Explore the versatility and flexibility of family modeling in Revit, from basic options to advanced features, such as adjusting the cross-section of a wall from vertical to slanted. This article provides a thorough guide on how to navigate these modifications, including the process of deactivating the section box to restore a regular 3D view.
Key Insights
- The article guides on the process of deactivating the section box to restore a regular 3D view after making modifications in Revit.
- Revit allows adjustment of the cross-section of a wall from vertical to slanted, a feature that can be used to add unique architectural elements to a building design.
- While adjusting the slant of a wall, it is important to note that openings may no longer be associated with it, necessitating their relocation. Besides, these options are also available to curtain walls and can be used to achieve certain aesthetic elements, such as a flight tower look.
Now that we've completed our In-Place Family modeling, there's one other option I want to show you that gives you the ability to break that Z-plane or that vertical plane in our modeling techniques. And so first thing we want to do is get out of this Section Box mode. So I'll go in and I'm going to go ahead and look for Section Box in my properties.
And you can see how we have the check mark here. This is a common question that I get a lot from students: you know, I've activated the Section Box—well, now how do I get my 3D View back? And this is how you do it here.
You'll just uncheck the Section Box and it takes us back into our regular 3D View. If we wanted to, we could actually say, well, let's push the envelope a bit and see if we can adjust this wall so that it's not perfectly vertical. And one of the new features that we've gotten recently is the ability to adjust the Cross-Section of the wall from vertical to slanted.
And I can go in and I can actually change the angle to—let's see—if I did a positive value of, say, 3 degrees, it's going to rotate this and mess up many other things, but that's okay. It'll rotate this back into the building.
And you can see how we now have the wall at an angle, and we can do it going the other way as well. If I gave it a negative value, it would go outside of the building and creates it going in this direction. And you will notice that our openings are no longer associated with it.
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And that makes sense because we did have them cutting outside of the wall, and now they're no longer associated with it because they've since moved away from there. If we wanted to restore this wall back to the way it was before, we could go in and we can actually adjust the slant on the glass here to be 3 degrees, just like we did on this wall. And we could re-host it back in by adjusting the location of those windows.
In our case, this was just an exercise to see what it looks like, so we're going to go ahead and change that back to vertical. But I don't want you to think that basic walls are the only ones that can have all the fun here, because these options are also available to Curtain Walls. If you wanted to get that kind of flight tower look to the entrance to your building, you could change this to slanted and give it a positive or negative degree value here.
It'll probably delete many curtain wall mullions, which is pretty typical when you're making a lot of adjustments or very radical adjustments to Curtain Walls. So I'm not surprised that we got those errors, but it does give us kind of a cool look to the building, which is very different from what we had previously. Now we wouldn't be able to do it on Curtain Walls that have a door because the whole element is slanted and we couldn't really have a slanted door there, so you'd have to come up with a workaround to keep the door portion flat and then slant the rest of it if that was your desire.
I'm going to go ahead and undo that because we want to make sure that we don't have the messed up wall for our final. So I'm going to just CTRL + Z back a few until we get back to our wall the way it was before, and then I'm going to save, and in the next lesson we're going to go ahead and take a look at some Wall Section and detailing options that we have that are available to us within Revit.
