Bottom Line
Understand the user interface. In addition to understanding how your project is organized, to use Revit software well you must understand how the UI is organized. Once you grasp both of these concepts, you’ll be ready to move ahead.
Master It The “big” areas of the UI are the ribbon, the Properties palette, the Project Browser, and the drawing area. How do these areas work together, and what tabs correspond to an iterative design process?
Understand project organization. The compelling advantage of being able to design, document, and manage your project across multiple disciplines – the architectural, structural, and mechanical disciplines – is something that you can do only in Revit software, and understanding project workflow is key to getting off on the right foot.
Master It Thinking back to the Revit organizational chart shown in Figure 2.22, what are the main components of a Revit project, and how can you apply them to your design process? How do these categories directly affect your design workflow?
Chapter 3
The Basics of the Toolbox
The road to mastering Autodesk® Revit® Architecture software will always include reinforcement of fundamental skills. Just as an accomplished musician will practice her scales, here you will “practice” by reviewing the fundamental selection and editing tools throughout the Revit Architecture program. There are many tools that can assist you in refining your models and project designs. Some are simple geometry-editing functions, whereas others possess more powerful capabilities.
In this chapter, we’ll review these tools and provide some exercises for you to remain productive. In this chapter, you’ll learn to:
● Select, modify, and replace elements
● Edit elements interactively
● Use other editing tools
● Create site context for your project
Selecting, Modifying, and Replacing Elements
Knowing how to select, modify, and replace elements efficiently is fundamental to working productively in Revit software. These interface operations are the foundation on which you will build skills to create and edit your project models. In the following sections, we will review methods for selecting, filtering, and modifying properties.
Revit was one of the first programs that had the ability to pre-highlight elements as you hovered the mouse pointer over them, before actually clicking to select. Not only does this give you a clear idea of what you are about to select, but it also displays information about that object in the status bar and in a banner near the mouse pointer. When you hover over an element, it pre-highlights; click the highlighted element and it turns blue, indicating that it is selected.
Once an element is selected, the ribbon changes to Modify mode, where consistent editing tools are located on the left side and context-sensitive tools appear to the right. Notice the subtle differences in the ribbon, as shown in Figure 3.1, when a roof, wall, and floor are selected.
Figure 3.1 The right end of the Modify tab changes based on the element that is selected: (a) the Modify | Roofs tab; (b) the Modify | Walls tab; (c) the Modify | Floors tab.
CHANGING SELECTION COLORS
You can customize the default colors for selection, highlighting, and alerts to your own color palette. To do this, click the Application menu and select Options. In the Options dialog box, select the Graphics option on the left to edit the settings for colors.
You can select elements in many ways:
Add or Subtract You can build a selection of individual elements by using the Ctrl and Shift keys on your keyboard. Hold down the Ctrl key while picking to add elements, and hold down the Shift key while picking to remove elements. Notice that the mouse pointer will indicate a plus (+) when you hold the Ctrl key and a minus (–) when you hold the Shift key.
Window To select a large number of elements in a view window, you can click and drag the mouse to form two different types of selection windows. Click and drag from left to right, and only the elements completely within the window will be selected – this implied window is displayed as a solid line. Click and drag from right to left, and any element within or crossing the window will be selected – this implied window is displayed as a dashed line. To activate either window-selection tool, you must begin by clicking in a blank area (not on an element) within the view window.
Chain Chain-select is an intelligent method for selecting connected elements such as walls, lines, sketch segments, and line-based components. To activate this mode, hover your mouse over (but don’t click) one linear element that is connected to several other linear elements. While the element is pre-highlighted, press the Tab key once and the connected elements will be pre-highlighted. You can then click to select the chain of elements. When selecting objects, use the Tab key to cycle through all available objects near your mouse pointer. If a floor edge happens to be near the edge of a wall that you are trying to chain-select, you can skip the chain of walls and select the floor. Be sure to look at the status bar; it will indicate “Chain of walls or lines” when you have selected correctly.
Select Previous Command A little-known feature allows you to select elements you had previously selected. Either right-click and choose Select Previous from the context menu or press Ctrl and the left-arrow key on your keyboard.
You have the ability to choose elements that will be included or excluded when you click on elements in a model. There are two ways to adjust these settings, as shown in Figure 3.2: Click the drop-down menu under the Modify button in the ribbon, or use the icons at the right end of the status bar. Note that the icons in the status bar will change slightly to indicate the status of each option. When a mode is disabled, a small red X will be displayed on the icon. One of these selection options is Select Elements By Face, which allows you to select elements simply by picking any face of the element.
Figure 3.2 Use selection options to avoid picking elements, such as links or pinned elements. These options are found in the Select expanded panel (a) and the status bar (b).
Once you have elements selected, a count of selected objects is displayed at the right end of the status bar. You can also filter the selection into object categories by clicking the Filter icon in the status bar or ribbon. This tool allows you to select large numbers of elements and then focus your selection by removing categories you don’t need, as shown in Figure 3.3. For example, if you window-select an entire floor plan, you will have a selection set of many different categories. Using the Filter tool, you can limit the selection to just the Doors category – or perhaps Doors and Door Tags.
