Masking Regions & Symbolic Lines

To make the most out of Revit content, including improving its performance when placed within a project, families should generally be modeled at Revit’s three levels of detail in 3D views as well as 2D views (see previous posts for examples of content I’ve created as such).

In today’s video, I’ll cover how to use masking regions with symbolic lines to create more accurate and efficient 2D views in Revit. I’ll use an example where left and right views need to be different at medium and fine levels of detail, and where geometry is simplified at the coarse level.

The resulting family, shown below, hides all 3D geometry from plan and section views, displaying only symbolic lines and masking regions. The first image shows the distinct left/right elevation views at the fine level of detail.

This next image shows the distinct linework for plan view at fine, medium, and coarse levels of detail.

Finally, I’ll show you a workaround for a bug in the Revit family editor that keeps you from hiding specific boundary lines in a masking region, so that you could do something like what’s shown in the image below.

Here’s the video. Enjoy!

Generic CCTV Monitor and Entourage Families Bug in Revit MEP

I recently finished a project where among the families I did there was this CCTV monitor with a nested symbol. Starting from a face-based template, I created the base and the arm of the monitor and then created a couple reference lines to host the geometry for the screen. The family was generic and so I decided to allow the screen to be set to whatever size might be deemed necessary by the user. To that end, I figured the best way to set the size would be by entering the screen’s diagonal length in inches in an instance parameter. You can also tweak the ratio between height and width, but I left that as a type parameter. These are the parameters I created:

• Screen Diagonal Inches – to be changed by the user
• Screen Ratio – set to 16:9
• Screen Width – set to sqrt(Screen Diagonal Inches ^ 2 / (1 + (Screen Ratio ^ 2)))
• Screen Height – set to Screen Height * Screen Ratio

That covered, I added parameters to tweak the dimensions of the base attached to the wall, as well as the arm that holds the screen. Last but not least came Screen Depth, Screen Frame, Tilt and Rotation. These last two allow the user to tilt and rotate the screen from the arm so that it really looks the part. Below there is an image of a composition I’ve put together to show it. All in all the family is only 252K, which, considering there is a nested generic annotation for the symbol (shown on the left), is pretty compact.

While creating the composition you see above I came across an oddity that I thought I would share. I tried to add Andy, our Revit human family, to the project file, but I kept getting the warning shown below. No matter what view I opened, trying to insert Andy wouldn’t work.

And then I remembered: Andy is an Entourage family. For some bizarre reason that must’ve made sense to someone at Autodesk, you can’t add Entourage families to any views within Revit MEP. You can load them into a project, no problem. But placing them in a view just won’t work.^corr

Fortunately, if you ever have the need to add Entourage families to a project while working in Revit MEP, there is the quick workaround:

1. Edit the family and change the category from Entourage to Generic Models
2. Load it back into the project. Now you will be able to place the family.
3. Edit the family again, changing the category back to Entourage and loading it into the project again, overwriting the previous version.
4. Now you will be able to copy your entourage family that’s already placed in one of your views.

Make sure you change the category back to Entourage though (step 3), or your family runs the risk of suffering a ghastly amputation (by none other than the cut plane!). See the image below for two complete Andy’s (Entourage families) and two chopped Andy’s (Generic Models). Strange what one discovers working in Revit sometimes, but hopefully future editions of Revit MEP will learn that MEP engineers might actually care now and again about humans… er… Revit human families.

1. CORRECTION: As pointed out in the comments, following Autodesk’s documented procedure for adding a component family into a project will work, and it will be much faster than my suggested workaround. If you try to drag and drop the family from the project browser into a view, the bug will still show up.↩