From the course: Revit 2020: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

Using object styles - Revit Architecture Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2020: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

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Using object styles

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- [Instructor] As your projects progress you'll often find the need to make modifications to the way that things display in one or more Views. Now there's lots of ways that we can customize the graphical display in elements in Revit and what I'm going to advocate is an approach that has you start at the most global way first and if you can achieve your desired aim there, that's always preferable and then slowly work your way down to more progressive levels of overrides. So what I mean by that is in this video we're going to start with the global graphical display settings that control your entire project so there's sort of a master control panel that we can go to that sets the overall graphical settings project-wide and then we have different levels of customization that we can do that progressively work from there and we'll look at those in future videos. But for this example I want to start with this sort of global settings which are called Object Styles and the reason I want to advocate that approach is you can often solve a problem in a Dialog like Object Styles and it will apply across the entire project and you won't need to do anything further. So it's usually a preferable way to get the task done if it solves the issue in question. So let me give you an example of what I mean by that. So, I'm here in a Section View and what I'll do is right click here and Zoom In Region and I'm going to zoom in around this location right here. And if you look at this wall and you kind of compare it to the floor here and the ceiling here, what you're going to notice is that the outline of the wall is significantly bolder than either the floor or the ceiling and that's also noticeable here, it's noticeable down here with this other floor and if we pan over it's also noticeable right here. Here's the floor again and there's a small little piece of wall here used as a vertical soffit right there. Now it might be tempting to just sort of select the floor and look for some way to customize it but it turns out that this issue is not isolated to just this view so what I'm going to do is doubleclick the Transverse Section here on the project browser and we have the same issue in this View. So if I zoom in, here are the walls and they are significantly bolder than the ceiling here or the floor down here. So clearly if we can find a way to adjust that line weight situation and do it globally, then we'd only have to change it once and the change would apply throughout the project and we would be done. So that's what we're ultimately looking for here. So, let's look at the Object Styles Dialog then. You can get to Object Styles on the Manage tab and it's on the Settings panel and you'll find it right there. So this is Object Styles and it will display the Object Styles Dialog. Now there are several tabs across the top but we're going to stay focused on the Model Objects tab for this example. All of these are the model categories in the project. And let's focus on the line weight for the time being. Line weight actually has two sub columns, Projection and Cut. So Projection are the line weights being used when you look at an object off in the distance and Cut is the line weight being used when you slice through it either in Floorplan or in Section. So if we scroll down and locate the Walls category you will see that it's using a pen weight 1 in Projection and a pen weight 3 when we slice through it. So that's why the wall has that nice bold outline because it's using this heavier pen weight here in the Cut column. Now compare that to the other two categories that we were focused on. If I scroll up and locate Floors, notice that it's using pen weight 1 in Projection as well, but it's also using pen weight 1 in Cut which explains why it's so much thinner than the walls, and likewise if you scroll up a little further you'll see that Ceilings are doing the same thing. So the solution here is actually quite simple. Just change the Cut line weight to 3 for both the Ceiling's and the Floor's categories. Now this is a category-wide setting and furthermore it's an Object Style setting so therefore it's actually project-wide. So what we're saying is, in any View, if you cut through a floor or a ceiling use a pen weight 3 now instead of a pen weight 1. Now the other settings that are in here I think are fairly self-explanatory. There's also a Line Color and you can see that most objects are set to black and you should probably leave it that way. And there's also a Line Pattern and most objects are set to solid but there are other choices if you wanted dash lines to be used and so on. So all we're going to change there is those two line weights for the ceilings and the floors and change the Cut line weight to pen 3 and then click Okay and now you're going to see that we get the same bold line around the ceiling as we're getting for the wall. We're getting it here for the floor as well as the wall and if I go back to the Longitudinal Section more importantly notice that we're getting the same line weights assigned here as well and that's really the critical thing is that by making that change in one location, I've now affected every View in the project. So that's a really simple example of the power of Object Styles. Now most of your firms probably have some sort of office standard in place for Object Styles so certainly you want to check with whomever is in charge of your Revit implementation first before you start making changes in Object Styles to make sure that you're working within the office standard guidelines but really what I wanted you to do was just to be sure that you understand what the impact of Object Styles is and really if you get the Object Styles correct first then in most cases you don't really need to override any further because everything will behave in an expected way.

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