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

STEVEN SHELL: You guys look good today. You're all bright eyed and bushy tailed. We've survived another AU.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. It's not over yet.

STEVEN SHELL: How many people-- it's not over yet?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

STEVEN SHELL: After this, it is for me. How many people's first year here? Oh, very cool. How many people are veterans? How many people think I should be in a band?

[LAUGHING]

Did I miss my career calling? No, I really am in a band, so don't worry. You're not-- you're not totally off base. This is just the other stage.

So we'll start about three minutes early because there's enough people here. They can miss my intro. It's not anything special. How many people have seen one of my presentations before? Keep them up for a second.

For all of you, believe it or not, I've actually-- I really do edit this and add to it and create things, and just so you know, for those of you who have never seen this, I've done this class a lot. So luckily, it's something I'm very passionate about. I really do enjoy teaching this. It's something I believe in, and it's just, to me, the most fun class you'll take at AU, because let's face it, we're just going to learn how to draw. And I don't know about you that's why I became an architect.

I actually went through my handouts, and I went through all my class critiques for the last 8 or 9 or 10 years. And rather than just looking at all the negative comments and going, pfft, I read them, and I actually kind of mentally took note and took-- and figured out why I was getting dinged and why people were saying my class wasn't very good. And I decided to address it, and I treated him like a client as a professional architect. I decided, even though I thought they were wrong, I listened to them.

I evaluated it. Found out-- but then I found out they were actually right. But it took a few weeks of digesting and admitting that maybe I was wrong. So I actually have made corrections in this, so hopefully, the class is now at its best, and you're going to get to see it for your first time. And hopefully, it's the best it's ever been, so I look forward to this.

My name is Steven Shell. I live in Tucson, Arizona. I've been a practicing architect since 1985 or 4 or something like that. I've had my own practice since '86, so I've been unemployable now for the last 32 years. Would you hire me?

I came from a hand-drawing background, so everything you're going to hear today is basically everything I learned in high school, college, and from my dad, who is a water colorist. So I was taught that this is an art form. How many people believe that what you produce is an art form? Thank you.

And just out of curiosity, how many architects? How many engineers, educators, contractors, fabricators? Did I miss-- did I miss anybody?

AUDIENCE: Interior design.

STEVEN SHELL: See, I lump you in with architects. I'm sorry. You do what I do.

See, I do a lot of-- I do all my own interiors. I do tenant improvements. I do interior remodels. I do all my own finishes.

I'm an all-in-one-stop shop, only because my ego won't allow me to delegate, and if someone's going to make a mistake, it's going to be me. I'm OK saying I'm sorry, I made a mistake. I hate saying, I didn't catch their mistake. It's embarrassing.

So as I said, I'm an architect, so I have no special qualifications to be teaching here other than I've been using Revit as long as, I think, anybody here. Any real Revit users here? Raise your hand if you used-- if you use Revit. Very cool.

I'm sure a lot of us are beyond a year of using Revit, so we got some people here that are going to understand the buttons that we're going to be using. And so you know, it's a live demo. I don't do pre-recorded stuff, so if you see me screw up, you'll go, I do that. Work with me here.

As I said, this isn't rocket science. We're really here to learn how to draw, and I'm going to show you how I do everything in Revit that I used to do by hand. I don't use any third party software. I don't use any add-ins. It's straight out of the box.

The only difference between what you're going to see on the screen and what you have, I have my Quick Access toolbar filled out. I used to not use it, but then I said, why am I making it hard on me? I'm up here doing it. I wanted my tools where I'm used to using them.

So graphics-- when you look at Revit, Revit basically starts from the global, all Revit things are going to act this way, and then you start fine tuning it to however you want to see it in even one little detail. So what you want to do is, first, look at Revit from a project wide and from a template wide point, because anything you do more than two or three times should be in your template. You don't want to keep redoing things.

And why is it important to make your drawings look good? The obvious-- your client. They need to understand this stuff.

You and I, we don't really need to worry about graphics. We see the model, so that's why we got into Revit. We can actually see everything.

But you're still producing a two dimensional document, whether it's a PDF on a screen or if it's a piece of paper. So obviously, your client needs to understand it. The building officials-- they really do need to understand these things. There's nothing worse than getting review comments because you didn't make your drawings clear enough to be able to find information.

And then of course, the contractor-- he or she needs to be able to read these things, and I can tell you now, you can spend as much money as you want on marketing. The best way to get a job as an architect or an engineer-- impress a contractor because they get the opportunity to give you work more than any owner I've met. Contractors, if they like you, and they like your drawings, and you're a good person, you're not a jerk, your drawings are good, they want to work with you. They'll actually shove work your way, and that's a good relationship.

If you can build up a relationship with eight or nine contractors, you all learn to work together. You learn to cover each other. It's a nice way to work, and I've learned that, by doing nice drawings and thinking of them, to make it easier to bid and easier to build, they like you, and that really helps.

So in this slide, I'm just showing the very first thing to do, period. We all hopefully print to PDF. When you print to PDF, have you noticed that your line weights go to heck? It just instantly cuts your line weights almost by half, sometimes a little less.

So literally, just you and your BIM manager, whoever's in control of your template, get into Revit. Go into every single object style in Revit and bump up those numbers. Look how many 1s there are by default. I mean, we wouldn't use a 1 Rapidograph or a 2H pencil in an office to save our lives. So go ahead and bump it up, and you can see the difference between the two doors.

Just by changing those two doors one or two line weights, now the panel reads in the swing reads, because after they've been in the field, they tend to disappear. And do the same thing with your annotation items. It's not just Object Styles. It's all your annotations.

So here, you've got an 1/8 inch floor plan. You show some cabinetry. They're not going to work off of an 1/8 inch drawing. The only thing that's important to the cabinet guy is that callout referencing it to a different sheet.

So bump out your callouts. Those should be a line weight 6 or 7. Give it some real width, so that's what pops on the drawing, and then he goes, or she goes, to the page that actually has that detail.

And then don't settle for what Revit gives you. Just because the developers give you something in Revit doesn't mean you can't create your own style. How many people have heard their bosses say, I don't like that in Revit. Make it one of ours.

Does everybody know how simple it is to create a new line in Revit? Raise your hands if you know how to do it. For those of you who did not raise your hands, this is how easy it is. You-- not my skies and not the PowerPoint.

So this is just live Revit. We're going to go into the Manage tab in Revit. We're going to go under the Additional Settings, and we're going to get two line styles. And once you expand that tree, you're going to see all of the lines that come with Revit with one or two of my own that I forgot to delete.

Go ahead and just click New, and here, we're just going to go ahead and click a heavy profile, so go ahead and just write Profile Heavy. And I still can't type in front of people. Go ahead and click out of it.

Now, you notice it's line weight 1. Go ahead and bump it up to maybe a 7 or an 8, so that you can really see it. Leave it black. We're going to leave it a solid line, but this is where you would change that if you wanted to, and create dashes, dash dot dashes, dash dot dot dashes, whatever you want to do.

But go ahead and leave it as solid, and go ahead and OK out of it. And now, whenever you go to a view, you can literally grab a line weight. I'll go ahead and use a drafted line for right now, because they're the easiest to go grab. But the minute I say I'm going to draw a line, go select what line you use, and you'll notice our Profile Heavy is now there.

And I can literally sit here and just draw a line, and if I then zoom in, you'll see it's a nice heavy wide line. That's how easy creating a line is. You should be in your template basically creating as many lines as you need to come in and make the drawings look more like whatever your office standard is or whatever you are more comfortable with as an architect or an engineer. And trust me-- 90% of what I'm saying applies to engineers.

Where are my engineers again? I'm going to tell you a little story. The way engineers used to draw, back when I was doing this by hand, I would give them a background. They would go shoot a mylar of it and screen it to maybe 50%.

They would draw their ductwork on it. They would then turn it over, color in all the ductwork with a pink Primsacolor pencil, turn it back, start adding all their notes, and when they printed, they were the most gorgeous drawings you ever saw because you instantly looked at it and just went, oh, there's the duct. Versus you look at drawings now, they're all the same line weight. You can't tell whether it's a t-bar grid system you're looking at, a duct, a plumbing line. Graphics are important, and it takes no time at all to do something that stupid, and we'll show you just how simple this is.

This is a fun little technique for those of us that hand drew. Remember taking the piece of vellum off the drawing board, turning it upside down and coloring in the back if you wanted to show wood or concrete? We called it poché. Revit calls it surface pattern. No difference.

The upper left-hand corner is how all our drawings look. That's Revit right out of the box. Yes, it's accurate. Yes, it's precise. Yes, it's modeled, and it has everything the contractor needs.

Is it friendly looking, and is it very obvious what it is? No, so I come in, in the family environment, under the Material settings for my cabinetry, I'll go ahead and add a slight color to it so that, even in a hidden view, black and white, I'm overwriting that material to show the color. And I did it with the file cabinets, because those are just metal. They're prefab, so I would just pick a brown or a black one or a tan one.

And at the same time, I gave the wood of the door a different color because all I really care about, that's what I'll show the client, usually on an 8 1/2 by 11 or a presentation drawing. But then how it prints to a PDF is black and white. I care about how it's toned and shaded so that I get various shades of gray, and that's what we did with the pink pencil.

Depending on how hard you spread that color, that's what printed. If it was really opaque, it'd be dark, and if you just lightly did it, it'd be very light. And you could show all these tonalities, and they just instantly read.

And the best part is, you only do it once. You set it up in your Material Template, and you're done. And then if you don't want to do that, you just duplicate into your cabinet material. You just pick the other cabinet material for your working drawings if you want to change it.

So here is a really cool thing that Revit added this year. How many people have jumped to 2019? Very cool. Believe it or not, this has been on my wish list since day one, version 4.1, or 4.0. I actually asked for this, and they said it can't be done, and it finally got done this year.

They allow you to do two surface patterns. How many times have you wanted to do ceramic tile, to where you showed the grid, but you also wanted it colored, and you couldn't? It was one or the other. You either had to settle for color or a grid layout. Drove me crazy.

How many times would you show concrete that was going to be demolished? You would stipple it because that's the texture of concrete, but then you wanted to shade it to show that it was being demolished. You couldn't do it, and Revit didn't understand why I wanted to.

Well, apparently after-- well, you do the math-- a few years, they added it. So now you can come in and actually add two materials surface overrides, which is really nice, and you build that into your family template. So that's new.

The other thing that you can do is you can do this on the fly. Have you ever been doing a job-- now, this, I don't recommend because it drives your BIN managers crazy. But let's face it-- we have deadlines sometimes, and you just don't have time to do it the right way.

Hence, why I used to get dinged in my presentations. BIN managers kept saying, don't you dare teach my people how to do this. Sorry, I'm still going to teach it a little bit, but I gave you the workaround. You'll see. So you can also do the same dual material override on the fly, and we'll show you a way to do that.

But this is the other thing that's really cool. I never really used to use these, and I'd been using Revit a long time. But because I'm a one person shop, I didn't really have to worry about having a lot of people do this.

So one of the things I kept hearing from BIN managers is, you're teaching all these great things, but you're eating up time by doing it all the time. There's too many hacks. So the way Revit was invented was, get rid of the hacks. Do it once. You then forever have it set up.

Revit has what they call View Templates. I never got into them. How many people here use View Templates? See you all know this because you all work in an office.

See, I am in a vacuum. I kind of-- in Tucson, Arizona, we're kind of down there with the cowboys and indians. We don't get out very much. So when I learned about how to really use these, what I discovered is everything I'm doing and everything I'm teaching here, you're going to do, but then you're going to save it out as a View Template for that type of view.

So here, this is a View Template that I created, and I just-- I actually now have four View Templates for every view I have that I use in presentations. This is just an example of an elevation. This is a presentation elevation.

It usually would take me maybe a minute or two to do the graphic overrides to make it look like that. I would color the windows to make them look like glass. I would put in some trees. I would put in a sky. I would do all those little things that we do on presentation drawings.

Now, I saved it out as a View Template, and then I created another View Template that creates my more working drawing look or design development look. So that way, when I want to change now from a presentation elevation to a CD presentation-- a CD drawing, all I do is duplicate the view, activate a different View Template, and I get everything I did graphically in one button.

So that way, the BIM manager still has control over what visibilities we're all using to control each type of view, and then I go further. I have realistic View Templates because there's times I still want to use realistic views because I still like the way Revit incorporates your RPC content in a realistic view. Or if I want to do a nighttime view RPC because of the light fixtures, realistic views activate that now. So those are all things-- so I've created, right now, three just for an elevation, which is a nice ability, and that's one thing I wish I'd thought about it earlier.

But this is how, on the fly-- going back to that little cabinetry thing. We've all been working-- does anybody actually still work at 11:00 or 12:00 at night? None of us do that. We're all much better at time management. Yeah.

So what I use-- what I do-- and this is where I gotta admit, this is not a production-- quite a production technique, but it's definitely an architectural design technique because what we do as designers is we're constantly visualizing. And Revit is really good at visualizing a lot of things, sometimes in ways that you didn't know that it would do. So for instance, I'm designing this building. It's getting late. I'm tired.

I'm basically done. I'm ready to print it, put it on some sheets, but this blank wall in front of my window, they're kind of bothering me. It was just massive and kind of yucky, and I thought, you know what, maybe that's a good opportunity to introduce a little bit of a design element. So I thought maybe I just want to put a grid on it or do something with tile or whatever.

So I clicked on it, and I suddenly saw it kind of go transparent. And I thought, well, that's kind of cool, and then I thought, well, that's glass block. So I figured, well, yeah, I could create a glass block family, or I could go get a glass block family and do it and do it the right way. But it's late. I'm tired.

So you can literally just come in on that one element that you're going to do for this one view-- you can come in by element and add surface patterns to it. So if I just choose to add a grid, and if I say I want to mimic glass block, I can just select a blue. Exit out of it, and suddenly I have a blue grid.

Now, this isn't worth anything other than visualizing or seeing how it looks for me, or if I want to present this for this one shot meeting that I'm going to go to, because I don't even know if the client's going to like the building yet. I'm still playing as a designer. But I lost that glass block field, so maybe what I really need to do is start playing with its transparency. And now, it's starting to get an indication of glass block because, let's face it, in architecture, we're drawing things not to be photo realistic, especially at this stage of design. You just want to get the idea across so that the client can visualize it.

And at this point, that right there opens up the dialogue with the client, because then he or she is going to go, what's that. And I go, well, I'm not really sure yet, but I kind of like the idea of glass block. And the reason I say, I'm not sure yet, is-- this is the psychology part of the class. I mixed in a few things, architectural marketing.

One of the things I've learned, and this is-- how many people believe what we do is a sales job? Yeah, we're just selling some really high-end LEGO sets. One of the things I learned, if you go into a meeting with a napkin sketch, that client feels like this thing is still 100% negotiable. He or she can now put in their two cents.

They can start discussing things. They feel they can move things. They know you haven't committed to anything yet. You're just sketching on a napkin, so they feel like they can be part of the design now. You get a client starting to evaluate a design and talk about it. Get the client to start recommending things.

If the client gets behind this glass block wall, what'll happen in the end of the job, when it comes in over budget, and the contractor comes back and says, I can save you $60,000 by getting rid of the glass block, guess who's going to be the first one to say no. The client-- he designed it. He's now as married to it as we are about everything else on the job. So it's nice to let your client come into the design process, and you can do that by staying, what I call kind of loosey goosey with your drawings. Don't come in with really fine tuned, hard line renderings at this stage of the game.

So that's how you do visibility overrides. I could have changed these, but I thought that other building was a little more fun. This is an example of how to win over a contractor. Show the contractor you care, and that you have him in mind, or her, and you will get work from this person for life, if not a good friend.

This was a job I did years ago. It's 10,000 or 12,000 square feet of medical. It was a boring tenant improvement for a health care facility, and right in the middle of this 10,000 square feet, I had this little tiny triangle over a little reception lobby area. And I decided we would do something really nice in there so I designed a wood grid system with recessed tiles, and it was actually a pretty special little ceiling.

But I know darn well, if I hadn't shaded it, he would have opened the drawings, seen what was on the drawings, read that it was all 2 by 2 tegular and just given a bid. And then it would be under construction. I'd walk up and go, when are you going to start working on my really cool wood inlay ceiling?

And they would've gone, huh? And you would have done what every architect does-- open the drawings and go, there's the note. And he would've gone, you know what, and he would've paid for it.

Instead, he opened the drawings and guess what the first thing he saw in the middle of 10,000 square feet? What the hell's that triangle? It took me four seconds to give it a color maybe. It takes less time that did to untape my drawing and color it on the back. I mean, this is where-- this is better than drawing.

Take the time to do stuff like that. If there's something on your drawing that's different, just do something to call it out. You could have done it with a bigger line weight around it. You could have-- I choose it the old way, with coloring.

This is another example of, I'm lazy, I'm tired, I don't get paid a ton of money to do space planning when tenants come into one of our buildings. So they come in and say, give us a floor plan. We'll budget it, and we'll see if we can negotiate a lease. And if we do then, we'll get serious about the job.

So I was doing a little bank inside of our lobby, and I just wanted to explain to the contractor that was going to be putting together our numbers, that's new tile in the bank. It's old tile in the lobby. That reads.

I'm not going to note it. I'm not going to do a working drawing. This is just for a contractor to throw budget numbers at. I literally sat there-- the same way I told it to add a grid, I added a half tone to the existing floor tile.

Does anybody use half tone on their working drawings or presentations? Let me show you just how easy it is to do. If I come in here, and I'll just do the same wall, just because it's easier.

If I click on this and just right-click on it, I can hit Override Graphics for that one little element. And up here in the corner, that's half tone. Go ahead and click out of it, and you can see, if I zoom in, that wall's actually half toned.

It's not anything you'd put on the working drawings. It's not anything I would ever do on a set of working drawings. I wouldn't put-- this isn't something you can put in a template. Well, you can if it's an existing floor tile because that's ultimately what you do with this.

So going back to that example, what you would normally do the correct way, you would actually go into your materials as you're designing this, and you would either create two floor tiles, an existing and new, or you'd create two view types with existing and new, and set your visibility overrides to do anything that's existing as half tone, and then anything you do as new is dark. Two ways to do it. Either way, you're doing it on a project wide scale that all of you are going to be doing, and that's what makes your BIM manager happy because that person likes to see consistency across the drawings. My way, overnight, is just what I did for that one meeting because I was tired and lazy. I'll admit it.

This is kind of the summation of everything we've learned up to now. That's the typical working drawing. That's my working drawing. It's not that it's better, but it reads better.

It's all the same information. All I did was, if there's a wall behind a wall, I made it lighter. Anything that's wood is shaded, and anything that's above ceiling is shaded. So that was my way of just-- but you notice, even on my working drawings, I still leave plants in there because actually plants are part of my working drawing because I do all my interiors. So I want them actually on the drawing, so I don't want to create a separate one.

This just then talks about how to use overrides, visibility wise, to create your visibility with half tone and transparency. You can make something all the way from bold and in your face to barely there, and depending on how you go and how you get there between half toning and setting transparency, it also affects when do shadows turn on and off for that object because there's times you don't want your trees casting a shadow on your building if you're doing a presentation. So to me, it's nice to play with transparency versus half tone because transparency is what stopped shadows from being cast.

We'll skip that. It's sheet numbering. Your cover sheets-- I can't tell you how many sets of working drawings I've seen that I've opened up, and I have no clue what I'm getting ready to look at. All I see is a name, an abbreviations list, a symbols legend, maybe a code review, bunch of project people's names.

Would you have rented a video at Blockbuster with that on the cover? Come on, people. This is an art. You're selling yourself.

You've got all these-- by time you get to working drawings, you've probably got 20 or 30 perspective views, elevation views, presentation views. You got something. Throw it on the cover sheet. Give us something to look at. Get us excited.

You spend all that money doing all this design work and getting the job and getting it to sizzle, and then you do working drawings, and suddenly, it's like someone gave you permission to do the ugliest drawings possible, and the most boring possible. It's like, no, get them excited. These are your working drawings. This is your art form. This is your voice.

You're talking to the contractor. He's going to look at that, or she's going to look at that, and go, jeez, I want to build that. That gets them into it. Get them excited a little bit.

This goes back to the colored cabinetry, only I don't know why I have a thing for green glass, but you'll see there is a theme here. But this is also what I do on presentations. If I'm doing a presentation on a really quick thing-- I don't even know if I get the job yet. This was a little competition thing I had to do for my client.

He wanted to see three designs, so I just banged out three of them. It's the same drawing. The only difference is I turned my glass green and the upper stucco tan. And to me, that looks a lot nicer, but the reason I did that is because, in the old days, we didn't want to color the whole thing because it took a lot of time to use Prismacolors.

So what you would do is you'd shoot a mylar on a slick, and then you'd tape it over a black line. But you'd take your mylar, turn it upside down, and use Prismacolors. They go on wax, and they make this really sexy color on the backside of mylar, and that's what we used to do. So to me, that was just a natural-- and we don't want to color the whole thing because it took too much time. I just wanted to give the drawing a little punch, so that's kind of how I did that.

But the same way I do material overrides in the family template, to do it right, that's how you do this. You just basically just highlight on an element, go ahead and click override graphics, either by category or by element, and that's where you come in and add your surface pattern. Give it a color. We'll make this thing really pretty, and voila. And that's how you really quickly just change the color of something on a drawing, just for that one view, that one meeting, whatever you're doing.

It's not the right way to do it, but let's face it. I hate to say this, people-- we're all in this to make money. And although there is cost savings in standardizing and creating your standards and creating a great template that has all this, when you're designing, sometimes you're doing one-offs. You're not going to create a standard out of a one-off. You just want to get through it, and that's why you use that trick.

Now, there's a green glass again. I don't know. And it's funny-- I don't do houses. I do strictly commercial, but for some reason my dentist have all wanted me to do their house. And if there's one thing I've learned-- you don't piss off your dentist.

[LAUGHING]

Let that be a rule. That's a-- that's a good rule. Make your dentist happy. But it's really funny-- do we have any BIM managers here?

If you ever want to know if your template's important, I'm going to tell you. I did my first house, and actually it was a couple years before with my own. I couldn't use my template. My template was for commercial architecture. I went to go start on my own house, and I kept trying to work off my template, and I kept going, doh.

Nothing worked, and I went, good reason we have templates. So I now own two templates. I have a commercial one, and I actually have a residential template now. I'll hopefully never use it again, but my dentist-- I just finished this, and we're going to-- I'm going to give it someone else to do the working drawings 'cause I'm-- believe it or not, I'm insured to do houses.

Profiling, silhouetting-- does everybody in this room do it? Come on, show your hands. Who does it?

This is Graphics 101. This is what every cartoonist did. This is what every water colorist did. This is what SketchUp knew.

How many people liked the way SketchUp just looks? Yeah, SketchUp is very architecty because it does two things-- it profiles, and it crosses lines. And that's the way architects drew for hundreds of years. It's just the way we did this.

If you look at this drawing, though, it's the same view, but if you go to this little corner right here-- see how those lines are all the same line weight versus up here? What it does is-- profiling is a way to go around the drawing, to indicate that there's something behind it. It's a way of layering, because anything that's bold will tend to jump out at you, and it tends to make anything behind that recede and go backwards.

So cartoonists learned this years ago. You look at cartoons. The drawing is all one line weight, and then there's this big bold line that goes all the way around the character. They profiled because they knew how important this was. It made the character jump off the page.

Do the same thing in Revit. It's one button. It should be set in every View Template, and it should be set on every View Template to On. I have yet to find a reason to turn this feature off in Revit.

So I'm just going to zoom in so that you can see it, and you can see this is turned on. These lines around the perimeter are bolder than those lines right there. So what you do to get to your silhouette, you basically go to your display options, and right here, it says Silhouettes. I've got it set to wide lines. This is the way default Revit looks.

Can you see the difference? It's-- to me, it's major, but you should be able to basically come in and say that there's now something behind that. This is why you create multiple profile lines.

Remember how I created a line, and I called it Profile Heavy. I actually have Profile Light, Medium, and Fine because profiling is scale sensitive. You have to almost do it on a one by one basis. So even if this is in your View Template, sometimes you've got to tweak this.

But the nice thing is, if you create a new line, it'll now appear in this. And if, for whatever reason, Revit does something that you disagree with, when you come in and use that line tool, there is actually a line that they give you that's called Not Silhouette because if you turn this feature on, sometimes Revit will do a line that I disagree with, and I'll give you a perfect example right here. That outside corner of this canopy-- that line should not be a silhouette. There's nothing behind it.

And boy, it already is set. Yeah, that's not a profile line. But that's what you do. You go through and clean up. If Revit silhouettes something that you think it shouldn't, just use your line tool and get rid of it.

There will be two or three of these. Revit's really good at this. It knows, if there's something behind there, I'm going to make it bold. So go ahead and just turn that button on and leave it on.

Even-- someone said, well, you wouldn't use it on floor plans, and I'm going, why not? How many times have you seen a countertop on your floor plan? Your countertop's hovering above the floor. Why wouldn't you want to draw that a little bit bolder?

Right now, cabinetry's drawn at 1. I mean, that's about as thin as it gets. You should play with that. So I personally like to leave this on constantly.

This is my favorite. Revit didn't add this until a couple of years ago. This is how you go into a very early design meeting. Go in with Sketchy lines. Cross your lines.

Clients think this is just a napkin sketch. How many people have actually shown a client a napkin sketch? It's fun to show them the creative process.

A lot a lot of my clients actually have my napkin sketches. Granted they're Xerox's of it, and you can still see the pattern of the napkin on the Xerox. But a lot of my designs were done in restaurants with a Pentel pen on a white napkin.

But this is so easy to do, and it's just a one button thing. You basically just come in and go to your Visibility settings. And under here, you'll see Sketchy Lines. Go ahead and turn them on.

The first thing I do is play with the extensions. I always like to see the extreme, and suddenly, I start seeing my lines cross. That instantly makes it a little sketchier. And then now, it's time to play with jitter, and what you've got to be careful of is, a little bit of jitter goes a long way, because that looks kind of nice, hand drawn. This definitely tells me you're either doing a drug that we don't talk about, or you've had way too much coffee, and you might want to think about decaf.

So both-- and God knows, I have drawings that look like that from the old days. 3:00 in the morning drinking coffee, and the client would go, you had some coffee last night, didn't you? And I'd go, yes, I did.

But that, to me, is a really nice loosey goosey sketch, and you come in with that, and a client feels like there's room for now improvement and discussion. And they start getting married to this design because they're going to start-- and of course, you lead them into it. You don't let them come back and go, well, wouldn't the circle look better in that wall?

No, a circle would not look better. You don't do that. You suggest things.

So what do you think about maybe making that wall something different, like-- I don't know, maybe glass block or some tile with a grid or stucco with grids. Lead them along, but at the same time, let them pick it. That way, your material will never change. It'll be that way, hopefully, when it gets bid, and it'll get built that way.

Anti-aliasing-- does everybody know what that really means? Raise your hands if you know what anti-aliasing is. Perfect. Have you ever done an angled roof or a circle, and your drawing has the little stair step zigzag? Anti-aliasing is getting rid of that.

So in Revit, there's two ways to get rid of it. There is the global way, one and done. You never think about it ever again. That's my approach.

You take a real small little performance hit. I haven't noticed it really, to be honest with you, but the Revit technicians tell me, you take a little tiny hit. But I can tell you the alternative is worse. You make it to where it's a drawing by drawing basis, turning it off every time, and I will guarantee you, you will plot these things and print them out, and you'll go, oh, I forgot to turn off the jitter. And it's like-- so just-- if you know you're going to make a mistake, just hedge your bet.

But this is a really simple thing to do as well. It's just a one button type thing. I don't know if this angle is enough to show it, but if you go into your File settings, under your Options, if you go to Graphics, you will notice there's a little button here-- Smooth Lines with Anti-Aliasing. And then you have a choice-- allow control under each design, or use it globally.

So if I turn off use it globally, or if I, rather, turn on this and OK out of it, what will happen is, I have to now come in on this one view and go to my graphics controls. And if I go to my graphic overrides, you'll notice there's a button here that says Smooth Lines with Anti-Aliasing. I have to check that and apply it, and then it'll get rid of all these lines. Here, it's too shallow of a slope, so it's not a big deal.

But the problem is, I would forget to do that, and then I'd go and set up my sheets, print them, and they'd look great. And then I'd go, ohh, and I'd have to go back and redo them because it actually drives me crazy. I hate seeing-- some of your designs, I mean, sometimes, they really look bad. You can get rid of those.

So it's just, to me, a lot easier to just come in here, under your Design options when you're first setting up a Revit with your BIM manager, and you're setting up your templates, just leave that turned on. And then what happens is, the next time you think you've got to go do it, you'll come into that graphic override, and you'll notice it's grayed out. You don't even have to worry about it anymore. It's just done.

So that's my approach. I don't know if it works for everybody else. I don't know if it even bugs everybody else. But it is one of my little pet peeves, and I like to take care of it.

Transparency-- does anybody use it? And there's not enough time to ask why each individual uses it. There's a lot of reasons why you use transparency, but I'll share my belief. My belief is Revit makes us better designers. The reason it makes us better designers is we can now see everything.

We can create a model. We can cut into it. We can isolate it. We can spin around it. We can tweak it.