Discover how to add a graphic decal to a wall elevation using Revit, a popular software for building information modelling. The article explores the step-by-step process, from creating the decal to placing it, and also reviews the limitations of this feature.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to use the 'decal' tool in Revit to add a graphic image onto a wall elevation. This feature is only visible in the realistic view and could potentially take a while to load depending on the computer.
- Adjustments can be made to the decal's brightness, transparency, reflectivity, and finish type. The 'illuminate' feature can visually transform it into a light fixture or a TV screen, depending on the desired result.
- Despite its advantages, one major downside of the decal tool is its visibility constraint. The decal only appears in the realistic view, which means it won't show in the regular views. This limitation could affect the efficiency of the design process, making it more suitable for post-production use.
This lesson is a preview from our Revit for Interior Design Course Online (includes software) and Interior Design Professional Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
For this next graphic, what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at adding an actual decal to one of our elevations. And to do that, I'm going to jump back over to my plan and we're going to put a big decal along this face of this wall here. And you can see it's in a couple different pieces.
And so we want to make sure that we just have it on one of these walls here and put it in there on the elevation. We're going to learn a new tool here. It's called decal.
And what decals allow us to do is they let us take an image and put it into essentially a box that we can place on the wall. There's a couple downsides to decals. The biggest one being they're only visible when you're in the realistic view.
And that's one of those things that can take quite a while to load depending on the computer you're using. So for a decal, what we'll do is we'll go to our insert tab. And then you can see we've got this option for place decal.
If you click to the bottom side of that, what you can do is you can go to decal types. And ours are blank right now because we haven't created any. But if we do the create button here, we can create a new one.
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And we'll call this fitness decal. And hit OK. And then we just need to load an image.
And so we'll browse to our dataset folder. And within the images, we've got a few images here that we can use. And we're looking for a fitness center wall graphic.
This is just something I pulled from the interwebs. And then I made a cutout. And we'll see what that does here in a second.
But I'm going to go and click open. And you can see this is the image that we have. And there's a couple of things that we can do here.
If it's too dark for some reason, which ours won't be because it's black and white, you can adjust the brightness, which will start to blow it out a little bit. If we're using this for rendering, or maybe it's like a film that we're placing on glass, we can set the transparency and reflectivity to suit our needs. Our finish type.
And so this will, again, give it a certain type of reflection. I'm just going to set it to semi-gloss. You can make it illuminated.
If I were to say this is a TV screen, or maybe it's a sign that's illuminated, I could use one of these options here to make it more like a light fixture. And then bump patterns are something we use in rendering to give a material that's typically flat some texture. If you had a brick pattern, you could give it a brick bump that would then give it the texture that it would normally have.
We don't have that. It's just decal. So I'm going to say no.
And then we'll take a look at what cutout does here in a second. But we're going to go with this right now. And I'll click okay.
And now if I go to place decal here, this is the decal type. And then we can set it on the wall. And so this has to go onto a host.
And so when I place it, you can see here, this is our decal. And what I'm going to do is before I change this mode to realistic, I am going to go ahead and sync by using that button there to save the model. Because you just never know what's going to happen when you tell your computer to do something more than it would ordinarily do.
And so you'll see here in a second why I'm saying that. And since we're using a view template here, it might be good to just temporarily turn it off from the view template. And then I'll go ahead and change it to realistic mode.
And you can see it swaps into this kind of shaded mode here. But there's my decal. And so what I can do is I can set it anywhere I want, but it's only going to show on the host that I picked.
So even where we have the two wall panels there that are up against each other, I can't have it overlap that. So I'm going to take this thing and just make it pretty large. And then I'll go ahead and set it so that it's nudging a bit here.
And I kind of want it down at the ground level. And then I'll make it a little bit larger. I just need to make sure I don't go too far to the right, because then it'll start cutting off the decal.
So you can see how it's cutting it off there. And so this is about right. I could get it just perfect, and I probably will, because I can't help myself.
But using the nudge tool here is going to be really helpful. And so a couple of things that we're seeing, it's always going to have this black background or the boundary on it. And then it's not really cut out, because it's not showing that wall beyond.
And so what I could do is I could go back into the decal type. If I click on the decal and say edit type, I can click here to go to decal attributes. And this is the same window we were just looking at.
And what I can do is, I don't know why that didn't stick, but what I can do is I can pick an image file. And this will be the cut out version here. And I'll click open.
And it's just an inverse of it, because all the black stuff will just get cut out. It'll just keep the white. And so I'll hit OK a couple of times.
And you can see now it cuts out the image so we can see the wall behind. If I were to use the paint tool using keyboard shortcut PT to put the field paint on these walls, you can see now it's a little closer. But the problem here, like I mentioned before, is this thing's only going to show up in realistic.
So even if I go to texture or shaded, I don't get to see the decal. And so it's a cool thing that you can add to kind of spice up your renderings a bit. But when you're just doing regular views, like if I were to jump back over to my plan view and create another 3D view of this space, say from like right here, close to the door, just looking through the fitness center here, you can see we can see our paint and our split face, because those are actually parts of the but we can't actually see the decal that we placed unless I change this to realistic, which this might take a minute.
And now you can see the decal has been added, but it's only in realistic. And it took about 15 seconds, not a whole minute, but feels like it. And so that's what I consider to be a pretty big downside to using this method to add graphics.
It's something that typically is better done in post-production, but it is definitely a cool thing you could do if you needed to quickly show some graphics for different wall patterns.
