From the course: Revit 2021: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial and Metric)

Using object styles - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2021: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial and Metric)

Start my 1-month free trial

Using object styles

“

- [Instructor] The theme of this chapter is controlling visibility. And there are lots of different ways that we can do this in a Revit project. So I advocate a systematic approach. So I think it's really important that you start at the top of the hierarchy and work your way down. So in this video, I'm going to focus on the settings that are the most global. In other words, we're going to make the change in one place, and it's going to affect the entire project across all of the views. And the specific example that we're going to look at is the line weight settings for elements in cut. So if we consider this section that I have open here on screen, and you look at the walls and the roof and contrast that to the ceilings and the floors, so here's a ceiling, here's a floor, here's another ceiling, here's a wall, here's a wall and here's the roof. Clearly, the roofs and the walls are much bolder than the floors and the ceilings are. And I'd like to address that. Now, if you're familiar with some of the ways you can control visibility in Revit, then you may be have heard of the visibility graphics command, and it would be really common for a lot of folks to jump right in and start changing visibility graphics. And we will talk about visibility graphics later in the chapter. But that would not be the right solution here. And there's is a really simple reason for that. If I open up the transverse section and zoom in on a similar area, notice that I have the same problem here. The walls are nice and bold, ceilings and floors, not as much, right. Here's the roof up here, nice and bold, matching the walls. So I'm going to click back to the longitudinal section here and the command that we want to look at is called object styles. So you can think of object styles is like the master control panel for the line weight and other overall graphical settings for any view. So this is the place where most firms will go to set up their office standards, and the advantage of that is, is if you make a change in object styles, it's going to affect every view that doesn't already have an override. And that's the key, that doesn't already have an override. So if you jump right in and start applying overrides, then you're defeating object styles before you even get it set up. So you always want to make sure that the object styles are correct first before you move on to any overrides. So let's take a look. So we're going to go to the Manage tab. And on the Settings panel here, you'll find the Object Styles button. And it's really quite simple. Now, in my case, these columns are a little bit squished, so I'm going to just stretch these out a little bit. And you're welcome to do the same if you like, but I'm going to focus on the category and line weight columns. Now, I'm on the Model Objects tab, that's where we're going to stay for this example. These are all the model elements in your Revit project. And as you scroll through the list here, what you're going to see is that each one of them has either one or two line weights. So one of the things that the category controls in Revit is whether or not the element is cuttable. So if we consider an element like a cable tray here at the top of the list, it is not cuttable, and I know that because it only has a projection line weight setting, there's nothing in the cut column. But if I consider casework right beneath it, that is cuttable, because it's got two values that I can configure. Now, at the moment, in this project casework is set to the same value for both of those numbers, but we could easily adjust that. Well, I'm not concerned about casework at the moment, I'm more concerned with walls, ceilings, floors and roofs. And if we scroll through this list, and we look at the two categories that we're happy with, we've got roofs here and it uses a pen weight two in projection, four in cut, and if we scroll down and look at the walls, it's the same, two and four. Now, the projection is any element that you're seeing off in the distance. So if you think about where we're cutting the section, the stare is often the distance. So the stare is in projection. Cut is anything we're slicing through, like this wall over here on the right, or this exterior wall over here on the left. And that bold outline is because we're using a thicker pen weight for the cut line weight. So all we need to do is locate the two categories that are not behaving the way we want, starting with ceilings, and check it settings and you can see the problem, projection is fine, but it's the cut line weight that's too thin. So all we need to do is change it from two to four and then repeat that for the floor category. Here's floors, change that from two to four. And then I'll click Okay. And now, we get that nice bold outline around all of the ceilings and the floors to go along with our walls and roofs. And more importantly, if you come back over here to your transfer section, you'll see that that changes applied here as well, because this view doesn't have any overrides. So that's the critical thing there. Make sure that you consider your settings at object styles first, because it's one setting, it affects everywhere, it's much quicker and more efficient. And then you can selectively override on a view-by-view basis as required. And we'll talk about some of the reasons why you might choose to do that in the future videos.

Contents