how to display revit wall center line ( please help )

[samar]

hi guys , am new here and i need some , so pleeeeeeeeez don't ignore !!! , am a graduate architect , and from were i am , we r used to have a center line for each separate wall not just for dimension or placing but even visible after plotting and in each view including section , whether it is a structural or partition wall or ... etc ,
am new to revit and i fell in love with the software right away , so the end of it could some one please show me how to display wall center line in views , the only way i found out how to do it is either by drawing model lines or grid lines which will be so dreadful and time consuming if u have 1250 walls in the project .
so if someone could hep me in doing it automatically perhaps to be a part of the wall proprieties
i need some guidance here . :?::?:
thanks :lol:

[irneb]

You could make your wall in 2 layers (change the wall type). Making a split in the middle item at a position which would be the wall's centre line. Of course it's going to be weird getting simply a solid line as the centre. Don't know how else to do this easily for a dashed line. Of course you'd need to set your detail level to Medium / Fine to see the layers of the wall.

Other than that all I can think of is making an addon (C#) to draw centre lines to all walls on all views.

[Mike L Sealander]

It's true that Revit is not set up to show a line representing the centerline of a wall. However, there are two things that might interest you. First, create a wall material to be assigned to your wall core. For the material Graphics, create a drafting hatch pattern made of parallel lines, set the orientation to Align with Element, and set the distance between lines to half your core width at a chosen scale. I'm not metric, but the idea is that at a particular print scale, there is a hatch setting that will get you a line in the middle of your wall core, but only at that scale.
The other method you might try is to set your core layer to a very small thickness, say 1 millimeter or 1/16th inch. This will produce two lines very close to each other to represent the boundary between the core and the outer layers of the wall.
Neither of these is very satisfactory, but if your over-arching concern is to automate the creation of a line in the middle of your wall, these methods may be acceptable.

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Samara,
welcome to the forums.
Although the workarounds suggested might work, none are automatic, easily repeatable or really practical.
I would humbly suggest that you might want to re-assess 'why' you need to see that centerline on your walls. Is it simply a graphic preference or do you feel the trades find it valuable? Is the standard to include the centerline of the overall assembly or the structural 'core' portion of the wall? What happens on walls where the assembly changes along its length (a concrete shear wall furred differently along its length).
I believe you really have to decide if the time and effort is worth the payoff for stuff like this.
Just my $.02

[MikeJarosz]

you might want to re-assess 'why' you need to see that centerline on your walls.

What Dimitri is saying is that your request is an unusual one. I have been an architect in NYC for many years now and have seen drawing sets for thousands of projects (not an exaggeration). I do not recall seeing a set with all the partition centerlines shown. This includes meticulous architects like Meier, Vinoly and even McKim Meade and White! As to Dimitri's speculation that it may be useful to the construction industry, how do you explain the fact that 99.9999+% of their other projects do not have these lines and are somehow getting built? Revit does not include this capability because the industry has not demanded it. Samara's drawings would be an oddity in Tishman's plan room.

There is one exception however. I can see that design presentation drawings, which are art as much as science, might make use of centerlines for graphic appearances, as Dimitri notes. But that is a personal preference. As such, it is too much to expect Revit to accomodate a feature no one else seems to need. In the end, the solution to your requirement will most likely be a workaround.

BTW: I suspect that you in fact do want centerlines for presentation drawings. Have you considered drawing by hand? No computer drawing will ever approach the beauty of a well done hand drawing. And, there is no limitation on what you can do. Try watercolor!

[Dimitri Harvalias]

If you 'really' want to do this ('cuz even if I question the question I hate to leave it unanswered :lol:) I would suggest the quickest way would be as follows;
- Create a new wall style called CENTERLINE. It will have a core only that is 2mm thick.
- Create a plan view where all you have visible is walls and openings (windows and doors and anything else hosted by the wall). This step is strictly for convenience.
- Window select everything in the view.
- Filter to remove everything except walls, doors, windows and other wall hosted objects.
- Copy to the clipboard and paste/aligned to the same place. Ignore the duplicate instances warnings.
- While all the elements are still highlighted create a group of them.
- Open the group and delete everything but the walls.
- set all wall locations lines to center of wall
- Swap all the walls for your CENTERLINE wall style
- Create a filter to override the cut line style and line weight of the CENTERLINE wall style

The fact that the core is so narrow will result in a single line appearance except at much larger scales.
If this is for presentations I'd suggest only doing it once, after all the walls have settled down.
Again, questioning the need at all, if you don't want the centerline running through door and window openings you could keep the duplicate doors and windows and just place all that stuff on a separate workset that was off by default in all views and filtered out your schedules.

Just one of many ways to tackle the problem.:beer: