Inconsistencies in Roofs

In Revit, we enter sketch mode to do a lot of operations, and is the way we interact with Revit to input the "geometry" parameter. Most of these operations involve sketching on a workplane and then Revit takes that geometric input and builds something with it for you, such as a wall elevation profile, a floor or a roof (by footprint).

Floor slabs grow downwards, so for example if your sketch is located at elevation 10'-0" on Level 2 and you use a 12" floor, the bottom of the floor will be at elevation 9'-0". A Roof by footprint behaves just the opposite and grows upwards.

Now this all makes sense (or not), but I have a problem with inconsistensies between how you build your roof. If you use a Roof by extrusion, it grows downwards instead. See the example below.

Now we don't typically use roofs by extrusion for flat roofs, but this was just to illustrate a point. I would rather come up with one rule and stick to it, such as see roofs by extrusion to consistently grow upwards like their footprint counterparts. You can argue that when sketching by extrusion, you know where the top of your roof is, however this seems to be a topic that can be argued from both sides. At least now you know the difference between the two modes!

You can also take a look at THIS POST for further discussion and a poll about the topic.

Inconsistencies in Roofs

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