Joining walls is a big trouble sometimes

[dpasa]

I don't know what you people do but I have to check 2-3 times my model for bad wall joins. I think this is a big problem especially when I have walls of different height and/or walls having some base offset. I see one wall penetrating the other, another wall goes back a little and anyway I think it is a waste of time trying to explain because you all have this kind of experience.

The Edit Wall Joins tool is a joke, sometimes it freezes my PC for 30sec and sometimes I get the message that there are more than 50 ways to join 3 walls.

I would very much appreciate some info on this.
Thank you in advance.

P.S. I hope we see some improvement for the next release, even in 10.1 if it is too late now.

[rjcrowther]

Yes it can be a problem.

I was having similar problems but not as bad. My solution was to go through my wall styles and be very definite about the function of the wall layers (Structure[1], Finish 1 [4], etc) and have the core where I want it. Now I still get some bad joins but the edit wall joins is more successful and if I pull a wall away from the junction and reconnect, it usually heals itself nicely.

Another thing I do is to draw the walls in plan all at the same height and then come back and adjust for different heights.

I felt my problem at the time was to make too many wall styles on the fly and they had become a bit disorganised.

I don't know if there is anything in this for you but it has been my experience.

Rob

PS. When all else fails, there is always disallow joins and cover the seam line up with a filled region. Not the correct way but it is a workaround that suits me

[dpasa]

Thank you very much for your quick answer, I didn't think of checking my wall styles.
Making all walls the same height can sometimes be better but it can create some mistakes and it is not a decent way because you have to open many prop dialogs and check everything twice.

I hope AutoDesk will be more serious about developping Revit and fixing these silly problems since there is a complete Revit suite now... Let's see Revit 10. Although I must say I can't be very optimistic.

By the way, I vote for disallow joins... The quickest method. Since I want it for walls of different height, the line should be there anyway, so it works fine.

[twiceroadsfool]

The only times ive ever not had success with the Edit Wall Joins all fall in to one of the following catagories:

I have overlapping walls that need to be Joined or Cut from one another.

I have duplicate instances of the same wall in the same place.

Someone used Edit Profile to edit a wall end/join, and its interfering with the wall join.

Can you slim down a model where this is a particular issue so that someone can take a look at some of these particular joins? Because i dont seem to be experiencing the same issue, and mi curious what the joins look like vs. what they should.

[dbaldacchino]

Have you guys worked with ADT at all? Talk about wall join nightmares!! Revit is a blessing. Most of the time, if your walls are layered correctly, you'll have a great experience. If the join isn't working, most of the time it's a matter of dragging the ends away and using the trim command to "fillet" the ends and they work fine.

One common case where joins mess up is due to walls with edited elevation profiles. Another common one is when you have 3 or more wall types trying to clean at a join, with some really short wall segments. My last resort is typically to disallow the join and leave a line or use Join Geometry.

[rjcrowther]

Have you guys worked with ADT at all? Talk about wall join nightmares!! Revit is a blessing.
Yes, that's part of the reason I am a Revit user and not an ADT user - another is all of those files and X-refs. (constructs, etc, etc)

[Wes Macaulay]

The secret is simple: disable the wall joins in areas where they are causing trouble. That's been discussed a fair amount around here. Where there is nothing to interfere with a wall join between two walls, you never have any trouble, but add a corner of a floor object above or below, or bring a third wall into the join and life goes downhill fast. Disabling joins and using Join Geometry to clean up kills this problem dead.

[dpasa]

Yes, that's part of the reason I am a Revit user and not an ADT user - another is all of those files and X-refs. (constructs, etc, etc)

I have tried twice to learn ADT, and I was lucky to see a revit demo...It changed my way of working and thinking... I think Revit can make all other CAD and BIM software disappear with a little more attention from AutoDesk. I have never thought that the Revit's dev team can't make Revit better... I think it is a company's policy, to keep subscriptions for ever, to add 1-2 improvements per release so that we get the perfect Revit rel. 1357 with our retirement...
Anyway, it's been a while since I have posted a detailed top priority wishlist and I think we should see some of them in Revit 10 or 11.

Anyway, about wall joins, as Wes said, the best solution is "disallow joins".

[twiceroadsfool]

I cant say i agree with that solution, except for at particular areas, which (i think) is what Wes was saying. He's not disallowing joins across the board, but at particular joins where the walls are not behaving due to a complex arrangement.

Id go absoultely crazy if i had all of my wall joins turned off. I reiterate, id be looking for the cause of WHY your walls arent joining very well, because we dont have many problems with wall joins that arent our own fault.

I wont comment on the Revit development team bashing, as i think its a biproduct of a frustrated Revit user working weekends, lol...

[Wes Macaulay]

That's correct Aaron -- there's always a reason wall joins are going awry. Disabling wall joins is good practice for those areas where wall joins are a problem or you know in advance that if you don't disable a certain wall from joining, it WILL mess things up.

[dpasa]

I wont comment on the Revit development team bashing, as i think its a biproduct of a frustrated Revit user working weekends, lol...

I apologize if what I said is not very polite, I am working weekends but this is not the main reason...I stand to what I said... Revit is the best CAD/BIM app I have seen and I just don't understand why all this delay for serious improvement.

[twiceroadsfool]

Not to derail your thread looking for information, but that is a complaint that i read a lot on here, and i wonder if people think about the consequences of their demands?

While you may wish the reveal tool automatically assumed you wanted it to cut all four sides of a wall, how many of the users here (myseld included, for sure) whould be up in arms if Revit assumed such a thing? Id be going ballistic, complaining that "I wouldnt want a reveal through EIFS cutting through my stud layer! Geez developers, what are you thinking!?"

The same is true for a lot of the items weve asked for. While some of them may be minor, i think we have tunnel vision in how WE work and the things we ask for. Ive only been a Revit user since 8.1, and already i think the improvements weve been given are significant.

Thats also discounting all of the behind the scenes changes that take place. They may not be sexy and may not have curb appeal, but a good deal of them are making my life easier (file linking, faster STC times), so im happy to take what i can get. Because ive worked with ArchiCAD, Vectorworks, and Gehrys Digital Project.. All for a decent amount of time. Ill take the seemingly slow development of this product any day of the week and twice on sunday, but i understand that may just be my own opinion. ;)

[dpasa]

Not to derail your thread looking for information, but that is a complaint that i read a lot on here, and i wonder if people think about the consequences of their demands?

While you may wish the reveal tool automatically assumed you wanted it to cut all four sides of a wall, how many of the users here (myseld included, for sure) whould be up in arms if Revit assumed such a thing?

I guess I didn't explain it correctly...
I don't want the sweep to automatically cut all four sides at once, I just want to be able to continue with the sweep without stopping to change sweep turns etc... As I said before, this would be the 99% of the cases. If the wall wraping was with a different material than the currently cutting material, then the sweep should stop and give a message for this.
(Still not sure I am saying this right)

[J. Grouchy]

If the join isn't working, most of the time it's a matter of dragging the ends away and using the trim command to "fillet" the ends and they work fine.


The secret is simple: disable the wall joins in areas where they are causing trouble. That's been discussed a fair amount around here. Where there is nothing to interfere with a wall join between two walls, you never have any trouble, but add a corner of a floor object above or below, or bring a third wall into the join and life goes downhill fast. Disabling joins and using Join Geometry to clean up kills this problem dead.

I've tried pulling, filleting, trimming, disallowing, re-layering...everything under the sun...but a simple joint between three walls that should provide very obvious results in Revit has become a monumental undertaking, giving me every possible permutation of wall joint conditions EXCEPT for the correct one (even giving me physically impossible wall joint conditions) and even creating problems elsewhere in the model!! I'd like to blame the guy who originally created the model that I inherited...but it really IS a Revit problem. I want to see a change that allows user definition of wall joins in three dimensions...none of this 'edit cut profile' nonsense I've ended up resorting to just to get this out the door.

I can appreciate the amount of memory and calculative power this stuff must require, but it's a critical element of BIM and accuracy in a set of drawings...so it should be a major focus in my opinion. I'm frankly tired of always having to worry whether some wall intersection is going to stay as it should. There have been way too many instances of everything looking fine and then when I print it out I find mistakes that have magically appeared that need to be corrected so as not to make us who produce the drawings look like fools.

I honestly love Revit and the amount of work gone into creating it...but I feel the need to vent my frustrations about something that has ALWAYS been an issue. The "Edit Wall Joins" tool is a joke and sometimes doesn't work at all. It's not something I can overlook, either. I have at least one major wall join catastrophe per project, it seems. We ain't building the Bilbao Guggenheim here!

[Wes Macaulay]

Don't suppose you could share the model? I would love to see this... PM me and I can send along FTP information.

Cheers

[ford347]

Hey guys....

I have had pretty good luck with the wall join tool. I have experienced quite a few problems myself, but most of them can be taken care of with wall joins or moving the ends of walls around for different results. I did however run into one yesterday in my current file that is really messing with me. These houses I'm working on right now are models for a residential track project, so I have permanent design options in them. This particular situation was for a fireplace in an exterior wall. If you look at the attached jpegs, you'll see the condition. To get it to look this good took me over an hour. Both of the wall joins on the left and right were terrible. My stucco walls have wraps for the exterior ends and they simply would not join, it continued to show the wraps at the ends of the stucco walls. The walls adjacent the fireplace which represent the exterior are not part of the design option because they don't need to be. I couldn't really tell you how I even got it to the point shown here in the pictures because I went round and round with them. So I could see needing some improvement with wall joins across design options, that would be helpful.

Josh

[jbdesign]

Josh,

I ran through your fireplace design option senario and this is what I came up with. It seems that if you section the wall for the area of design option a little larger than the fireplace (enough room for the cleanups) it seems to work pretty well with auto joins. Check it out.

Usually, when I run up against a cleanup problem or anything that I need to "noodle out", I jump to an R&D file and use standard elements to see if I can isolate it and work it out. Often times it's something else getting in the way.

Wes, the Disallow Join + Join Geometry is a huge help. I've beat my head against the keyboard many times on that one. Thanks.

Jeff

[olgabogdan]

When everything else failed, I split the wall at the corners, erased the corner portion and then redrew the missing walls (with a chain) at same corner. This seems to fix the problem.

[dpasa]

When everything else failed, I split the wall at the corners, erased the corner portion and then redrew the missing walls (with a chain) at same corner. This seems to fix the problem.

Yes, that works most of the time... But, always with some use of bad language.
I feel really stupid tolerating this 1990 kind of modeling (erase this, then do that and then erase that too and then take the first and ...) for a 2007 application and I get very ungry to see that the big improvement between 9,0 and 9.1 was the detail library which by the way I have never used.

[twiceroadsfool]

At the risk of coming off as a jerk, im wondering if a lot of your frustrations are user based? I found wall hoins to be a very big hassle until i got to "understand" how the "hierarchy" of the wall joins works.

But instead of trying to resolve the issues at hand, you keep coming back and just saying the product itself isnt sufficient for your needs. 1990 Modeling techniques? Yeah, i remember polyline extrusions and sweeps for door handles. If youre having THAT much trouble modeling with Revit, id say something is wrong...

But not everyone is having the same difficulties with wall joins as the couple of you that are, so it obviously cant be an issue with the software. :shrug:

[dbaldacchino]

You'll experience trouble if you edit the elevation profile of a wall or if the walls have the layers in section unlock edso you can stretch them up or down, or when you have walls with different top and bottom constraints. Other than that, one pretty much forgets how to join walls because it's pretty dang easy and transparent.

[twiceroadsfool]

You'll experience trouble if you edit the elevation profile of a wall or if the walls have the layers in section unlock edso you can stretch them up or down, or when you have walls with different top and bottom constraints. Other than that, one pretty much forgets how to join walls because it's pretty dang easy and transparent.


That ill concede. When ive editied the profile to show an arch above, and two walls are joining together right at the endge of that edited sketch, it tends to shift the sketck or slide it over or make it not symmetrical. But again, a simple edit wall joins, or manipulate the hierarchy an leave a couple of ends unjoining, and a few minutes later im on my way.

I understand for complex joins its not always idea, but i just cant see it as the "archiac lousy tool" a couple of people make it out to be. :::shrug:::

[J. Grouchy]

Don't suppose you could share the model? I would love to see this... PM me and I can send along FTP information.

Cheers
Here's a clipped file demonstrating the problem. One area is a framed out brick pilaster on a CMU wall and the other is a close joint between walls. In the former condition it shows correctly until I try bringing in the face of the pilaster to the proper depth. I've tried various methods of using end-wraps and creating new wall types to give me the proper effect, but nothing has worked to my satisfaction. In the latter condition I just can't get all the layers to clean up and join correctly...sometimes I get physically impossible results when using the Edit Wall Join tool.

These aren't so strange to build, but they are the most recent examples of the problem I've been dealing with. I've also had difficulty with stacked wall-types not joining correctly in typical right-angle condition (i.e. corners of the building)...but these tend to correct using the edit wall join tool (though they do tend to somehow 'come undone' occasionally and I have to go back and fix it).

[ericl]

Here's a clipped file demonstrating the problem. One area is a framed out brick pilaster on a CMU wall and the other is a close joint between walls.

Attached is your file modified to what I think you are after. This misjoining of complex walls is a constant complaint at my firm about Revit.

When corners will not automatically join properly, you need to help Revit along. You do this by selecting the wall (or walls in your case), and right-click the wall end control and then click Disallow Join, relocate the geometry if needed, and then use the Join Geometry to clean up the joint

In both your examples when you disallow the joining on the problem walls, you will see that the walls overlap oddly. Move the end of the wall to where they only overlap what you want to join. You may have to setup a few reference lines to get the end of a wall to the correct location because you want to align it with a core or a substrate and not a face. Selecting the walls in the attached example will show you where I did this. Once the end of the wall is located correctly (you will find there is only one location that really works, though it is not always consistent from joint to joint) use the Join Geometry (not Allow Join) to clean up the joint.

When you get the wall to join properly, looking correct in the 3D model, you may get a few artifacts leftover in the wall sections and the plans. A judicial use of the Linework command, using invisible lines, will fix this. You may end up putting in a drafting line or two because of an extension to a line you vanished needs to be partly drawn.

Please note all you drafting purists that Revit is meant to work this way. It is not AutoCAD. Get the geometry to work the way you want to look in the 3D model and then clean up the 2D drafting Revit creates for you; not the other way around.