Filter By Material

[DaleSmith]

Hi everyone,

Could someone explain why filtering by material in a view, doesn't seem to be an option? A typical example of this is a steelwork frame where I want to differentiate between two grades of steelwork. If I wanted to show beams of the first steel grade(S275) as a thin blue line and the beams of the second grade(S355) as a bold red line, I would currently have to manually override every piece of steelwork's graphics individually, which is clearly a MAJOR pain and a massive waste of time. Also, if a beam changed steel grade, I would have to go back and change it's graphic overrides in this view manually once again.

The only real reason I can think is maybe because some elements don't have a single material type, adding confusion.

Can someone offer a more suitable work around than manually selecting, checkling, then changing every single element's graphics override indivdually?

I always thought a 'quick select' option (similar to the one AutoCAD uses) should have been an important inclusion in Revit. At least that way I could select all beams in a view, and then quickly filter my selection to all beams with the grading type I required, before manually amending their graphics.

It just seems strange that Revit has the ability to filter my view to provide a visual indication that pieces of structural framing have slightly different Cross-section rotations, numbers of studs, or even manufacturers, but not what the things are actually made out of :)

[jpeters]

Hi,

Considering that no one has answered this question and that I have a very similar one, I'm posting here. Hope that is okay.

I'm looking for a way to filter a 3d view by material. I have building and in a particular view, I only want to see Cast-In-Place Concrete. I've used this material in floors, walls, foundations and other misc families... What I'm really trying to accomplish is to create a DWG export that only shows Cast-In-Place that I can send to my field engineers for concrete form layout. I don't want them to have to pick through the model to find the geometry they need... Any idea?

Thanks!

[greg.mcdowell]

You can't filter by material so you'll have to assign additional parameters to your elements and filter by them instead.

[jpeters]

Yeah, I was thinking that might be a possible way to do it. Thanks for the reply!

[Dimitri Harvalias]

This is where naming conventions for everything from materials, to assemblies, to views and levels is so important.
Thinking outside the box a bit allows you to find ways around the material limitation. The CIP example doesn't necessarily reflect material as much as construction process for the various walls, footings etc. If these assemblies are named accordingly you'll be able to filter by Type name. If you add various trade or contract ID parameters you can use those to filter.
For example wall name could be
03_Concrete_CIP_200_Sandlblast_Light
03_Concrete_CIP_200
Additional parameters might be added to help with 'quality' level required (e.g. a Yes/No parameter to indicate if the concrete is Visible).
It all depends what you want to get out of the model.
By default Revit will assign names from the general to the more specific (Option Set: Option: Workset: Object Category: family name: family type)
So there are ways to get around the problem. That said, filter by material should be an option.;)

Kind of a random little rant. :lol:

[jpeters]

Dimitri, Those are some excellent ideas and thoughts. I think I might try to implement some naming conventions like that. Thank you!

[dimak1999293768]

You can definitely filter by Structural Material though. Here is a blog post on how to do that http://allaboutcad.com/07/create-view-filters-in-revit-by-material/