Color Schemes in Reflected Ceiling Plans

NOTE: This is a re-post from the HOK BIM Solutions blog

 

Color schemes are a great analytical and visualization tool which can be used in floor plan, section and elevation views. Sadly, this functionality has been left out of reflected ceiling plan views. So how do you go about creating a colored ceiling plan?

There are a few of options at your disposal and each has its downfalls.

A) Overlaid Views on a Sheet

Create a floor plan view and turn off everything except rooms, then apply your color scheme. Create a reflected ceiling plan view and set ceilings to 100% transparent. Finally, overlay these views on a sheet.

The main drawback with this solution is that you are unable to work in a composite colored RCP view since the final result only exists on a sheet. Activating the RCP view and editing directly on the sheet results in the other view appearing half-toned, so it’s still not a perfect solution.

B) Plan View with RCP Underlay

Create a floor plan view and set the Underlay to Reflected Ceiling Plan orientation for the same level as your view. Set the Color Scheme as desired…

…and uncheck the halftone option for Underlays.

(Manage>Additional Settings> Halftone / Underlay)

The result is similar to A) above, but now you can work directly in the colored view since there is no required compositing of views on sheets.

The main drawback with this solution is that you are not truly seeing an RCP view, so some features that occur above the cut plane might not show up properly or not at all. For example take a look at the door: the frame should show up at the head in a true RCP view such as in A) above, and is thus incorrectly represented in this “hacked RCP”. Please also note however that Revit represents cut families based on the representation stored in the family itself, so you have to be very careful with object representation even in a regular RCP view (ex: the window has an extended sill, yet that sill shows up incorrectly in RCP views too).

As with all workarounds, there are no perfect solutions, so make sure you understand all the issues before choosing the option that works best for your project. Hopefully the Factory will eventually enable Color Schemes for Reflected Ceiling Plans as well!

Color Schemes in Reflected Ceiling Plans

Shared Positioning

This is a topic that has – historically - caused confusion across all levels of Revit users, myself included. I seem to have to re-learn the ins and outs of shared coordinates and the myriad array of associated tools every time I have to intervene on a project where multiple linked models are employed. This week has been one of those weeks, but this time I am thoroughly documenting this topic in an effort to shorten the learning curve next time this comes up once again!

For starters, HERE is a very good summary blog post by Steve Stafford with links to other of his posts on this very topic.

I will write more in detail on this as time permits, but in the meantime, I will offer the single most important strategy to avoid confusion: if you don’t need Shared Coordinates, don’t use them when linking and positioning models! Sounds simplistic, but it is valuable advice and you should ensure to touch on this in your BIM kick-off meeting. If you have separate discipline models for a particular building, they should link into each other with Auto – Origin to Origin from day one. This way you reserve Shared Coordinates for other purposes. Don’t use this system to fix sloppy and incorrect linking because you lose the flexibility to use it for other desirable purposes, such as reporting true site coordinates. For example if you want views showing Level 1 at 0’-0” in some sections/elevations, but want the ability to report the exact height above sea level or to report site building coordinates in a site plan, you won’t be able to do it simultaneously in the same project if you have consumed Shared Coordinates to fix improperly positioned models at project startup. EDIT: I should have worded this better. What I mean is that if you use Shared Coordinates as a linking fix with no regard to properly locating the shared coordinate origin and orientation based on a true survey mark, you would have to repeat the process later if you need to report coordinates relative to this point (especially the elevation above sea level), which can be a painful exercise later in the project.

The other problem I’m finding with the use of Shared Coordinates is that if a model with shared positioning is moved and this in turn causes Revit to save the location back to this linked model (sometimes even when nothing has actually moved), the Project Standards workset gets checked out and not properly relinquished. This results in a team member of one discipline (ex: Mechanical) owning the Project Standards workset in the Architectural model, which can lead to quite a bit of finger pointing! I’ve witnessed this several times when Architectural wants to edit the project address and they are locked out because Project Standards is owned by someone that has no business being in their file.

So are Shared Coordinates pure evil? I won’t dare go that far as their use might be absolutely necessary when exporting data to other applications, such as when needing IFCs for use in Solibri Model Checker. They are a great tool when used with care and caution, but they are undoubtedly one tough nut to crack.

Shared Positioning