Mastering Wall Sweeps in Revit for Seamless Baseboards and Crown Molding Installation

To add things like wall bases and crown moldings, what we're gonna do is use a tool in the architecture tab on the bottom side of the wall here. And if I click on that, you can see there's an option for wall sweep. And the way this works is when we go into the wall sweep command is we have different options.

So right now, the only type created is cornice. And what it'll do is it'll use the profile that's selected here. And right now, you can see it's just set to default, but these are all the profiles that are loaded into the project right now.

None of which are the ones we wanna use, so we'll have to load one in. But that setting of that profile is gonna determine the size and the shape of it. And then what we can do is we can apply it to the base of the walls that we have copy monitored over into our project.

So I'm gonna hit cancel here. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to our insert tab, and we're gonna use the load Autodesk family option. And from here, we're gonna browse to the category we wanna use.

And in this case, it's gonna be profiles. And you can see right across the top here, there's a handful of different base options that we can pick here. And any of these are gonna work.

And so I'll pick one, and you can pick a different one if you want, but I'm just gonna go with this base one option. And I'll click load. And so now nothing happened, right? We just loaded a profile in.

And so it's important here that we take a look at our wall sweep again. If I go to architecture, go to wall sweep, and then I can do edit type and duplicate. And I'll rename this just like we have all of our other types.

And so this is gonna be B-1 for base one, and I'll hit OK. And remember what I was saying about the profile, we need to make sure we set that correctly here. And so see how there are all the different options for base one that we have? We can pick the one we want.

And for this project, I'm gonna go ahead and pick the taller one, the seven and a quarter. And that's mostly so we can see it better. But if you're wanting to use a smaller one, you can definitely do that.

Everything looks good here, so I'm gonna hit OK. And now this is gonna apply itself kind of like a chain of things. And so you can see, because this wall here goes beyond our project into the next room, it's going to place it like that.

And what we can do is if I place it here, you can see the base gets added. And then we'll do the same thing going this way to kind of make a chain. And what's great about doing it this way is if it's a chain like this, it's one element.

We don't have to go around and pick multiple pieces if we need to modify it. And so I'm just using the shift and pressing down the mouse wheel to 3D orbit around here. And what I can do is I can hit this restart sweep here, and it'll kind of start the process over.

But before we do that, I wanna hit OK a couple times and then hit escape a couple times. And then I wanna go in, and I wanna show you how we can modify this. We don't want this piece to go way out over into that.

So you can see where the end is, there's a dot, and I can bring that in to trim it at this corner. So you can see, we can actually bring it all the way to the corner. And I could do the same thing over here, where instead of having a wall base that runs all the way back behind our kitchen cabinets, we could bring that across.

And I intentionally brought it a little further because I couldn't see that corner at that point in time. And then I can bring it over here. And so now I've got the base in a few of the different areas within our living room.

And there's still definitely a lot more to do here. But the next thing I wanted to do is, and this is kind of a minor thing, but if you remember when we created our floor, we gave it a quarter-inch offset. And so now if we leave our base down here, you can see that there's a kind of a hidden line on the edge there.

But if I change this to have an offset of a quarter inch, then it'll put it up so that we can see the bottom of the base there. And so now what I could do is I've got the base selected, and the contextual tab items here are to modify returns or to add or remove walls. If I go to add remove walls, then I can go in, and I can actually add walls to my sweep, and it'll let me continue to add these in there the same way where we were before.

And so I can go through and add the base, the rest of the base to these walls here. And I really do think that doing this in 3D with the section box on like that is the best way to do it. And then not worrying so much about how it's being placed initially, but really going in with kind of this bulk add to make sure that we get the sweep on all these different walls here.

And so in this case, we've already got it on that wall. And so I'll have to start the command over. And so I'll keep that in mind as I come back through, but I'll go ahead and finish out as much as I can on these walls here.

And that one, yeah, I got a couple more here and same thing, that one I'll have to come back and get. And I actually removed it from this guy cause I added it and removed it. But now I can see where I've got the base on these different pieces.

I'm gonna hit escape here to get out of that command. And then we'll go through and do those same edits that we were talking about just a second ago. So here, this wall goes way out.

This space goes way out pretty far here. So I'm gonna bring that one back so that we can have a more accurate, so that we can have more accurate takeoffs if we were to do that. And I can bring it across.

And so, I was talking about having the advantage of having it as one piece here. There are definitely advantages there, but there's also a downside. If you were working in like an elevation view, and then you said, oh man, I don't really want base there.

And then you just deleted it. Well, now if I do that on this project, I'm actually deleting my base everywhere. And so things like this, where this piece is on there because it's all part of that same wall, those are less than ideal.

I'd rather have it be separated by room. If I could. And it looks like there's a little extra piece right here.

And this one, oh, that goes through to the wall. So that's no problem there. And then we can add more to this guy here.

Okay, and then we can start that command again. So I can do wall sweep, making sure I'm using the base again. And then for this wall, now that we can put it back on that side there, I can add it here and then use a restart sweep so that I can add it for this small leg here.

And again, you can see it goes all the way through. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab that endpoint to bring it in because I don't need it to go all the way across. And so we've got a couple of pieces that had to be separated because it was necessary to have two pieces here so that we could have it on either side of the wall.

And so I'm sure you've noticed as we've come around at these locations where we have the base on both ends here, but we don't have it on the wall end. And for some reason, Revit doesn't recognize that as a plane for the wall. We have to do a sort of strange workaround here, and it shouldn't be a problem because it tends to work every time.

But what we'll do is if we pick this one, you can see this is one of the second ones that we created. We gotta make sure that we have the same, the base at the same height as well. And so you can see most of our base is at quarter inch, whereas some of our infill pieces that we added after the fact, they don't have that offset.

And so I wanna make sure those are gonna be aligned. And then what I'll do is I've turned on my thin lines so that it's a little easier to see all the line work, and I'm zoomed in pretty far here. But I'm gonna click this modify returns and if I click on it, I can leave it on a return at 90 here, and what it'll do is it'll turn the corner and that'll hit escape a couple times and then I'll pick this other one here and do the same thing where I can hit that return and it does it.

And now what we can see here is that we have a gap that we need to fill. And so I'm gonna use the align tool, which is keyboard shortcut AL or this button right here from the modify tab. And I'm gonna pick this face right here, and then I'll pick this face, and then it'll join them at the corner.

And so anywhere I have this condition, I'm gonna wanna go in and do the same thing. So I'm gonna make sure that my joints are all lined up. So this one is set to one inch for some reason.

So I'll set that at a quarter inch. This one's at a quarter inch, and we'll do the same thing. So I grabbed the base, do the modify, return, hit escape a couple of times to get out of the command, and then do it again.

And then we'll use our align tool from face-to-face to join those up. And that's how we get the base, and also when we get to it, the crown molding to go around those corners.