Mastering Wall Types in Revit: Using Sweeps, Merge Regions, and Profiles for Efficient Detailing

We're gonna keep working on this wall type, so I'm just gonna go ahead and select this one here, and we'll go to edit type. And there's a couple more settings that I wanted to point out to you here. So one of them is, let's say you've done this and you're like, you know, I really don't want that there anymore.

That's where we have this option for merge region. And so what I could do is I can click merge regions. And what you'll see is as I hover over the line, it's kind of pointing which way do I want it to merge? Do I wanna merge up or down? And so if I wanna merge down, I can click on that and it'll merge down, which in this case, it effectively got rid of our base.

This also works with layers vertically. This, not something that I do typically, and I haven't really found a good use for it yet, but essentially I could split and then merge a layer to have like, let's say I wanted a larger concrete base within here. I could do that by having the concrete span, like the whole width of the wall, and then still have things like the tile or finishes above it.

But that merge regions does come into play and it does work out pretty well for you. So the other one I wanted to look at is sweeps. And so this works just like what we were doing where we're applying the wall sweep to the walls for our base and our crown molding.

And so if I click on sweeps here, what we can see is we can add a profile and this will only let me add the ones that are within our project here, which are just a few. But if I were to add a profile to this, I can set where I want it to be. So essentially profile, what's the material, the distance from, meaning base of the top.

If I say base and zero, it's gonna sit at the bottom of the wall. And then it's orientation, whether it's perpendicular or parallel to the ground, and then which side of the wall it's on, interior or exterior, and then just offsets and ways that you can change that. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna back out of this here because I wanna load in some profiles.

And if I click load profile here, it's gonna take me to the Imperial Library, which a lot of people don't have loaded in. We're gonna go through the process we've been using before. So I'm just gonna hit okay, get out of that.

And it gave me a zero thickness layer because I did remove that one. So I need to make sure I delete that layer if I'm not gonna use it, which we're not going to. And so I'll hit okay here.

And I lost the dimension because I got rid of that eight inch base there. That's what those warnings were. And so we're gonna go to insert, load Autodesk Family.

And then we're gonna look for profiles here. And we're gonna go ahead and pick a base, doesn't matter which one. And then we're also gonna pick a crown molding.

Again, doesn't matter which one, just make sure you grab one of each. And then we'll hit load. And so now I've got profiles that I could use for this.

So go back into that edit type structure, and we should still be in the section mode here. And so if I were to go in and click sweeps, then I can add a profile. And I can pick the profile that I want.

So these are all the bases that we have. So I'll pick the seven and a quarter by five eighths. I want it to be on the base.

And the side that I want it to be on is interior, because that's where we have all this stuff on. And you can tell because it says exterior side right here, and it says interior side right here. And so all of our finishes are on that side.

We want it to be on the interior. And then I'm gonna leave all of these settings here right now, and we're just gonna leave it as is. And we're just gonna see what it does, because I think that's the best way to learn how to do things is just dive in head first and let's see what we get.

And so the profile shows up as a preview here, and you can see it at that point. And so if we go in and start messing with some of these things, like let's say I change the orientation to parallel to ground and I hit okay, this one doesn't change so much because it's the same thing. But some of the other ones might flip around a little bit.

So it doesn't matter as much here, perpendicular to face, parallel to ground. But if we do change some of these things, like the distance, like if I were to just set that to one foot and hit apply, you can see it's gonna move up the wall. Not what we want, but it's good to know, and so you can see what it looks like.

And then there's also this option for cuttable, and we're gonna see what that does here in a second. We're gonna hit okay, hit okay again, and keep going. And so now you can see we've got our wall base that's been applied to all these wall types, and I can hear all of you guys cursing me now for forcing you to go through adding the base to the plan manually, but I feel like that process is important as well, because here in this case, if I were to add a base to a wall type, but I only want it on this wall or that wall, or only one or two of the walls, then what ends up happening is you have to create many different wall types to reflect all of the conditions.

And so in our case here, we only had a small area that we were working on, and so it was just better for us to add the base and the crown manually, where in some projects where, like I mentioned before, if you have a lot of the same conditions occurring over and over and over again, then it makes a ton of sense to build these things within the wall. And so I could do the same thing for the crown molding here. If I were to go in, edit type, edit the structure, I can do sweeps again, and I can add another profile, and then this one would be the crown, which I can see I got one three inch here, and then this one's gonna be distance zero, but this one will be from the top.

And then make sure it's on the interior side, and I'll hit okay. And you can see here's my profile, and it's zero from the top. And this one doesn't quite work out so well because it's using that as my reference point.

And so if I go back into sweeps, you can see here I've got this option of adjusting it from the top. And so let's say I do from base because I might know that better, and then I can put it at like eight foot six, which is kind of like what we did in our project. And I'll hit okay.

And then it'll drop it down to a much lower elevation. This thing's got a sample height of 20 feet, which our wall's only 12 feet, which I could change that to 12 feet so we're not dealing with such a large piece here. But let's say I wanted it to be up at the top there, then I can adjust my sweep to be from the top, and then I can give it a negative three inch offset because that's what the height of the base is, and then it'll set it across the top.

But this is an option that you need to take a look at where if you have multiple ceiling heights, but it's the same wall type, this one may not work out so well. And that's why I think it's important to have a good understanding of using those sweeps within the wall sweep tool and not building it into the wall type. One of the things I've run to in the past is where we build these things in and then somebody uses that wall, and they're like, oh, I don't want that here.

And then they remove it, but then they unknowingly removed it from 30 other locations when you really only needed to remove it from one. And so that's something to keep in mind, especially for the crown, I feel like the base, it's always gonna be at the base, but the crown could change based on what your ceiling height is. And so it's important to keep track of these things and make sure everybody's communicating on where this stuff needs to be.

And so we're gonna hit OK and see what happens here. There's some things it didn't like, which we got an error there, and I have a feeling it has to do with the height of my wall because my base didn't even show up here. And so I'll give it a top offset, which is gonna blow up our wall here, but I'll give it a top offset of one foot here on all of these, which means my tile is now a different height and everything is different here, which what we're doing here is we're identifying pros and cons, right? On how to do things, because this is the time to do it.

And so let's take a look at that sweep and see why we didn't get it. And so if I were to take a look at that again, and everything looks good here. So I'm gonna go ahead and lower it now to negative 0.5 and hit OK.

Let's see what happens. Seems promising. When we look at the crown here in this case, what I'm running into is in the situation we have here with our sweep, when we have it on the face of the wall, like we did here, we're running into a case where we dropped the tile down.

So remember I was talking about how there's advantages and disadvantages to the different methods here. And so I'm gonna leave it like we've had it here and just hit OK. And then I'm gonna go back in to where our top extension is at, at five foot eight.

I'm just gonna put it to zero. And then magically the crown molding shows up. And that's because this layer of tile that we had is actually part of the wall itself.

And so when we take that and we have the top extension through there, what happens is the sweep is now outboard of the wall and it can't find a host anymore. And so this is another one of those reasons like I mentioned before, why it's good to know how to add that sweep manually because I could easily go in and add it to this wall with no issues. But if I were to do the same thing and go back into edit type just for demonstration purposes here, you can see if I were to change this crown to exterior instead of interior because this side of the wall doesn't have all those layers and hit OK.

You'll see that it nicely puts it all the way around on this side of the wall which gives us a really quick and easy way to add crown molding. Not only add it, but it does give us the option to set it at a particular height. So in this, I can go in and I can say distance from base because we always measure ceilings from the base but I can say, okay, well I want it to be at a nine foot ceiling.

When I do that all the way across, you can see it's gonna pick that nine foot point and keep them all because these walls are joined to each other. Keep it all aligned and consistent across the whole project. And so some of the things that we had done with ours was we had to manipulate the heights, make sure they're all correct, make sure they're joined and set all the way across there.

And so you can also apply these things to both sides. If I were to go back in and edit the sweeps and say I wanted base on both sides, I could just hit duplicate here and then see it says interior. So I could change that to exterior and then I could do the same thing on the crown where I can say duplicate.

I've got two on exterior so I can change one to interior and hit okay. And it's gonna give me that error here, but you can see it'll flip it around with the base on both sides. And then if I were to adjust my tile to just be like negative two feet or something like that, then it gives me the point for the sweep to have it on both sides and it will give you that consistency across.

Although it'd be weird to have tile above the ceiling, but just for the demonstration, you can kind of see how that works. And so to close this out, you may be wondering like, hey, what about these end wall conditions? Do I still have those same options? And you can see here when I click on it, as long as I use the tab key to get to those points here, you see how I select the wall? It gives me the modify return. So I can click, again, I'll just go from the top here.

If I click on the wall, I can do modify returns. And then if I want it to return at 90, I can do the same thing on both of these here. And then we could do that same option where we use the align tool to tidy these up so that they are, let me get in a better angle here, so that they do return that wall back.

And this is a little trickier, and I got the wrong piece that time, but it's kind of the same process that we used before, but just slightly different because it does require you to make sure you're selecting the wall as well. Seems like there's just more things that are in the way, but not anything that we can't overcome. And so same process, slightly different, and could be more efficient, but I'll leave that up to you and the needs of the project that you're working on.

But this is just one of those things that we could do and can be defined within our wall types.