Partial element phasing curtain walls - Revit Architecture Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, I want to talk about demolishing part of a curtain wall. Now I'm picking up right where I left off in the previous video. If you didn't watch the previous video, then your roof might not look exactly like mine, and that's perfectly fine. You can go back and do that later if you like, it won't affect what we're doing here. But what I want to do is switch to a different view to talk about the curtain wall. So I'm going to scroll down to my phase one new branch here, and I'm going to open up the 3D view phase one new only. Alright, let's zoom in on this portion of the building here. And you can see I've already done some of the work. I've got this little piece of curtain wall floating over here and it kind of looks like this entry way. And what we're imagining we need to happen is that the client wants a second entryway to occupy these two bays on the right. And how would we achieve that? Well, that means that these two bays on the right would need to be demolished. And then in their place, we would insert this. So what we want to talk about is how we would actually go about demolishing two bays of the curtain wall. Now, just like we saw with the roof, if you watch the previous video, the curtain wall is all one piece. So you're either demolishing the entire curtain wall or you're not, you can't do a partial demolish. So what we need to do instead is remove the corner of this curtain wall. And then in its place, we're going to place two objects. One that's going to be a little piece of curtain wall that looks exactly like what it is now. That's the one we're going to demolish and then this one for the new construction. All right, so let's get started. What I want to do as step one is highlight near this mullion, use my tab key until I can highlight the dash grid line that is underneath that mullion, click it. And then we can use the add and remove segments button here to remove the lower segment. So just click anywhere on the lower segment. And that will hide that segment and remove the mullions that are attached to it. I'll click the modify tool to cancel out of there. Next I will hover near the bottom mullions here, tab in and select go over to the one next to it, hold my control key and select. Now you'll see that both of these are pinned. You can unpin them manually, onscreen, or you can use the unpin tool here which also has the keyboard shortcut of UP. So I think that's a little bit faster. And then press the delete key to remove those two mullions. Finally, we're going to tab in here and select the panel. We're going to unpin it as well. I'll just do that right on screen. But this time you can't delete it. Revit won't allow you to delete a panel. So what you need to do instead is come over here to the type selector and choose the empty system panel. So if I choose that and then click away from it to de-select, you can see the result. So an empty system panel is a panel that has no geometry. So even though technically a panel there, it's effectively invisible because there's no geometry within that panel. Alright, so now that we've created the hole, the area where we want the piece to be demolished out, we can build the little piece of curtain wall that we want to infill in there. Now I'm going to continue right here in the 3D view for this, and I'll go to my wall command and you could use the storefront but I actually think it'll be more work to use the storefront. So I'm going to switch to curtain wall one which is just basically a piece of glass. And I'm just going to draw a small segment of that onscreen out in front of the curtain wall. Now you may be wondering why I'm building it out in front. The reason is quite simple. When you use tools like curtain grid or mullion, it'll be really difficult to make sure you're picking the correct curtain wall if they're right on top of each other. But with them out here, notice that I can very easily determine if I'm getting the curtain grid on this curtain wall or this one. Do you see the difference? So even though we made this invisible down here, notice you could still add grid lines to it. So that's why I don't want to build it right in that spot. So I'm going to build it out here and just divide that into two bays. Now it's much too tall. So let me cancel out of that command, select the curtain wall itself and the height that it needs to be is eight. So change the unconnected height to eight and that matches the storefront one in the background. Next, we'll go to architecture, we'll click the mullion tool and we need a mullion along the bottom. And we need one here on that new bay in the middle. And that's all we need because there's already a mullion along the left, right and top edges. So we don't want to replicate those. So once we've done that, we can now move this into position where it needs to go and that'll be a little bit easier to do in a floor plan. So I'm going to go to the level one phase one new floor plan, and you can see both of those curtain walls kind of floating out there but let me just zoom in a little bit here. The first thing I noticed is that this curtain wall is pointing the wrong way. So just select it and use this little flip grip here to flip it the other way, then I'll go to my move tool and start right at its end point. And I want to move it up to the mid point here. If you can't move along a diagonal like I'm doing, uncheck constraint. So constrain would force it to only go horizontal vertical. It will complain that this curtain wall overlaps the other one but we're going to ignore that. And then I'm going to take this little grip here and stretch it up until it snaps right to there. And then if I look back at the 3D view here we should be pretty close to what we need. Now notice that this mullion doesn't line up with the one up above. So I'll switch to the align tool and I'll highlight the grid line for the existing curtain wall and then the grid line for the new curtain wall. And now those should be lined up. All right, so now what I need to do is take this curtain wall. I got the mullion there. Let me try that again, there we go. This curtain wall, and then I will scroll down and change it to the existing phase. And we're going to demolish it in new phase one. Now, when I do that, it's going to disappear because this view doesn't show any demolition but if I de-select and I changed the phase filter of this view to show previous plus demo, then you're going to see that little piece of curtain wall show up in that shaded red color. Okay, so that's how we've effectively represented that we're demolishing that corner of the curtain wall. So let me change this back to previous plus new. And then all that remains for us to do now is let's return to the first floor plan here. Tab is already open. I'll select this curtain wall right here. A temporary dimension will appear right here and I'll just set it to zero and that will move it into the correct position. And now if we switch back to our 3D view, we can see the final result. So to demolish a portion of the curtain wall is not necessarily a trivial exercise. It takes a certain amount of effort to get there, but I hope you can see that if you follow this process fairly methodically, that you can achieve that desired result.