Understand how to adjust the visibility and graphic overrides for imported Revit links in a project. This article details the techniques applied to the second floor plan of a project and explains how to manage visibility settings in section and plan views.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to adjust the visibility and graphic overrides for imported Revit links in the context of a second floor plan. It emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between structural grids and architectural grids to avoid overlap and confusion.
- The author demonstrates how to customize settings to improve the visual representation of structural elements. They highlight that these elements should be set to medium or fine detail level to ensure a clear view of beams, for instance.
- The article also discusses how to optimize visibility settings for different systems in section views. Specifically, it suggests setting mechanical and plumbing models to 'fine' detail level and disabling the display of annotation categories to aid in clash detection and improve the view's usability.
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Hello and welcome to the CAD Teacher VDCI video series for Revit Project Management. In this video we're going to take a look at the different techniques for adjusting the visibility and graphic overrides for our imported Revit links. So this is our second floor plan that we're looking at and we can tell that because when we look at our project browser, second floor is bold and actually highlighted at the moment.
If I were to zoom in here and take a look at some of my grid lines, you can see on the left side I'm getting a solid line and on the right it's kind of dashed over here. Well what's happening is the one on the right is actually our Revit link that's showing through because the structural is going to be using the same grids as well. So what's happening here is I'm getting a double up on grid five of the architectural grid which is ours.
You can see when I highlight over it right now I've got the structural selected. If I hover over it and I hit TAB you can see it's cycling through my selection options and that's the grid that's actually in my file here. But for our purposes here we don't want to see the structural grid showing through.
So I'm going to go to my visibility and graphic overrides and I'm going to go to my Revit links tab. So I'm going to edit my structural Revit link. So I'm going to go to BIM304structure.rvt and all the way to the right here you can see it says by host view.
What that means is our host view, which is our second floor plan, is going to determine the visibility and graphic overrides for this link and those settings are going to be from our model categories and our annotation categories tabs. So I'm going to go back to Revit links and I'm going to click on by host view. From here we have the same options we had before but they're a little bit different.
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So you can see I've got basics and this is really where it all starts. When it's set to by host view all of the settings that we see here and then also the settings that we see in our model and annotation category tabs are going to be locked out. So back at the basics tab here I'm going to go ahead and change from by host view to custom.
Now I can actually adjust some of these settings here and the ones that I'm really going to be interested in are actually going to be in our annotation categories. So some of the ones that are interesting to note with structural elements a lot of times if it's not set to medium or higher you're just going to get a line work representation of it you won't actually see the beam. So you want to make sure that this is actually set to medium or fine and then the next thing we want to look at is our annotation categories.
So my model categories if at all if I can help it I want to make sure that I set leave this set to by host view so that I'm not contradicting myself in my original model categories visibility and graphic overrides and the one for this specifically for the link. So I'm going to go to annotation categories here and you can see it's set to by host view. I'm going to change that to custom and you see what happens when I change it when it's on by host view it's all grayed out because it's pulling from the settings of this particular view.
When I change it to custom I can make any changes that I'd like here and these are only going to be for the Revit link that we selected which was the structural link. So what I want to do is I want to turn off annotation categories. I don't want any of those to show through so I'm going to uncheck where it says show annotation categories in this view and I'm going to hit okay and I'm going to hit okay one more time to get out of this and now you can see the difference with our grid lines now I've only got the one showing for our architectural project.
Okay so let's go ahead and take a look at this in section. So I'm going to create a section so we'll go to the view tab hit section and then I'm just going to draw a section kind of through the middle of the building here. Okay with that section created I'm going to navigate to that view so I'll just double click on the bold part of the arrow and we can see we've got a lot of systems going on here.
There's some plumbing kind of going out of the building there we've got our structural foundations in and some framing for the roof and for the structure and you can see when I look at my structural it looks like I have a beam going across right here but I'm not really sure because of the way it looks it doesn't quite look like a beam here and then if you look at our mechanical systems and even our plumbing systems down in here everything is just a single line version and that doesn't help with class detection because we don't can't really tell how big something actually is when it's just a single line version so we need to make some adjustments to this view. So I'm going to go to my visibility and graphic overrides again and I'll go to Revit links and this is an override that we want to do because we don't want to necessarily have this view be in fine detail we might still want to have it coarse but we want to see the full detail of our systems. So under Revit links I'm going to start with mechanical so I'm going to go to by host view on mechanical and the first thing I want to do is going to be the same thing we did to that structural model in our second floor plan view and this is something you'll probably want to do for all of your views.
So I'm going to go and click custom so that I can modify the settings and again this is in the basics tab and then I'm going to go to my annotation categories and I don't want to see any of the annotations for my mechanical model so I'm going to change it from by host view to custom and then I'm going to uncheck annotation categories in this view and I'll hit ok. So my mechanical model is no longer going to be showing annotation categories but there's actually one more setting we want to change in there so I'll go ahead and click on it again to edit the settings and I want to change my detail level you can see it's picking up the level from the host view which is set to coarse but I always want to have mechanical and plumbing models set to fine that way you'll actually be able to see the systems in section here. Okay that looks good I'm going to hit okay and okay again and now you can see the ducts are actually showing the full width here.
Looking good. Okay I'm going to do the same thing for the plumbing model I'm going to go to visibility and graphic overrides go to the Revit links tab and the first thing we do is we select by host view here this button and we want to go ahead and change this to custom. We want to change our detail level from coarse to fine and we'll go to our annotation categories tab change that from by host view to custom and then we're going to uncheck show annotation categories in this view and I'll hit okay and we're going to do the same thing with our structural as well so I'll click by host view to get into the settings change it from by host view to custom we want to make sure our detail level is set to fine and then I'm going to go to my annotation categories tab set it to custom and then I'm going to uncheck show annotation categories in this view.
So with these settings I should have a pretty good coordination view that we could use here so I'm going to hit okay and now I can see all of my plumbing going under the building here and out looks good and then when I look at my structural I can actually see the depth of the beams that are up in the roof there looks pretty good. So I'm going to go back to my second floor plan I'm going to adjust my section a little bit I don't want it to be looking as deep I just kind of want to see what it's looking through at this point so I'm going to pull it back a little bit let's say to about right there okay I'm going to go back to my section view and I did that so the background wasn't as busy but what we want to do is our mechanical and structural systems are pretty heavy in line weight and the structural one's going to be okay but I think the mechanical and plumbing are we're taking up a little bit too much space there so I'm going to go ahead and adjust the visibility and graphics of our mechanical model. If I go back to visibility and graphic overrides and then over to work sets I'm sorry over to Revit links you can see that we have mechanical again but we've got a couple settings that we could use we want to go with half tone what's this going to do it's going to cut everything in half for the line weights it's also going to give me kind of a grayscale look on those so when I check half tone and hit okay you know the focus of our view is still architectural but we have our mechanical system showing at a half tone look to it okay so let's go to our second floor plan again okay so we can do the same thing with our plumbing model in plan that we did in section so right now I'm just kind of seeing looks like point of connections here and maybe some intersections and that's just about it and so we'll go ahead and we can make those changes here as well so I'll go to my visibility and graphic overrides select the Revit links tab and then I'm going to go to my plumbing model and I'm going to go ahead and set the detail level for my plumbing model to be set to fine and hit okay and now I can actually see what type of piping is within this chase here okay in the next video we're going to make a few more tweaks and then we'll go through and create some view templates and apply them to all the appropriate views
