Element Transparency

We all know how good a section box is to see inside your model, but if you want to have a quick peek into your model without having to hide elements or evoke the section box tool, than this little tip could help out.

If you select an element in your model it temporarily goes transparent, so to have a quick peek into your model just select one of the walls it will go transparent and you can see inside your model.

This feature is controlled in you Revit Options, and by default it is turned on. You can suppress this feature by going to the Revit Application Button ►Options ►Graphics ►Colors ►Selection  ►Semi Transparent.

Model Fill Pattern Visibility

This is something interesting about how Revit deals with Model Fill Patterns. When you have fill patterns applied to elements in your model, at different scales it will be represented differently, and 1:100 is usually the magic number before visual changes take place.

As the scale increases, Revit will halftone your fill pattern or even change its representation to a solid fill. This is to do with how close the lines are in your fill pattern and the scale of the view.

The Example below is a brick wall, with the model fill pattern to indicate the brickwork. As you increase the view scale it changes from black lines at scales up to 1:100, to halftone at 1:250, to a halftone solid fill at 1:1000.

Different fill patterns with different line spacing’s will give you varying results. It is just good to know that Revit is going to make these changes to your fill, whether you like it or not.

Selection Filter Groups

When you are selecting elements and using the Filter tool in the Selection part of the Modify ribbon. You may not have noticed but there are some additional tools alongside the filter icon, Save, Load and Edit. These allow you to create selection sets for future use.

The Save selection, allows you to create a selection set of elements and give them a name so that you can retrieve it later, sort of like a group (without creating a group).

The Load selection allows you to load a previously saved selection set. Just select elements in your model and select the load icon and you will be able to select a previously created set from the Retrieve Filter dialogue box.

The Edit selection allows you to edit the elements in your selection set. You have the ability to add or Remove elements from your selection set.

You will notice that this tools works very similarly to the Group tools, without storing additional groups in your model and leaving all elements individually selectable.

Synchronising Faster

When you are in a workshared project, synchronising can be a time consuming process. One way to speed up the process is to synchronise in you ‘Synchronise with Central’ view, this is a drafting view set up especially for synchronising the model.

To help this process, once you have made the ‘Synchronise with Central’ view current, use the ‘Close Hidden Windows’ tool to close all other views of your model.