Mirroring a whole model

[Tom Weir]

Hi all,
I am designing a four story concrete tilt-up office building. We are almost through with the design, and it has gone very well with Revit. But due to site considerations I was told today that we have to mirror image the whole building.
I created in-place families for the panels and doubt they will mirror correctly.
But how can I get into a view of the whole model and use the mirror command and know that I am perfectly perpendicular to the plane in order to mirror correctly.
I am sittin' herer scratchin' my head over this one hoping somebody might have some ideas. Otherwise I'll write it out to Autocad and mirror it there.

Thanks and have a great day.

Tom Weir
Los Angeles

[jwilhelm]

I had to do that recently, the problem currently with mirroring an entire project is that you can't select everything from a single view. What I did was place a reference line at the axis of the mirror, this will display on all levels, then I mirrored each level independently. I suppose you might be able to select everything from a 3dview then switch to a plan view to do the mirror.

[jbalding48677]

We were able to mirror an entire project mid-stream in schematic design. We had a plan and for the most part it worked. Here it is (sorry for the delay, I had intended on posting but...)

The theory is that you need to grab all elements in one shot, theory any way.

1. Because we knew that annotation would be an issue we opened all views that contained room tags, and delete them all except the overall floor plans, thus maintaining the room information

2. closed all windows/views

3. Reopened all views with annotation

4. went to the 3d view and turned on all visibility categories (model, annotation, worksets etc.)

5. Grabbed the entire model

6. Ctrl+tabbed through the remaining views and added all of the annotation to the selection.

7. Selected a mirror line, centerline of the building and BOOM... Nothing... Didn't work. Tried again with a different mirror line and BOOM... Nothing... Didn't work. Tried one more time with a mirror line some 5'-0" off to the right side of the building and left the copy icon on and Badda Bing Badda Boom, we had a copy.

8. Went through the process of deleting all of the original model, annotation etc.

9. Moved the mirrored version back into place (to the left the building width + 10'-0").

Now there were some notes generated by the folks that pulled this off (Randy Sharp and Nile Warwick)

A. Could not mirror without a copy
B. Ground floor, moving grids got floor invalid sketch, floor deleted and recreated
C. Second floor - plan regions did not mirror
D. Second floor - some wall joins needed clean up, room tags affected.
E. Railing on ground floor disassociated
F. Room separation lines in some areas did not work, needed clean up.
G. Room tags created in options conflicted, required required removing the room and reassigning.

One more thing, we created view templates for all of the view types so we could just "turn everything on before the flip.

This may not work in every case, but it worked for us. :)

[Yman]

Just another little tip. I made a group of what I was selecting to mirror. And then went thru all necessary views and then added to the group of little things I missed overall. When you go to mirror just select the group and then ungroup it. Everything remains highlighted and then you can do what you need to do.

I was pretty successful at mirroring a building. I noticed that it worked very well if you make sure you don't select the elevation/ section tags.

Y

[SkiSouth]

Things locked to reference planes 90 degrees to your mirror will not work. (like roof planes). There will be issues, but the key as per Jim's comments. Go to your plan view, draw a mirror line (model line type) outside your total project parameters. Go to your 3d View and turn all on, select all and mirror. If you haven't annotated, it will go smoothly (watch out for the reference plane items though)...

[jbalding48677]

Just another little tip. I made a group of what I was selecting to mirror. And then went thru all necessary views and then added to the group of little things I missed overall. When you go to mirror just select the group and then ungroup it. Everything remains highlighted and then you can do what you need to do.

I was pretty successful at mirroring a building. I noticed that it worked very well if you make sure you don't select the elevation/ section tags.

Y

Good tip YMan, I believe the did group some of the elements but not the entire thing. Thanks for the reminder.

[Tom Weir]

Greetings,
Thanks for those comprehensive replies. I blew out my shoulder exercising a few days back and am struggling at the moment to use my other hand to draft with, (always a fun exercise), so have not had a chance to actually try it, but your responses give me hope that I can do it.

Thanks and have a great day....

Tom Weir
Los Angeles