Building Sections . . . I hate them!

[Sweetshelby]

I am currently working on a large condo with 22 stories and am now working on building sections, which I hate. Can anyone give me some advice on how you do building sections in your office? We have been using Revit for over 5 years but I have never been happy with the way we do sections. How do you get floors, walls, roofs to all look correct without lots of time consuming work? We have typically used masking regions to cover up and make things look correct but this sucks when a change is made. This building is so large I just wanted to see if there were any better ideas before I wasted tons of hours on it.

Any suggestions would be welcome!

Thanks,

[Phil Read]

I'd recommend that you over-ride the view so that everything you want in the cut plane is solid fill and the color black (could be just core building elements - or everything).

This is fine for coarse detail or overall building sections.

This will clearly show what is being cut and what isn't. Seems a lot more clear than relying on a heavier line weight. And is much clearer when you print 1/2 sized sets.

.02

Phil

[Sweetshelby]

Thanks Phil. By the way I took a class with you when you came to Atlanta, loved it.

Yes we have done this before some partners in the office were ok with it and others hated it so it all depends on who you are working for at the time. I will try it again and see what happens.

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Jennifer,
exactly what aspect of the Revit generated section aren't you happy with? I've found that for overall building sections (say 1:50 scale or 1/4" and greater) Revit can generate about 90% of the linework needed to do the job. Add some insulation hatching, a few detail components and you're off to the races.
For larger scales creating callouts with additional detail components and annotation does the trick.
It's a matter of getting your assemblies defined correctly so most of the clean up is done by Revit. Becaue Revit sections are too 'real' for some they can show too many lines sometimes. To reduce that line 'clutter' you can limit the depth of sections so you aren't seeing too deep into the view.
Can you post an example of one of the sections your managers have issues with?

[Sweetshelby]

Actually I showed him the one I did by doing Phil's suggestion and my manager was pretty happy with it. Yes there were a few to many lines in some instances and I had to do some filled regions for the roof but, all in all, it was ok. I guess I was just stressing because of past experience.

We have linked in unit plans and I had to do a lot of turning off to get rid of all the things they did not want to see. But other than that no so bad. I just really wanted to hear what others out there were doing to make sure I was not making things more difficult than they needed to be.

Thanks