From the course: Revit 2018: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

Using object styles - Revit Architecture Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2018: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

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Using object styles

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- [Instructor] As you work through your projects in Revit, you're going to discover many situations where you need to customize the way things graphically display both on screen while you're working and in final output. Now there's a variety of ways that you can achieve that, and I'm going to advocate an approach where you start thinking globally first and look for opportunities to make changes to the display that have a broad impact across your entire project, and then slowly work your way into more and more specific conditions and specific overrides as needs dictate. So in this video, we're going to look at the global Object Styles command. We use this command to change the way elements display at the category level, and then in subsequent videos in this chapter, we'll look at increasingly more specific ways to apply overrides. So to start our exploration, I'm here in a Section view, and what I'm going to do is zoom in region over here at this juncture between the exterior wall, the floor, and the ceiling. And what you'll notice immediately is that the outline of the wall is significantly bolder than the outline of either the floor or the ceiling. Now if I go to the previous zoom, and I look at other areas in this section, you're going to notice the same situation. Here's the floor, here's the ceiling, and this turns out to be a very small little wall, used as a little vertical soffit right there. Now zooming back out I can see that that's the same floor and ceiling element across both of those conditions I just showed you, so it might be tempting to just select the floor and look for some opportunity to modify the floor to adjust those graphics, but what I'm going to encourage you to do is to think a little bit more globally at first, and double-check the settings in the file and make sure that there isn't some setting that you can control that will actually have a broader impact. So to illustrate what I mean here, let me select this section over here. I'm going to right-click it and choose Go to View, and then I'm going to zoom in on this condition over here where I have similar situations to what we just saw in the previous section. Notice that the wall is bold here, and the ceiling is lighter as well. Furthermore, if we look at the floor slab, we can see that the same situation applies. So I'm going to close this section, return to the original one, and what that tells us is the problem isn't isolated to just this view. The problem actually exists across several views, and honestly across the entire project. So how would we address that situation then? Well, the global settings for the entire project are configured in a command called Object Styles. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to the Manage tab, and we're looking for the Object Styles command, and you can find it here on the Settings panel, and that will display the Object Styles dialog. The Object Styles dialog has a few tabs across the top, and we're mainly concerned with Model Objects for this discussion, so we're going to stay on the Model Objects tab, but much of what we talk about could be applied to the other tabs as well. Right beneath the tab name is a filter list, and by default I'm showing all disciplines, but it actually is possible to uncheck disciplines that you're not interested in. So if you're only interested in Architecture, for example, you could uncheck the other check boxes, but I'm going to leave them all selected. This is an alphabetical list of all the model categories in the project, and what you're able to do is kind of scroll through here and see the settings for each of those categories. Now we're discussing line weight at the moment, so you can see here in the Line Weight column that there's actually two sub-columns, Projection and Cut. Projection is what you see when you look at the object off in the distance, so such as an Elevation or in a Floor Plan view. Cut is what you see when you actually slice through the object. Now that slice could happen in Plan, like what happens with the outline walls in Plan, or it could happen in Section. So in our case, the condition that I zoomed in on a moment ago, those are the Cut line weights that we were witnessing there, both for the wall, the floor, and the ceiling. So what I'm going to do is scroll through this list here and kind of look at what the settings are currently configured as, and I'm going to scroll all the way down the bottom, and locate the Walls category. So what you're going to see is that in Projection, if a wall is off in the distance beyond, it's going to use a pin weight one, but if you slice through it in either Plan or Section, it's going to use a pin weight three. Now either of these lists actually could go all the way up to pin weight 16. Now rarely have I ever seen anything higher than five or six, so even though all these other numbers are available, those line weights would be significantly fatter than anything that you're likely to want to use in a typical drawing situation. Notice that right above Walls that Topography is using a pin weight six when it's cut, and that just means that if you have a ground plane in your model, and you're slicing through the ground plane, it'll be significantly bolder, so that could be appropriate for that kind of an object. But meanwhile we're more interested in what the walls are currently doing, and as I said, they're using a pin weight three. Now I don't want to change the walls, but what I do want to do is compare these two settings to the other two elements that we weren't satisfied with. So if I scroll back up to the Floor and Ceiling categories, what you'll see here is that my Floors are currently using a pin weight one in both conditions, and that's really the problem that we're witnessing there. So the Projection is fine, but I can come over here to this little drop-down list and simply change the Cut line weight for the floors to a pin weight three. Now if I scroll a little further up and find the Ceiling element, I discover the same thing, so I can change that to a pin weight three as well. Now the next two columns I hope are fairly self-explanatory. The line work that's used for each of these items can have a color assigned. Most elements are set to black by default, and you probably should leave it that way, and you also can assign a Line Pattern if you wanted to. So most objects are using a solid line pattern, but it's possible to use any number of dashed line patterns such as center lines, dash lines, hidden lines, and so on in order to render those lines. So I'm going to make those two changes, changing the Cut line of Floors and Ceilings, and then let's click OK and see the result. If I zoom back in on that same condition, you can now see that the line weights of the floors and the ceilings match the line weight of the wall, and it's a more desirable rendition for this condition. Furthermore, if I return to the other section that we looked at, you can see that the change has applied here as well. So the advantage of Object Styles is it's a global setting that you only have to configure once, and it will apply across the entire project to every view that has not been overridden. So the reason I'm starting with Object Styles is it's really the settings that you want to get configured first. So it's likely that your office probably has some sort of an office standard for these sort of settings, so you definitely want to check with whomever's in charge of that to kind of make sure you understand what those office standard settings are, but if you work for yourself, or if there isn't a clear set of settings, then Object Styles is definitely the first stop to get configured before you move on to any of the other graphical overrides that we'll discuss in the next few videos.

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