Filled Region not Showing Plan when Transparent

[artitech]

I want to create color coded floor plans (to show the various program spaces) and I am trying using filled regions with colors set to "transparent" but I can't get the floor plan to show through the filled region, even though it's set to transparent and I have "sent it to back or sent it backward"..

Is this not the method to use for this?

See attached.

[iru69]

How are you setting "colors" to "transparent"? Do you mean you're setting the "Background" to "Transparent"? The "Background" will only be the white space between the pattern lines. The "Color" is the color of the pattern line. Using a "Solid" pattern will not leave any white space - hence, no transparency. Am I missing something?

You can create Floor types made of glass and sketch those in over the plans, but the walls and doors will still show through since their cut plane will be higher (also you'd have to get into worksets if you want to hide them in other views).

The massing tools might be a good bet... this thread (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=19114) might be of some use...

HTH

[LRaiz]

Are you using Color-fill tool? This is the primary tool intended for your purpose.

[artitech]

I am thinking that color fill may have been the way to achieve what I am after....

I am trying to make a program space diagram on my floor plan, using colors to differentiate between the various program spaces (circulation, public space, service space, etc)..

I thought the filled region set to "transparent" was the way to do it. It appears it may not be...

See example attached. Except I don't want these colors to appear "solid" (hiding the walls, etc... underneath). I want it to be transparent to show the walls, doors, etc...

How should I have proceeded with this?

[iru69]

The word "transparent" might be a red herring.

It looks like your setting up the color fills using an area plan?

You can assign color fills based on many different schedule types. For instance, set up a room schedule and use color fill - then it will only color fill the floor areas between the walls. You can use the same room name (e.g. Arts Center) in different spaces to achieve a larger area color fill without color filling over the walls. Make use of the room separation lines to define areas (e.g. circulation) within a space or between spaces.

[beegee]

One way to achieve what you want is to create a very thin floor , say 5 mm thick, over the program spaces, with the surface finish set to the colour and solid fill you need.

[artitech]

So what is a filled region set to "transparent"? What is the difference then between transparent and opaque?

I notice the room labels show through the filled region... why won't the walls?

[LRaiz]

I am curious to understand why users are inclined to use filled regions instead of colorfill areas. Colorfill is the tool that was deliberately designed for the purpose similar to one stated by artitech. Colorfills are parametric and associative. When walls/area boundaries change colorfills will automatically recompute bounded areas and adjust their graphical representation. When user decides to designate different use for areas colorfill will update as well. No such automatic updates available for filled regions. In addition colorfills work in concert with area/room schedules and thus should be convenient for program related activities and deliverables.

People seem to be ready to ignore above stated advantages and go for a dumb 2d approach. Why is that? Is it related to the luck of familiarity with Revit tools? Or is it simply a sign of remaining addiction to drafting tools ala ACAD? May be colorfills are inadequate in some way? Or do people find it difficult to follow the mental model implied by colorfills? Just as architects find it interesting to model buildings in their heads and in their CAD systems I find it interesting to create models of thinking processes that occurs in user's head. Thus I ask to excuse my curiosity and shed some light on choices made in this particular case.

[Scott D Davis]

Exactly Leonid!

Why are you not using Color Fills??? This exercise of coloring the plans would have taken all of 5 seconds and two clicks using Color Fills, AND it would have created a legend for you too, on the fly.

Filled Regions is NOT the tool to do what you are trying to do. Look up color fills in the Help menu...you'll be shocked at how easy it is.

[artitech]

Points well taken, all of them. As I mentioned in the start of the thread, I was just taking a shot at this for the first time.

None-the-less, my project at this stage is a massive modelling (design) with alot left to be worked out at a later stage (construction documents) and I have very few rooms with four enclosing walls and was finding the room labellling very cumbersome and time consuming under these circumstances. I may still not grasp the whole concept yet, but time was of the essence.

I will take some time (once this presentation is out the door) to better understand the use of the color fill. I had to revert to "drafting-text" for alot of my room labels because the room label (tag) wasn't recognizing my partially open areas and sub-divided areas and I never had the time to sort this out.

Thanks.

[aaronrumple]

I am curious to understand why users are inclined to use filled regions instead of colorfill areas.
1. Color fills can't be combined with floor patterns.
2. There is a need for regions and sub-regions. I need the room to have several sub areas, but the room still needs one tag. And then I need to do area calcs based on the regions/sub-regions. (...which may even overlap.) This is a big issue in retail management.

[Steve Jager]

Artitech,

Under the drafting menu, use the "Room Separation Tool" to define rooms without walls, (just draw a line anyshape you wnat) you won't lose the speed you are looking for and the benefit in time savings is huge over the 2d method you are using now.

[Scott D Davis]

Since you don't have 'rooms' bounded by walls, and had to sketch in all the filled regions, you could have used an Area Plan with a Color Fill and Legend. In the area plan, you would have used sketch tools to define the boundaries between spaces, then dropped in 'area tags'. Then you could have dropped in a Color Fill, which would have colored those defined areas.

Infact, you could use an area plan that has no geometry at all! Just sketch some closed boundaries, drop area tags in, name the 'areas' in the tag, and then drop in a Color Fill!

I understand you are too far into it this time, but I hope this helps for next time!

[artitech]

Scott,

Thanks, it sure does.

I have yet to harness the power of Revit, and I hope the closer I get to it, the further away the developers keep getting!

[artitech]

... in reading my lat reply to this thread I just wanted to clarify what I meant about the developers getting further away (incase it is taken wrongly) (is that a word? wrongly?)... I guess it is now...

What I meant was that as I get closer to figuring out all the tools with Revit, I anticipate that the developers will continue improving the software, so I likely will never catch up (that's a good thing).

[iru69]

I am curious to understand why users are inclined to use filled regions instead of colorfill areas...

This reminds me of an architecture lecture I attended at school. A series of slides were shown around campus of paved walks and adjacent lawns and plantings. Wherever a paved walk wasn't most convenient in going from point A to point B, people had simply walked across a corner of the lawn or similar ground cover until a dirt path was clearly visible - a shortcut. What I took from the lecture was that people are going to go the way that makes the most sense to them at the moment - and we as architects need to recognize that. We can either cut them off at the pass and erect various barriers, or we can adapt the design to meet their needs (even if it means compromising certain principles of the design). But we can't expect to change their natural behavior.

Sometimes it makes "sense" to spend more time up front in setting up something like a Room Schedule, and then creating an Area Plan. Sometimes it just leads to more questions and more messing around with the "feature" itself when it can be least afforded. The Architectural fee structure is particularly tight at the beginning of a project. Often, clients have not committed to moving forward with a project beyond the planning/schematic design phase – and therefore we as architects need to minimize that up front investment. And really no offense to Scott, but everything takes him five seconds to do in Revit :). Something like Schedules and Area Plans are rarely as simple in practice as they are in theory. The time and mental energy invested to set up Schedules, Colorfills, Area Plans, etc. often outweighs the necessity for continued associativity. Filled Region are *so* easy to use, and *so* fast to use, and it just works (well it would "just work" for artitech if they could be made transparent).

Another example that is brought up again and again is getting square footage areas. Setting up a Room Schedule and creating an Area Plan will never be easier than selecting a few points to get a rough square footage. Back in the days before computers in architecture, when I needed to get a rough square footage estimate, I could get one in less than a minute using a scale and a calculator. But when I had to do a room by room area breakdown, it was a major drag.

Revit needs to be flexible enough to work both ways. To *keep* it easy when you need to do something quick and dirty, and to *make* it easy when you need to do something that would otherwise be difficult or time consuming. It doesn't always make sense to apply the same tool to what appears to be the same situation.

Revit is an awesome piece of software - but ultimately it's just a tool to achieve a means to an end - it's not a means in itself.

[artitech]

Thanks all for the kind words....

I still haven't received an answer to my main question though....

Q. What does the "transparent" option do in a filled region?

[Max Lloyd]

My 2 cents on this subject. I agree with everyone that colour fill is the way forward, but it does not behave very well. I have been doing a similar excercise to artitech, but went straight for the colour fill. Works well re: room bounding etc, but there are areas of the plan which don't get coloured. For instance a staircase remains uncoloured up to its cut plane. I would like it coloured please? How do I do that? Seems obvious, use a coloured transparent filled region.......hmmm, not very transparent!

I have had similar problems with an internal swimming pool that does not get coloured where the pool itself is (I think because the pool is a hole cut in my floor with another 'floor' to represent the water, howevere, no colour. Its been very frustrating I must say.

Maybe I'm missing something?

[patricks]

My 2 cents on this subject. I agree with everyone that colour fill is the way forward, but it does not behave very well. I have been doing a similar excercise to artitech, but went straight for the colour fill. Works well re: room bounding etc, but there are areas of the plan which don't get coloured. For instance a staircase remains uncoloured up to its cut plane. I would like it coloured please? How do I do that? Seems obvious, use a coloured transparent filled region.......hmmm, not very transparent!

I have had similar problems with an internal swimming pool that does not get coloured where the pool itself is (I think because the pool is a hole cut in my floor with another 'floor' to represent the water, howevere, no colour. Its been very frustrating I must say.

Maybe I'm missing something?

Well for one thing, when you create a color plan, floors are turned off. I don't know why, but that's what it does.

As for the transparent option, it controls the background of the filled region. The background of a filled region is always white. Blank Mask is simply a type of filled region with no pattern, and opaque so it blocks whatever is behind it. If you set it to transparent, then whatever is behind the fill pattern will show through. If you make a colored filled region, you have to use the Solid Fill, which leaves no background showing, and therefore the Transparency setting has no effect on regions that use Solid Fill.

[Alex Page]

So where do I find one of these 'blank masks"?

[iru69]

So where do I find one of these 'blank masks"?
Patricks can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think "blank masks" is a made-up term for a Filled Region that is opaque (white) and has no pattern. Good for covering up elements you don't want to see in a Hidden Line view, etc.

[sbrown]

Yes that is exactly what it is, I call it white out and note that you can use invisible lines for some of the boundary lines which makes it very easy to clean up troubled modeling.

[janunson]

Color fills are the way to go. IF you don't have inclosed rooms, use Area Plan. Transparency in a filled region has no effect if the fill is 'solid' if transparency is off, space between hatch lines will be white, if on, it will show the model through.

I wish transparency were a percentage though, so you could do as you say and allow things to partially show through, only i would not use it for coloring floor plans.

[jrocc858]

Transparent filled regions would still be a nice feature. For instance color fills do not work in elevations. A transparent filled region would be an easy way of demarkating new contruction. Currently you have to use a diagonal hatch with a transparenty wich will read diffently deppending on your plotter or if you publish a pdf. A solid transparency that you could read linework though would be vastly superior for this. If I'm missing another way to do this please let me know.

[janunson]

Transparency in filled regions, or any drawing element, including lines, text, and hatches would be useful, i think. You're not missing it, it's just not possible at this time...

As a workaround, you can place some masses or walls that have a material set as transparent and colored... this will get you the colored elevation thing... although i usually just do that stuff in photoshop...

[david@stearnsarchitecture]

Photoshop? Such a shame that after 8 major releases, Revit doesn't have the background color filled polygon that most shareware drawing programs have. This has been a big problem for our office for awhile, and it's not just floorplans. at times I need to shade particular shapes under a roof plan to highlight portions of a building for the city. The other day the city requested shaded color fields underneath a large parking lot site plan that was Revit lines and DWG link lines. Sometimes clients want an artistic elevation backed with abstract colors that dont follow 3d items...I could stay in Revit, but for this one feature!

Is this on the forum wish list? I have been asking tech support to add it to theirs since V5.

[david@stearnsarchitecture]

<<I still haven't received an answer to my main question though....

Q. What does the "transparent" option do in a filled region?>>

When the Region has a hatch pattern such as diagonal lines, the "transparent" option makes the space between the lines transparent and you can see 3d objects below it. "Opaque" makes the spaces solid white. You can approximate a colored shaded area by using a transparent hatch pattern of grey or colored lines, for example, but the where the colored lines cross the black object lines, the colored lines will be on top and break the black lines at the intersection.

What others and myself mean by transparent color, I think, is a user definable polygon (like a Filled Region) inside which in Hidden Line mode, there would be a color instead of white; black 2d and 3d lines would still be black.

I imagine from a programming standpoint that this would be done at the level of screen draw pixel management, since the 3d model is separate from the world of 2d items such as Filled Regions as it stands now. This new object type would interlace all of them.

[szechuan3]

We use area plans to show our space planning - we have found it is the best tool to use for any program/space planning - it uses colour fills, creates a legend, allows the walls to show through a solid colour fill etc but provides the added bonus of giving your space planning an 'area' calculation and files it seperately in the Browser for better browser organization.....

[Alex Page]

We use area plans to show our space planning - we have found it is the best tool to use for any program/space planning - it uses colour fills, creates a legend, allows the walls to show through a solid colour fill etc but provides the added bonus of giving your space planning an 'area' calculation and files it seperately in the Browser for better browser organization.....


So do we, the problem with this (as noted previously) is how do you show an area colour for vertical circulation?...the colour doesnt show through the stairs.
Therefore we are forced to draw detail lines over the stair risers in the area plan, and then turn the stairs off....everyone would agree with me that this way shouldnt be the best way....

[felix.81253]

Well, the "color fill" is as nice as all the parametric stuff, but imagine you want to create a colored area that is not defined by the boundaries of the room it belongs to. Additionally, you want to see the Floor plan underneath...
Speaking of the "dump 2d"- approach: as far as I know, the "Art of Revit" is the to know where to make the jump from the 3D to 2D in order to get out a useful working drawing that meets the necessary criteria. I am afraid, that I am not alone explaining to the usually totally unexperienced principals, that I really would like some pretty trivial stuff to just look as they are used to , but the program does not allow for that.- Anyhow, I am convinced, that the parametric approach is the right one- just deserves some more work as most stuff in life.

thanks,

Felix

[Chad Smith]

I want to create color coded floor plans (to show the various program spaces) and I am trying using filled regions with colors set to "transparent" but I can't get the floor plan to show through the filled region, even though it's set to transparent and I have "sent it to back or sent it backward"..
I was having this problem the other day, where a solid fill that was set to transparent wasn't showing the model lines underneath.
I sent it off to Autodesk support, and the reply was that it was a bug, and was going to be fixed for the next release.

If I didn't want model linework showing through, I would have set it to Opaque.

[david@stearnsarchitecture]

I really hope you are right since it would fulfill one of my top wishlist items for 3 years. But I am less hopeful, because the opaque / transparent value belongs to a parmeter called "Background", which changes the way fill patterns behave, but has no effect if it's set to Solid fill. Revit is set up so all 2D objects sit on top of the model view. The Front/Back controls work only in relation to other 2D objects, not model objects.

[jwilhelm]

Well this is real disappointing, my boss has requested that areas of the exterior elevations be shaded to indicate depth beyond, a typical technique in this office,
now I have to tell him its not possible in Revit. great

[Chad Smith]

Yeah, we use a gray filled region to show the extent of landscaping.

[iru69]

Well this is real disappointing, my boss has requested that areas of the exterior elevations be shaded to indicate depth beyond, a typical technique in this office,
now I have to tell him its not possible in Revit. great
I know it's not what we want, but as has been noted before, maybe the next best thing is to use a filled region with a 1/64" diagonal hatch w/ transparent background (or similar). Not as sharp as true transparency, but will have to do until this is adequately addressed in a future release.

[Martin P]

Exactly Leonid!

Why are you not using Color Fills??? This exercise of coloring the plans would have taken all of 5 seconds and two clicks using Color Fills, AND it would have created a legend for you too, on the fly.

Filled Regions is NOT the tool to do what you are trying to do. Look up color fills in the Help menu...you'll be shocked at how easy it is.


Sometimes though the wall joins etc are a pain and you end up wasting time to fix them - (and it only works in plans)

[Alvin_Alejandro]

In my case I used fill region as polyline in autocad to show the bold out line of the object but the problem right now in V8.1 even if NO PATTERN assigned & TRANSPARENT is on the object under it does not show...unexpected. Grr...

[jarkko.rauvanlahti]

Someone might correct if I'm wrong, but it seems like users wanting transparent filled region aren't speaking the same language with the programmers.

If one asks an transparent filled region from programmer he probably gives you back closed polyline, because that what's the final result is unless you use % of transparency. So what we users really are wanting is actually color filled region that can also be laid under plan or elevations 2d lines not just over the top. I'm I right?

For me the color fill and room and area schedules work fine most of the times, only one major problem has been demolished walls that will show white fill inside. Not very nice effect on colored plans.

[Martin P]

Thats correct, its basically like solid fill that will go "behind" lines - ie transparent. There is no real arguement against getting this function no matter what options there are within revit for room area schedules.


It is a simplistic view to take that the only time anybody would possibly ever want to use a transparent solid coloured fill - is to represent a room on plan. Lots of other uses..


Its this sort of subject that has been keeping me away from AUGI more recently, I find I am becoming too frustrated with this type of thing to post without starting to rant all the time. Its clearly a tool that is missing from the toolbox - no explanations are required, just get it in the toolbox !!! - thus the frustration, release 8.1 - I can do a seashell shaped building but I still cant to this?? anyway I feel myself starting to rant a bit so I am going back into my shell again......

[janunson]

I am curious to understand why users are inclined to use filled regions instead of colorfill areas.

Here's an instance where color fills don't work correctly because they exist beyond the model instead of semi-transparently at the cut plane -
I need to show the gymnasium floor (a level below in this plan) so i have the view depth set deeper, but now because the floors are hidden to show the color fills, i see all the footings as well.

[ejburrell67787]

Well I have been using transparent filled regions to draw flat boundaries for conveyance plans. (More control than just lines.) This worked fine in Revit 8 ... but they are coming out opaque in 8.1...

Note that the filled region with the "sand" pattern is transparent!!

This must be a bug?

I guess I'll have to just do lines in the meantime unless anyone has another suggestion?! :(

[ejburrell67787]

And here is an image of the properties of the transparent filled region in Revit 8.0 for comparison... ie exactly the same. :?