Creating Custom Wall Elevations with Separate Decorative Layers for Flexible Design Control in Revit

All right, for this next part here, what I want to do is I'm just going to clean this up a little bit because I want to create a just one wall elevation that we could use that will have the different methods that we're talking about here. So I'm going to go ahead and just kind of slide this door over. I really just want to have a few different sections of wall that we could work with.

So I'm just going to grab that middle piece and kind of drag this over here. I'm actually going to do that in plan so I can see it a little better. And the next thing we'll do is we'll draw just the basic stud wall, which was the base for this one.

And I'm just using the keyboard shortcut WA for wall. I'll pick the type and I'm just going to align them here. And you'll notice they're not lined up perfectly because they're center to center.

And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to align the drywall layers. And so what we're seeing here, that's our base. And then on this side, that's our tile and our base.

And we're going to add this layer, the decorative layer, as a separate wall. And then we'll talk about some of the things that make this a good method or a bad method. So let's pop over to our 3D view again.

And from here, which is this is our default 3D view, I'm just going to go ahead and use CS, which is create similar, to make this wall again. And I'm going to use this one as essentially the wall I'm going to create the new wall with because I don't want to go through the process of recreating all this stuff. If I go in and I say edit type and duplicate, this will make a new wall for me.

And so I'm going to just call this one tile and then pattern one. And so it's really important, edit type duplicate, because if you do rename, you're just going to rename this one. And we don't want to do that.

And so I can always double check because I can see here, I've got the tile one side still there. And then tile pattern here. And then I'll go through and I'm going to remove the stuff that I don't need.

We don't need the interior finish. So I can hit delete on that one. Every time I do this, I'm going to get this error or warning saying like, hey, you're removing references because it's dimensioning it all the way across these layers.

And so we'll just get used to it. It's not that big of a deal. I'm going to move these layers up into the core boundary because we always have to have something within there.

And then layers two and three can be deleted. And so I'll go ahead and delete those same issues, right? We're going to see that every time. And then I can go into my sweeps.

And I'm going to get rid of the exterior side sweep. So this wall looks kind of crazy right now. But I can go in and I can remove the exterior side sweeps just by clicking on it and hitting delete.

Okay. And so this is what we end up with. It's the same tile pattern that we had before, but now it's a separate piece.

And I'll hit OK and OK again. And so now this wall can be added as part of this one, but there's still separate elements. And so some of the benefits that we see here, if I needed to isolate, say, this wall from the other pieces within the project based on the work set, I could.

I don't think that's necessary in every case, but it's also a good option to have. And then I can place it essentially wherever I want. If I were to just use the align tool and line these things up so I can go from wall to wall here, you can see now I've got essentially the same wall when I go to 3D, but it's a separate piece from that one.

And so if we do our test, which is placing the toilet and placing the door, we can see what those look like and how they can be different. And so I'll go to level one here. I'm going to go ahead and move this guy pretty much to the end.

And then we'll add a door. It doesn't have to be that door. It could be any door.

It doesn't really matter. They'll all act the same. I do want them to be the same frame type, so I'll change this so it's not masonry frame.

And then I'll add the toilet here. And so there's one difference that we can see already, and that has to do with the door. And that's because I added the door to this host wall, but it didn't cut this one here.

And so if we're going to use this method, one thing that we need to do is we need to use join to join the geometry. And this is from the modify tab. And so I'll pick my primary wall and then my tile wall.

And when those two are joined together, it'll respect the opening like you see here. Now if I look at it in 3D again, it's essentially the same thing. The toilet is hosted to the wall.

The door is cut through the wall, and everything looks good. Now just like I said before, we're going to look at everything, right? If I were to try to move this, if I move this wall say two feet back, you see what happens here? That wall is going to stay behind. And so one thing that we want to do is we want to make sure that we use the tool align and lock.

And so when we added this wall the first time, when we aligned it like that, what we really wanted to do was align it here and then lock that constraint. And by doing that, now these walls can move around, and you can see it doesn't separate from itself. The other part that we looked at here is if I had more of these walls, so let's say I had the same thing going across this way here, and I wanted more of the tile wall to go this way.

See I can have it turn the corner, and I can do the same thing here with this one. The one thing I will do though is I will want to set this to finish face interior so that it's aligned. Because the real scenario, let's just say if we're drawing this wall, I'm just going to draw a rectangle and make sure everything's facing the right way.

It looks like it is. But the real scenario would be I'm trying to add tile to a room that we have here. And so when I want to add this wall again using that create similar tool, wall center line is not going to be the option I want.

And so in this case, I'll set it to whichever location line makes the most sense. And so if I put it on finish face exterior, then what we're looking at is essentially the face of the exterior side here. So that would expose the interior to the inside of our building.

And so when I draw this wall on the inside using finish face exterior, you can see it's setting itself up to align it to the finish face of the exterior. Whether it's facing the right way or not is a different thing, but we do see that it's being placed in the correct orientation. And so if I were to draw this wall all the way around on the inside here, you can see it's trying to find a different point here and it's just trying to align to the center line.

And so when you're drawing it, you want to make sure that you're setting it at the right point like that. And then if you have to reset like I just did there, not a big deal, but you do have to go back through and draw these things because when it tries to do the chain, it's going to try and line it up to the core boundary there. If you do end up with a case like here where we were before and I'm drawing it and it's facing the wrong way, all you got to do is hit spacebar and it'll flip to the other side and then you're in business.

And so that's essentially the same operation we have here. We have some issues with the priority there, but we can fix that. And so when I look at it now, I've got that same wall type effectively here, but they're all different pieces.

And so the other test that we had that we were looking at with the first option that we looked at was when we had a wall that that just went out and terminated that a wall end. And so I'll just kind of adjust this guy a little bit to match that condition. And what's great about it is if I wanted to have this wall, if I wanted to have this wall wrap the end, I'm in complete control of that.

And so I can set it again to that finished face exterior and I can have it wrap around the end and it'll look exactly the way I want it to. And so when I look at this wall in 3D, it actually does wrap the end with the height and everything exactly the way that I wanted it to in this case. And when we look at it in plan, you can see it's kind of odd.

And that's because this wall here, the four and seven eighths partition doesn't wrap at ends. And so if I say, go ahead and wrap the interior finish at the ends, then it'll do that. This one's joined right now.

But then I can have that option to have those wrap around the corner. Whereas before, when we were using this other one, we saw we could have the material wrap the corner, but we didn't have any control of the height. And so this is an option that I think is a pretty good one.

And it's actually the one we used on our project for the midterm because we were working with a linked model, which may not always be the case. You might be in a situation where you're in control of the whole thing. But if you're not, then you can always go in and add the veneer on top of the wall that's already there.

And you have the control of it in every aspect, meaning you can still have openings cut through it. You can set the height to whatever you want. And then you can also set your extents, meaning wrapping at ends or inserts or whatever it may be to every single scenario there.

And so the disadvantages are it can be a little clunky. It's like drawing walls twice. And then the other one is if anything's hosted to these walls, you just got to make sure it's hosted to the right element.

Okay. And so there's one more method we're going to take a look at in the next video.