Building Sections

[jgray]

I'm starting to work on my building sections and i'm just not really pleased with what Revit make automatically. It's almost 100% the same as what ADT made, your section/elevation is only as good as your model. Problem is that the detail level and what needs to be seen in a section there's no way your going to model that exactly, (seat cuts in rafters, individual ceiling tiles and hangers, vapor barriers and s much more). How are the lot of you doing your building sections and wall sections. I can see wall sections just doing as a drafting view and creating from scratch in revit. I've done a few of them and they look great. But what of wall sections, some can get quite large. What's everyone doing........

Thanks everyone,
John Gray

[Justin Marchiel]

i tend to only draft detail sections. i find that the wall section from the building section is actaully really good compared to adt. you just have to add some detail componants to the wall section such as plates, vb, etc. a lot of the detail componants will contain a filled region that will blank out the model. so there is some work to get the wall section to view correctly, but it is still much faster than starting from scratch. and at least you know that you are building on the model and if something changes the wall section will look off and aleart you that something is wrong...not possible with drafted views.

Justin

[sbrown]

Once you learn how to add detail components to your wall sweeps you can have very accurate walls sections. If not, I never would recommend doing drafting views for wall sections. If your walls sections look that bad your doing something wrong.

[jgray]

Would anyone be willing to post a sections so i can see what CD quality sections you are creating?

[jcoe]

This is a wall section sheet I have started for a project I am working on. This sheet has only taken me about 6 hours to develop because I spent a lot of time developing the model and model components. With a little finesse, cut profiles, and detail components, Revit sections can look awesome.

[kshawks]

We use the section cuts with minor detail components to punch them up a little, then we use call out details for specific detail areas on the wall section. At first I was a little frustrated with the initial detail quality; however after using the program a little longer I have learned how to cut wall sections more effectively.

[Rols]

I've had a few users who thought that wall sections in Revit should be "automatic" just like everything else. Fact is, wall sections and details require 2d drafting, which is still easier in Revit than in Autocad. The trick is to not show too much detail in the wall sections. We'll just add masonry, insulation and structure in the wall sections and then let the details take it from there.

Don't fall into the old Autocad trap of inserting your detail drawings into your wall sections. You just end up with a ink blot that you have to update every time the detail changes.

[Adam Mac]

We use the section cuts with minor detail components to punch them up a little, then we use call out details for specific detail areas on the wall section.

Me too.... then call-up details of those and use detail components to the max. to finish the details.

Bewdiful!

[greg.mcdowell]

I've talked with the contractors who have built some of our work about our drawings and what we could do to improve things... aside from the "obvious" bit about better coordination within the drawings and (more importantly perhaps) the specifications, they have all suggested that more building sections would be helpful and that the wall sections we provided weren't nearly as useful as we make them out to be.

From our conversations it seemed to me that, for the most part, we could skip the wall sections and go straight to details. Our project are usually pretty complicated spatially and the building sections do a lot more to explain the design than the wall sections do.

The reason I mention this is that if we stop for a minute and think about what a wall section at 3/4", 1" or whatever is really telling us when compared with smaller building sections at 1/4" or even 1/8" in some cases we might not need to worry about them as much. If the details can be keyed into the small scale sections and if these sections look okay straight out of Revit then we forgo all the potentially unnecessary duplication of work that comes from producing detailed versions of wall sections.

I'm not sure I'm being very clear here but my hope is that we can start to rethink our documentation efforts in the same way we rethink our design process as a result of BIM and Revit.