and you want to look at the Options bar.

Now there's nothing here for the call out. But again, it depends on what you're doing. But in this case, the properties palette's kind of important. Because when I create this call out, it wants to be the same family and type of view as the view that I'm creating it in. So something to watch out for. It's a minor thing but it can save you a little trouble later on. I'm going to change it from a building section to a detail.

Now does that-- if I forget to do that, does that make this an invalid detail? No, it's just as valid as any other detail except it thinks it's a building section. Sorry. And just modify these a little bit. So it thinks it's a building section unless you tell it it's a detail. Could you change that later? Sure. This just saves you the trouble of doing that.

So just a little tip. Just try to remember to change that to detail view so that in your project browser you won't be looking for these things under your building sections. They'll be here under your detail views. So just another little tip-- when you're editing this call out, I don't know about you guys, but every time I do this I can never get that thing to be horizontal unless I'm teaching in front of a class. And even today I'm not-- I can't get it to be horizontal.

I can try all day long. All you have to do is get it close then come up here and touch that little blue dot and it'll fix itself. Don't fight it, just humor it. How many of y'all have kids? So do you argue with a two-year-old? Revit's a two-year-old. You humor it, don't argue with it. Same thing right here.

All right, so that's easy enough. And then I'll go ahead and go to the-- I'll go to this one here first. Go this parapet detail. I'll go ahead and rename it so I'll remember which one's which. And first thing I want to do is maybe change my scale to an inch, inch and a 1/2 equals a foot. I'll go with an inch. And fine detail.

And I really don't need the level markers. And I might at some point decide I don't even need the column grid. So that's easy enough. We all know how to use visibility graphic overrides. I'm just going to do a little shortcut here to avoid having to go into the dialogue box. But then I have-- oops, I said override, didn't I? Hide category. There we go. Then I've got another issue.

I really don't need to see that parapet cap beyond. That kind of just distracts from the whole thing. It has nothing to do with this detail. That's several feet beyond. But I do need to see it in sections. So I can't just use visibility graphic overrides to turn that off. It's the same object. So what I do as a rule of thumb, one of the first things I do whenever I create a detail view, if it's a section detail, I'm going to go to the View Properties and change the far clip settings here.

Right here, it says it's the same as the parent view. In other words, that detail is looking just as deep into the model as the building section that it came from. And I don't need it to do that. I don't want to just change this number here, because if I do that, I'm changing the building section as well. These two are linked together. So if I change my far clip value right now, I'm actually editing the building section as well.

So the first thing I do is I change this from same as parent view to independent. And then I usually just set it to six inches. If that's not good enough, I'll adjust it from there. But that usually suffices. And so now I'm only looking six inches past that section line that that call out came from. Anything beyond that is gone.

So again, the other view, I'll do the same thing. So I'll go up here to the other detail. Let me rename that. How many of you all create views and don't rename them right away? Like me. So I wind up with section 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, eleventy billion. And I don't know which one's which. I'm trying to get better about that but, I'm trying to get better about a lot of things.

So same thing. I'll go ahead and set my scale, detail level, turn off what I don't need. I am going to leave the column grid there for now because I do need it for something later on. But again, one of the first things I do before I start doing anything else in the detail is set those far clips settings to independent and the far clip off set to six inches or some other value that works.

Any questions on that? Simple enough. OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Use a view template. You can also use view types. Are you going to be in the class I'm teaching tomorrow afternoon on how to lose your job with Revit? I'll talk about views and-- view types and view templates in that class. And actually the class is trying to get you to keep your job using Revit, it's just-- Oh you want to lose your-- OK, well, do what I say not to do and maybe you lose your job. All right, we're all good. All right.

All right, let me switch back over here. How do you do that again? There we go. All right. So this is, again, where people tend to get hung up. Because if we look-- we go back and look at my detail, the one I'm in right now, there's a couple of things that aren't right. Never mind the fact there's a lot of things that aren't there, like the brick-- the mortar joints and all that other stuff. There's some things in the model that just flat aren't right and I really don't want to model them.

So there's two primary tools. One is the masking region, like a wipeout in AutoCAD except that works. And it doesn't crash your system. But massing reason, I call that the nuclear option. That's like, I can't figure this out. I'm going to blank it out draw on top of it. Which is perfectly valid. If you have to do that, fine. Do it. But just remember that's kind of the nuclear option.

But this other tool is invaluable. Cut profile. What this tool allows you to do is take any layered object like a floor or a roof or a wall-- and other non-layered objects as well, any 3D object really that's being cut through, either in plan or in section-- and change the way the faces of that object or that layer represent themselves in the view.

So without actually making changes to the model itself, I can change the way model elements display themselves in this view to go from this to this. So I'll show how that works. So I'll just work in this view. Three main things I want to deal with-- first off this guy right here. If I can get my thing to work here. There we go.

So this guy right here. That's just a layer for a bar joist. If I have a structural engineer using Revit, then I probably got the bar joist in the structural model that I've got linked in. So I don't even need to show that. But in this example, my structural engineer isn't using Revit. I decided not to model the structure in Revit, which is again another discussion we could have. I probably would.

But I need to represent that bar joist in this detail. So I need to replace that layer that I've allowed for the space of the bar joist with an actual representation of the bar joist. So that's one. The other one is this gyp board right here. It's not going to go all the way up to the structure here. It's only going to go a little ways maybe past my ceiling. So I need to model-- I need to change that.

And then the big one is right here. So I've got that soldier course that's out from the face of the wall just a little bit. I'm not a-- I don't do construction. I'm not even a handyman really. But I'm pretty sure you don't have brick behind the soldier course like that. So I need to do something about that.

Again, could I model that? Sure. I could model a void or something as an in-place family everywhere I have one of those soldier courses. Wouldn't that be fun? I'm not going to do that. But I just need it to look correct in the detail. So again, I'm going to use that cut profile tool to do that. I'll start off with the layer here.

So on the View ribbon, you'll see the cut profile tool. So it's on the View ribbon because it's a view-specific command. You could argue that maybe it goes on the detail tools. But it's on the View ribbon. So I'll click on the cut profile tool. And again, ribbon, options bar, properties, palette. Now notice on the Properties palette right here, I've got an option.

Do I want to edit a face or a boundary between faces? Well in this case I want to take this face right here and just make it stop outside the crop boundary here so I don't see it. So I'm going to leave it set for face on the Options bar. Click on the face that represents the layer of that-- for that bar joist. And I'm just going to draw a little line outside of the crop boundary like so.

The direction of the blue arrow is the part that will remain. And I can flip that around if I get it backwards. It's blue. And I'll go ahead and finish. It's gone, right? It's still there. I can actually go back and edit that if I want, or delete it, and the face will come back. But I just kind of tuck it there outside of the crop boundary. It's only cheating if you get caught, right?

So now that's gone. Now this guy here, a little different. Here I need to edit not the faces but the boundary between the air gap and the brick itself. So I'm going to choose boundary between faces. And I'm actually going to sketch this kind of sloppily. So I pick my boundary. I'm going to do my initial sketch like so.

So one of the things I hear from people when they try to do this is that they go to all this trouble to get this detail set up and then two days later somebody comes along and moves the wall six inches. And then you've got to move all their stuff to catch up with the wall, right? They have to play catch up. So two ways to get around that.

First off, don't start doing this until later in the project. If you don't have to have the detail done right now, hold off. Go ahead and do the call out. Get it named, get it set up to this point, maybe even go and put it on the sheet if you know what sheets they're going to be on, but don't really develop them until you absolutely have to. Put it off as long as you can till things start settling down, and then hopefully by the time you get to this point things are settling down.

So here's what you do to counteract the possibility that someone might still move that wall, or the soldier course itself. My favorite tool is a line. And then I'm going to break one of the rules that I'm going to tell you about tomorrow afternoon. I'm going to constrain that in the project. We'll talk about why I usually don't do that. But in this case, it's pretty straightforward.

These constraints are pretty low overhead. We're talking 2D geometry. The chances that I'm going to do something to conflict with those constraints are pretty rare. And you don't have to worry about, well gosh, if you're constraining that, that means if you go in and edit the sketch later, you're actually going to be editing the model, because that brick will want to move for something when I moved that line. No.

Revit won't let you edit 2D geometry that's constrained to 3D geometry. The 3D geometry has precedence. So it's perfectly safe. But if someone comes along later and moves that soldier course, or the wall, that geometry will follow it. And I don't have to come back and chase it. So you're going to see me doing that align with the lock tool quite a bit here. So that's cut geometry. I'll go ahead and take care of the gyp board real quick.

So how many of y'all, every time you get that dialogue box that reminds you that you haven't saved, how many-- whoops, what did I just do? This is what happens when I try to talk and do at the same time. Flip that around. There we go. How many of y'all, when that dialogue box comes up, says Save Your File, how many of y'all save?

Most people do, right? Ooh, I don't want to-- it's been 30 minutes, I better save. My job, I don't care if I lose this stuff or not. I've got 26 copies so I never save. All right, so that's cut geometry. We'll use it for some other stuff here in a little bit. But that pretty much gets my detail broken down to its bare elements of correctness. Sort of like-- how many of y'all were ever in the military? When you went to boot camp, what's the first thing they do to you?

They shave your head, right, so that you're just like everybody else, and then they beat everybody down until they feel like they're lower than the lowest form of life on the planet, right? So that's what we've done here. So now we're going to start building it back up. So we've got this thing down to its bare essentials and now it's time to start embellishing. And the tools we're going to be using to embellish are, for the most part, found on the Annotate ribbon in this Details section right here.

So we have detail lines, we have both filled regions, masking regions, we have a variety of detail components. Revision cloud, of course. And then-- I don't really talk about detail groups in this class, but just remember-- y'all are all familiar with groups, right? Take advantage of detail groups as well. If you're doing something with 2D detail components and that same assembly needs to repeat itself in another detail, go ahead and make it a detail group so you don't have to rebuild it every time. Works great. Then of course we have an insulation tool here as well.

Typically what I will do if I'm going to be using detail components is do those first and then any line work I might need. So the Detail Component tool, again, is on the Annotate ribbon. I'll click on component. And the one I want is not here. So I've got a wide flange here, but it's the wrong size.

So I'm going to go up here and click on Load Family. And I'm not going to go here. So don't go down here to structural framing, for example, and find a wide flange beam. As a matter of fact, don't use any of these categories. Because those are all 3D geometry. That's model geometry . We don't want that. We want something that represents real world geometry or real world objects but is 2D. It's like a 2D block in AutoCAD.

So I've actually got a shortcut here-- Imperial Detail Library. You should have it with your Revit as well. Where that's going to take me though is this directory right here. Detail Items. And of course, these are families like anything else that can be customized. You can create your own. So you'll probably have your own library of detail components as well.

But in this particular folder, it's divided up into the master spec format. So I'll go into division five metals and I'll go into structural steel framing. And I'll go down here to AISC wide flange shapes. And again, I have section views, side views, and top views. They're 2D. So I'll go with a section tool-- a section view. And I'm only going to load one side.

Y'all are familiar with type catalogs, right? That's all this is. Because you wouldn't want to load every single one of these types into your project. Does anybody have like a template or something that has like 10 bazillion wall types in it? And you've got to scroll up and down. So wall types I can see having several of them in there. Not too many. But I really don't see a reason for having a bazillion component family types preloaded in a template it just makes it harder to find stuff.

But in this case, I'm going to go down and grab the W 10 by 30. That'll work. And I'll load that in. And I'm just going to kind of stick it here. I kind of know where I need it, but I need a couple more things to put it in its final place. How many of you all buy furniture from IKEA? So my wife loves to go to IKEA. And whenever she goes to IKEA, I know that I'm going to have a little project that weekend. And I don't mind. It's kind of fun, it's like putting an erector set together.

But if you ever notice how the IKEA instructions work, you have a page. And on that page it shows you all the pieces you need for that assembly. And sp I get all those out and I set them over here on the side and the rest of the stem I don't worry about. Well it's kind of the same way I put these details together. I've got an assembly here that's going to be a beam and a bar joist.

They're kind of interdependent only on each other as far as our positioning. So I'm going to kind of work the way I do with IKEA. I'm going to get my pieces and just kind of throw them on here and then I'll start moving them into place relative to each other. So I'm going to go that bar joist. So again, I'll go and load another family.

By the way, if you are not running on Revit-- when did they add this? Was this in 2018 when they added the-- or changed it so that whenever you go to get a family it puts you in the last folder you were in? It only took them like 15 years to do that. But-- so I'll just go up one and steel joist framing. And I'll do a K series bar joist side view. And that's-- that space was for a 14 K one.

And of course Murphy's law says it's going to come in the wrong direction. So I'll go ahead and mirror that. And then I'll start positioning them. So the first thing I'm going to do is just move the bar joists. So I'm going to take it and tuck it right up in here like so. And then I can start positioning the beam. Now that I know where the bar joists is going to be. And again, I'm going use my favorite tools.

Matter of fact, I'm going to move this guy over just a little bit and down just a little bit. Because again, I want to make sure that if this thing-- if the floor moves or the wall moves, this bar joist will react. So again, I'll use my favorite tool, a line, with my other favorite tool, the Tab key. Line those up and lock them.

And then the same thing here. That beam needs to be centered on the column grid. And it's-- ultimately this bar joist is going to rest on the top of the beam there so I can go ahead and position it relative to the bar joist. The only thing left to do on the bar joist here is to kind of adjust it so that bearing plate is a little bit longer. And if you've never used this particular detail component, you want to be careful.

I have no idea what that line right there is for. That invisible line right there. But that's not the one you want to use to line this thing up with the edge of the beam. If you try to do that with this end locked, I'll get a Constraints Not Satisfied. See where these little handles are? That's what I can use to make that bearing plate longer.

So I can use the align tool, again, to line that line up with the outer edge of the beam. Or I can move this guy back in. But you want to be careful. Whoop, and I forgot to lock it. But that's all right. OK, so far so good? Nothing really hard here. It's just knowing where to go to find these things. And some of them have their little quirks.

So I need to do the ceiling. Same thing. I'm just going to go grab all the components I need for that. So let me go back to my detail components and do another load family. These are going to be in the finishes folder under ceilings. And I'm going to grab the tegular edge, the Ts, the wall angles, and the wire sections. I'll just grab all of those components and load them in my project. And again, I'm going to do another assembly.

So I need the wall angle but I need a 15/16ths. I'll stick that in there. I need a T. I'll probably need two of the ceiling tiles. And I'll need a wire. So I'll start with this guy, because that guy basically kicks everything else off as far as where it's placed. The first thing I need to do is, again, mirror it and then use align again.

Now that I've aligned it with the ceiling, I don't need the model ceiling anymore. Again, that's just a representative to the ceiling. I need to show more detail. That's why I've got these guys. So I'll take the ceiling and in this view I'll hide that category. And then I'll start aligning things up. And if you're doing your own families for these detailed components, I'm going to show you a little trick here that you want to take advantage of. Go ahead and lock that.

See that little invisible line right there? You can put those in your families for strategic placement of objects. Because what that represents is where this T needs to be positioned. And if you-- you can just put-- just do a reference plane. I'll show you what this family actually looks like. Turn on annotation categories. So all they did here is they put a little reference plane in there.

Nothing special about it. Just do a reference plane. It'll be invisible. You won't see it until you move your crosshairs or your cursor across it. But you can use that to align objects or to position the ceiling panel with something else. Let me go ahead get the rest of this done real quick. And I'm going to cheat some more because I want to do any more of these. So I'm just going to pull this guy over.

And then the wire section here. So I'm going to grab that, pull it down here, make it longer. This is one that you can't really do an align with. And I'll rotate it like so. Adjust it a little bit. Now how many of you all are real picky about your graphics? Or your boss is real picky? That's all? That's-- y'all are lying. So I know you're picky. So this doesn't really look right.

This is where I used the masking region. This is where I'm going to use the nuclear option. I'm going to go up here to the Annotate ribbon and I'll click on the masking region tool. I'll do a little rectangle like so. And I'm going to $take I'm going to take this edge and that edge and make them invisible. Did y'all know you can do that? There, so I'll make those invisible. Finish.

There it is? That didn't help any, did it? One more step. Send that to the back. So you do a send to the back on that and it'll go behind the masking region. The masking region will always mask model geometry, but when it comes to annotation, it doesn't automatically mask annotation. You have to force the annotation objects back. And these, in that respect, act like annotation objects. So I'll just send that to the back. Does that look better? Hopefully.

OK, so those-- that's most of my detail components except for the brick. I need brick. And I need the roof deck here. And you can actually do the roof deck as part of the model very simply. If I edit that roof type-- or that floor type I should say-- it's a floor deck, not a roof deck. Sorry. And I go to the structure, if I assign that component, that metal deck right here, as being not just structure but structural deck-- so that is a function that you can use for floors and slabs that is just as structural as the structural category.

But notice when you do that you base it on a profile. And so what I'm saying here is I've got a profile that represents a deck like that. And I'm telling it to take this layer above that is three inches of concrete and include this in that layer. In other words, this isn't going to sit on top of the deck. It's going to be embedded in the deck, if that makes sense. So if I click OK, and because of the constraint I put on the joists, it didn't want to do that.

But it doesn't matter, because I'm not going to do it this way. Those lines are a little heavy, don't you think? I'm picky too. And I have found no good way of overriding those line weights on the decks. You can't use the override-- the modify line work tool. There's probably a way to do it, like if you go into visibility graphic overrides there's that little button in the lower right corner to override the graphics of layers within walls and floors.

I tend to avoid using that at all if at all possible. So I'm not going to use this. I've got another way of representing the deck. So I'm just going to back up. First thing I'm going to do is take care of the brick. Have you guys ever played with repeating detail components? In particular, the one that comes in the default architectural template-- I love this. It's exactly what I don't need.

I've got the brick. I need to show the mortar joints. This does me no good whatsoever. So I'm going to load two more families. So I'm going to go the Insert tab. And I've got a couple of custom families. I've got a standard mortar joint family and I've got that deck. And then I'm going to use the mortar joint. But again, if I just come in here and do a detail component and say yeah, use that mortar joint and stick it in there wherever it needs to be, well that's great.

There's one mortar joint. But now I've got to do an array to get the rest of them. This is where the repeating details come in handy. I'm not going to use this as a regular detail component. But I'm going to create a new repeating detail component type from it. So I'll just duplicate this one and call this one brick mortar joints.

And I'll say go ahead and use this detail component that I just imported. And I'll just set the distance here at, what, 2 and 5/8ths? Whatever it's supposed to be. And you can use the spacebar to flip it around if it comes in on the wrong side. And there you go. And there's my locks. And so now I've got the brick mortar joints without having to model all those bricks. Would everybody agree it'd be kind of ridiculous to model brick? I actually saw a guy doing that once.

OK, and then the same with the roof deck, or the floor deck. I'm using a roof deck detail component, but again it's just to represent the decking. So I'll go to repeating detail component again. I'll duplicate this one and call this one structural deck. And I'll use This one. It's six inches. And this one needs to be rotated 90 degrees clockwise, otherwise it'd come in sideways. I just know that from experience.

And there we go. And that line didn't really disappear. It was just kind of an optical illusion. It's there. That detail component, by the way, it's actually one of the standard detail components that comes with Revit. I just opened it, did a Save As, and I embellished it a little bit with a masking region underneath to mask out that concrete when I placed it on the floor. So I haven't had to model anything here. But is this starting to look like a detail now? It's not perfect. There's a couple little hitches here that still have to fix. But it's getting there, right?

So there is another tool here that I probably wouldn't use at this point. I will, but I would probably save this really toward maybe the end of the project and go through all of my details and do just some fine tuning on the line work. Because again, if we look at this soldier course here, I wouldn't want these lines to be as heavy as they are. My masking region actually has a little-- this detail component here is really two masking regions.

And this one here could probably be edited to pull it in just a little bit to get rid of that little gap. But I'm going to take care of that with detail line work anyway. So I'm not going to worry about it. So this again is something I would probably do kind of on the far back end of the project, maybe just a few days before the thing's going to go out. I would probably go through all of my details and just do these final little tweaks on the line work.

Really fairly straightforward. I also don't need this column grid line anymore. So I'll hide that. So I'll start with the brick here. And the modify line work tool is on the modify ribbon. And it's right here. Not real obvious, so you may have seen it plenty of times but never really noticed it before or never played with it. I'll go ahead and click on that. And then over here I'll choose what line weights I want.

Right now I want to override the heavy lines with thin lines. So I'll do that. And then I'll come back in with the detail line tool, wide lines, and I'll just draw wide lines back where they need to be. And the same thing over here. I need this gyp board here does not want to be bold all the way. Up course that, again, kind of killed that wide line all the way up. So I need to come back in with a white line on top of that where it really needs to be. And I've got my line work pretty much adjusted. But again, pulled off toward the end.