Creating a Building Section in Revit: An Easy and Efficient Process

This next view type is probably everybody's second favorite when you start using Revit. And I say second favorite because the next one you're really going to like. We're going to start by taking a look at creating a building section.

And those of you who have done some manual drawing or even done a lot of ad work in the past, you know that this could be a time consuming process and is especially very frustrating when something changes. And so what I'm going to do is just to illustrate that even further, is we're going to create a section through one of our stairs. Because if you've created that manually by hand or in CAD, you know it can take quite a while.

And oftentimes when it changes, it's frustrating because it's quite a bit of work to change. So let's go to our view tab again. We're going to grab section.

And this is a pop-up that'll hop in periodically. It'll remind you every 30 minutes or 60 minutes depending on how it's set to save the project. In this case here, we're just doing a demonstration.

So I'm going to go ahead and hit cancel because we're not going to save this model. When you're working on your project, of course, you're going to want to be saving very often. And there's no reason most of the time to not just say save the project.

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So I'll hit cancel here because we aren't saving this project. It's just a demonstration model. With the section tool activated, what we're essentially going to do is just draw a line across our project.

And I'll just click once to start the section. And then as I drag it across, you can see I can create a section at pretty much any angle I want. Most of which would be pretty useless for us.

So you want to make sure you create a horizontal section. And if you're having a hard time getting this to lock in, or if your mouse is kind of bouncing around a lot like this, just hold down the shift key and that'll lock it in to being perfectly horizontal. Click again and that'll place your section.

So the beauty of this is my section view, I can set it anywhere that I want. So just to start it off, what I'll do is I'll set it in the middle of the building here. And there's a few parts that I want to go over here.

We have our section tag with the callout head on the left side here. And then we have our depth. So this is going to represent how far the section is going to look.

And then we have our left and right extents. And so if I move these in, essentially that will crop the view to just showing that little section of the building. And I don't want to do that, I want to show the whole thing here.

Okay, and notice that those are independent. Of the annotation. We can move the annotation out further or closer to the building as needed to clean up our graphics.

One of the things I did do that I don't recommend is I sliced right through a wall. So I'm going to move this up a bit. We're through that window there.

So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to close my hidden windows because I want to have just this level one and the section open. So just like the other views that we were working with, I can double click on the head. And it'll take me to the section view.

So you can see here, we can see our section that we just placed. And what I could do is I could go to my view tab. And I can actually select tile views.

And it'll allow me to see both of these views side by side. So I just went in and double clicked the wheel to zoom extents on both of those. And what's cool is I can go in here and on my plan view.

If I were to do something, so I just want you to note the grid lines across here. If I were to do something like hit this toggle here, it'll flip the section 180 degrees so that I'm looking in a different direction. So you can really see it by looking at the grid bubbles going C to B to A versus A, B to C. And then if I wanted to, I could even press and drag it to move the section to cut through a stair.

And you'll notice it's just automatically going to update no matter where I cut the section through. Even if that means it's going to cut through our lobby area, which is obviously a totally different section than what we had before, which was through the center of the building. Another thing that I want to point out, and this is not just specific to sections, but it's relevant to all of our views, is the walls and the ceilings and the doors and windows and everything that you're seeing in this section view are the exact same element that we're looking at in our floor plan view.

If I were to go to my floor plan, select the wall on grid line A, notice that it gets highlighted in the section. If I, for some reason, decided to move this over eight feet in this case, you can see that the section gets updated to show that. Because everything gets updated as we go through.

And then in some cases, like this one here, the ceilings, the floor and the ceiling above and the roof all went with the wall because those are all associated together. So those types of modifications happen pretty automatically. I wouldn't count on it.

I'd always double check to make sure that those things are in order. But it's one thing that you want to keep in mind. You're not just moving a wall in a section or moving something.

It's changing everywhere. And the same goes for grids and levels. If I were to start moving these things around or adjusting them, it's across the entire project, as we saw with some of our previous examples.

So our next video, we're going to take a look at everybody's favorite view type, which is going to be 3D views.