Brick Detailing in Wall Sections

[chadr]

When cutting wall sections, is there anyway that revit knows the brick coursing. It is a little frustrating when you go to the effort to add information to a wall and then when you cut a section it still has no detail. We are working with hosting additional information in the wall such as a parapet condition or head/sill condition as a detail reference that shows when you cut sections but we have not been able to find out a way to get the brick to show accurately without having to draw it each time. Even the multiple detail command is not accurate for coursing. Does anyone have any tips or tricks to avoid adding the brick to each wall section or detail as it would be nice if it would travel from the wall to the section to the detail. Any help or assistance anyone could give me is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Chad

[ron.sanpedro]

When cutting wall sections, is there anyway that revit knows the brick coursing. It is a little frustrating when you go to the effort to add information to a wall and then when you cut a section it still has no detail. We are working with hosting additional information in the wall such as a parapet condition or head/sill condition as a detail reference that shows when you cut sections but we have not been able to find out a way to get the brick to show accurately without having to draw it each time. Even the multiple detail command is not accurate for coursing. Does anyone have any tips or tricks to avoid adding the brick to each wall section or detail as it would be nice if it would travel from the wall to the section to the detail. Any help or assistance anyone could give me is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Chad

Create a Reference Plane and name it Brick Coursing or some such. Now you can align the material hatch in the walls to this, and also reference it in sections and details. It also gives you ammo to argue against Drafted Views, which can not show the this kind of model reference.
Also, you can control the extents of the Ref Plane, So you might have a North and a South Brick Coursing, and you don't want to see the South one when working on the North elevation, or a Section or Detail of the North wall. It is pretty easy to limit the Ref Plane to just the area needed.

Best,
Gordon

[sbrown]

I'm not sure why the repeating detail is not accurate. I just set the coursing to 2.667" and it courses out to 8" every 3 bricks. However I take the approach I just add mortar joints not bricks. You can embed detail components into profiles so you could add a sweep containing a profile that had detail components loaded and arrayed with a qty parameter so based on the height of the wall it would add more joints(note, not modeled but detail components.

[adb]

Chadr,

That leads you to one of the biggest questions dealing with Revit. "How much do I model in order to get accurate details?"

As far as brick coursing.....no way. Even if you figured out a way to quickly model bricks in your wall you would not want to do that. Your model would be too huge to manage. This applies to many other types of objects that people feel the need to model but is really unnecessary.

Someone on this forum that is smarter than I may have come up with a quick way of detailing bricks and getting the coursing right but I think you will find that you will still be detailing in 2D.

As far as your comment that "Even the multiple detail command is not accurate for coursing" you can edit the detail component to whatever dimension you need to course.

[adb]

Gordon,

So do you create different hatch patterns for each size of brick? I must admit I have thought about this but have not taken the initiative to try it.

Thanks.

[chadr]

Everyone.

Thank you for your replies. They have all been very helpful. I did think on the load on the model size if I were to add the coursing to the model and I guess I am trying to find the middle ground. One where I have information in the wall that travels minimizing the amount of info I have to add in a detail and not loading the walls with so much info the model starts to push back with problems. I am interested in Gordon's method but I am still a little confused. Where would I create the reference planes. If you could walk me through it that would greatly be appreciated.

Thanks for your time and help in advance.

Chad

[ron.sanpedro]

Everyone.

Thank you for your replies. They have all been very helpful. I did think on the load on the model size if I were to add the coursing to the model and I guess I am trying to find the middle ground. One where I have information in the wall that travels minimizing the amount of info I have to add in a detail and not loading the walls with so much info the model starts to push back with problems. I am interested in Gordon's method but I am still a little confused. Where would I create the reference planes. If you could walk me through it that would greatly be appreciated.

Thanks for your time and help in advance.

Chad

The main issue is you are NOT showing every course, just setting a reference for the first course (or whatever course governs, I guess). So the process looks like this, assuming a single start point for all coursing.
Go to an Elevation where you need to set your coursing. Add a Ref Plane, locate it as needed and name it appropriately. Now go to a perpendicular elevation, and you will see that the ref plane is there, and covers the whole elevation. You can now do an align of the hatch in all your walls so as to start at this Ref Plane. Now go to a Wall Section. You will see that the Ref Plane is there also, and you can use an appropriate Repeating Detail, and you have an accurate start point. If you lock your hatch and repeating detail, then a change in the Ref Level is tracked. If the coursing is likely to change a lot, it might be worth doing the locks. If you are setting the coursing and leaving it, I wouldn't bother locking.

So you are not 3D modeling the coursing, but you are using the "model" to manage the different 2D representations of the coursing.

Hope that helps.

Gordon

[chadr]

Gordon,

Thanks. That makes sense. I will do that when I set up any sweeps that I may have so they will align with my coursing. Then in the section I will add the mortar joints and everything should look great.

Thanks to you and everyone else you replied to this post.

Chad