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

My Second Revit Project - Part 4

It's been a while since I posted about the latest project that I've been working on for a while now. Below are some images from last week. There's still work to be done (the weather has NOT helped) but hopefully it will be finished by the end of the year. The last major work consists of demolishing some existing parts during Thanksgiving and then the staff and students will move into the new parts of the building.

It is pretty enlightening to follow a job in construction. Regardless of how many drawings you crank out and how carefully detailed something is, you're still at the mercy of how someone interprets notes/markings on a submittal (or whatever mood they woke up in that day!). Sometimes it feels like there's not enough leadership at the subcontractor level and no amount of hand-holding from the contractor side (superintendent and PM) or the Architect is enough. But I'm finding that by maintaining a collaborative spirit, being nice, understanding and firm, you can take care of the Project and help steer it in the right direction.

We're currently helping our client by creating Evacuation maps for occupied spaces. Revit comes in really handy for this task. Here's a snapshot of one such map (the screen color is off, but the printed output is correct!):

Here are some tips about the tools and techniques used:

1. An Annotation family was created to manage the graphic border layout, title and legend (title block).
2. A floor plan view was created and the appropriate categories were left visible. Everything was set to halftone with the exception of rooms.
3. A color scheme was applied (for Area, By Range set to be at least 1SF). This made all rooms show solid with the orange color we wanted.
4. A Filled Region was applied around the building to make it pop more.
5. The exit paths were drafted in the sheet view after setting two unique line styles.
6. Multiple plans were created by Duplicating as Dependent and placed on sheets (with no View Title). Room fills were controlled by overriding visibility in each view. The Reveal Hidden Elements tool made it easy to un-hide one room at a time for each plan view and hide other irrelevant rooms.
7. An empty sheet was kept handy in the Project Browser with nothing but a title block. To create a new sheet, I simply selected the sheet in the Project Browser and used the copy & paste keystrokes to duplicate the sheet (thanks Luigi for reminding me of this tip!).
8. The Project Browser was filtered to display only these views and sheets, making it easier to work on this particular task.
9. When one area of the building was complete, I used a recently added feature to position a new area on a sheet: Pan Active View by activating the view, selecting the crop region, right-clicking on it and selecting Pan Active View. This is similar to just moving the crop region around, but I found panning the view within the crop to be more user-friendly for this task. This function is only available for views placed on sheets.
10. I'm up to 55 sheets created with about 12 to go, but interestingly enough, the file only gained about 1MB in size!

My Second Revit Project - Part 4

Floors and Color Schemes

Prior to Revit Architecture (RAC) 2008, when one added a Color Scheme to a floor plan view (back then it was termed as a Color Fill), if Floor visibility was turned on, Revit would issue a warning and turn it off for you so the colors would display correctly. This meant that in some cases, the “correctness” of the plan representation would be compromised.

To illustrate, imagine you have a colored floor plan on Level 2. There is an opening in the floor slab and a stair goes down through it. The last few steps leading to the first floor are covered by the slab above (the opening doesn’t go the entire length of the stairs).

Since Revit wanted you to turn floor visibility off, you would see the entire stair run, which is incorrect. The last few steps (shown dashed in the image above) are supposed to be hidden, so the workaround for this situation was to hide the last few steps by placing a filled region with the same solid color fill as your floor plan space.

In RAC 2008, we now have “Color Schemes” and Revit no longer turns off Floor visibility. But hold on…don’t get too excited! Unfortunately, there is a bug, which is known by Autodesk (and hopefully we’ll see a fix sometime in a future release).

Even though the floor is visible, it is in some state of “transparency”. The last few steps show through the slab. Notice also how the continuous wall on the level below shows through too, indicating the floor has become transparent. Notice how the grey wall color shows through the surface pattern of the slab, which is another indicator that the slab has become transparent. Surface patterns seem to display just fine but if a color was assigned to the floor material and the view was set to Shaded, this color is not displayed (compare to the first image).

The above image shows a color scheme set with the option “foreground”. If the option “background” was enabled, the floor area at the steps would not be colored correctly, as shown in the image below. So how do we fix it you might ask? The linework tool? No, actually that doesn’t work on this portion of ths stairs. Somehow it seems that Revit knows this shouldn’t be displayed and the linework tool does not “see” these lines.

So the same workaround as in previous versions of Revit still applies….head for the filled region! (the floor surface pattern was left visible so you can see where the filled region is located).

Floors and Color Schemes