From the course: Revit and Unreal Engine: Real-Life Architectural Visualizations

Using Hide/Isolate in the Revit views

From the course: Revit and Unreal Engine: Real-Life Architectural Visualizations

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Using Hide/Isolate in the Revit views

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now, and we're going to have a little look at how some of the Revit tools could be useful before we start thinking about taking our Revit 3D views into unreal engine. So we've got a Revit project for you, it's called new office building underscore metric dot OVT, you'll recognize it from previous chapters, but just make sure you download this particular Revit model for use with this particular chapter, because we're going to to be making some changes to it, and I want you to be able to save it separately from other Revit models we might use in the course. So it opens up in the default starting view, which is the default 3D view. You can see that in the view tab there, and you can also see it in bold here in the project browser in Revit. Now what we want to do is we want to duplicate that 3D view like we did for the coins test view there. So we right click on the 3D view first, duplicate view with detailing, like so. And that'll give us a new view, and it's called 3D copy one. Right click on it. And we're going to rename it. And we're going to put 3D and then space dash space, and then hide and isolate. Now, the reason we're using hide and isolate as a naming methodology there for that 3D view, is because we are going to hide and isolate various elements in our Revit 3D view. So the first thing we're going to to hide and isolate is the roof, so I can select it like so, there's the roof. Now, obviously it highlights in that nice blue color and you can see through it. Now, if I right click on the shortcut menu, hide in view, I can either hide the elements or the category. Now, we only have the one roof, so I could select elements, but if we have multiple roofs, I would select category. I'm going to go for elements, and that hides it. Now, we haven't deleted it, it's still there. If I come down here to the view control bar, and click here, reveal hidden elements. There's my hidden roof there in that pinky color. And what I can do there is I can quite easily right click and unhide in view elements, and you'll see it changes color. Hit Escape, and it sits on that gray color, come down here to switch off reveal hidden elements, and you can see the roof is back. So select it again, right click, hide in view elements. Now, the reason I've hidden that is I want to be able to see inside the building. To start developing my Revit 3D view for a scene in unreal engine when I take it across. So, we can now start thinking about a fantastic tool in Revit called Hide and Isolates. Now I have obviously just hidden the roof, but if I come down here onto the view control bar, we have what looks like temporary hide isolate, they look like spectacles. If I click there, obviously it's great out at the moment because I haven't got any elements selected but what I can do is I can apply hide, isolate to the view. I can isolate a category. I can hide a category. I can isolate an element, or I can hide an element. Now this is where it gets kind of clever because what I can do now, so I can zoom in on my desks. Let's say, I don't want these desks in the VA. So I select a desk. There we go. There's a desk selected there comes up and my properties pallet over here. Now if I go down here now to the little spectacles and click I can now hide that entire category. So if I click on hide, it'll hide all of it. Can you see that? And you'll notice hang on a minute, everything's gone the whole category. And of course it has because it's all in a furniture category. So I've hidden everything. If I do a little bit of a 3D orbit there you'll now see that the lamps are still there and I've got a lamp floating in space. That was on one of the desks. If I come back here now and I reset the temporary hide isolate you'll see everything comes back again. I'll just orbit back again like so. So one of the benefits of all of this temporary hide, isolate and hide and unhide is it allows you to remove the elements that are sort of extraneous bits that you might not need when you want to take this particular 3D view into unreal engine. And one of the bits of donkey work that you need to do here is to go through your Revit model piece by piece, removing, hiding, isolating, but more importantly creating different 3D views to say what is hidden and what isn't hidden. And you'll find as we work through the course you'll see that I'll take you through specific categories of what you need to create as 3D views before you take them through datasmith, into unreal engine. So let's have a little bit more at this hide and isolate kind of idea. Now we've got some TVs on the wall here. Now we might not want to take those through, into unreal engine so I can select one of them and you can see I've selected it there it's 42 inch plasma TV. So if I come down here again to the spectacles what I can do is I can hide that one element for example, and it will just hide one of them. So I can be as detailed as I want with hide and isolate. Now isolate works the other way around. Let me just jump to the spectacles again and we'll reset it again. So that's a click and then just click on reset. I think sale a little TV screen comes back. Now, if I want to isolate something let's say I wanted to isolate the exterior walls for example. So if I select a wall segment like that, and I want to isolate it in the model I go down to the spectacle set and I can either isolate that particular wall or I can isolate that wall category. So if I isolate that now can you see all I've got are my exterior and interior walls. Now, this is where we can start thinking about how we bring things from Revit into unreal engine. Because ideally what we want to be doing is we want to be breaking things down into categories. So we want to start thinking about bringing a structural category into unreal engine and interior category into unreal engine perhaps even a furniture category into unreal engine. Now, the reason you do that is one, it's easier to bring them into unreal engine that way, but also more importantly it allows you to be a lot more choosy about what you bring through into unreal engine. And it distinguishes one thing from other, if you basically had everything in one 3D view and brought it into unreal engine it's all going to be a mishmash of elements. And you're not going to know what's what. If you bring them in as separate categories like structure, furniture, interior and so on. It's a lot easier to distinguish what's going on in unreal engine with the models you've brought in. Because each particular model then acts as an actor in that unreal engine scene that you're building up perhaps for your client or your stakeholder on your project. So this temporary hide isolate is a really useful feature because what I can do now is I can just hit escape just to de-select that wall like that. And what I've got now is a 3D view. Let me just make sure that's isometric by using the view cube for example. I might go even the other way around let's go that way around like that. There's our walls there. So what I can do now is I could potentially duplicate this view. So if I now right click and I duplicate view with detailing and we've got 3D hide and isolate copy one. So what I'll do there now is I'll Right Click on that and I'll rename it and we'll call it 3D and we'll just call it walls for now. Let's break that down. They're like, so, and we'll call it walls in presenter. So we've got that view there. So if I go back to hide and isolate, now, that's like that. I can switch that one off. Research temporally hide isolate that goes back so we have before. Now, you'll notice that we've got our 3D walls here but it's not the current view anymore. So we've got 3D walls. I'll double click on it. And it takes us back to that view where we've got the temporary hide, isolate in place. Now, the trick is with this hide and isolate is I've got 3D views that only show specific elements when I bring them into unreal engine. Now it might sound again like I've said before, a little bit complex at the moment. Don't worry. What we're going to do after we've been through this chapter is we'll start developing our Revit model, ready to go into unreal engine. And you'll see all the workflows slowly building up. So we'll look at things like hide and isolate, the coin section box and then finally exporting each of the 3D views out via datasmith. And then we're going to bring those into unreal engine.

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