Creating Spandrel Glass Panels in Revit: A Step-by-Step Guide

Now that we have the framework set up for our curtain grids, we can go ahead and start modifying our panels. And the first thing I want to do is create the panel that we need for the spandrel glass across the middle here. And so to do that, what I'll do is I'll pick one of my panels.

And in this exercise, the key that you're going to use the most on your keyboard is going to be tab. So you can see as I go through, I'm constantly using tab to be able to select the different items. And it's going to be really critical for you to just run your mouse to one of the edges here, hitting tab a handful of times until you see it selected, and then you're good to go.

As you start to become more familiar with the software, you might be able to branch out a bit and use this select elements by face. I highly recommend not using this because it can get you into trouble, especially in plan view. But in the 3D view, if you toggle it on, you can easily grab the face of an element because it'll actually allow you to select the blank space.

But in this case, because we're in the 3D view, you're still going to have to hit TAB to select it. So I'm going to leave it off and just use the edges. But that's totally up to you.

I just wanted to highlight that option. So I'm going to go back and select this. And now we've got the grid selected.

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And we'll look at our types and see what we have available to us. And we have system glazed, system panel glazed, and we have system panel solid. So neither one of those are a Spandrel panel.

So what I'll do is I'll take this one and we'll say edit type. And we definitely don't want to override any of the settings on the glazed panel. So what we need to do is use the duplicate option to make ourselves a Spandrel panel.

So I'll say duplicate. And we'll change this from glaze to Spandrel. And all Spandrel panel is is a glass panel that has a film on the back of it.

And that can be made out of multiple different types of materials. But essentially, the idea is that you still get the glass look, but you can't see through it. Knowing that we know that the glass material is only sort of appropriate here.

And so we're going to want to select a different one. So where it says material, I'm going to go in and I'll click into that field. And you can see we get that browse button that we always see when we click into these types of fields.

And I'll select that it's going to open up our material browser. And we can go ahead and look for a glass Spandrel type and see if that's in there already. This is a good practice to be in because you never know if your model already has that.

And so you'll want to just kind of start typing in Spandrel. And of course, as usual, we didn't get lucky on that one. We're going to go through the process of creating a new material.

So I'm just going to type in glass to get me back to the glass material here. But you can see we have glass and glass clear glazing. So I'm going to take this one.

And if we right click on it, you can see that we get the option to duplicate it. And that's going to be a good thing for us to do here because we want to duplicate the material because we know the basis for this is pretty close already. We'll say duplicate.

And then we'll give it a name that makes sense. We'll use the same nomenclature, see how it says glass comma space, and then we'll just add Spandrel to that. And now this will be our Spandrel glass material.

And all we have to do is adjust some of the settings. So the first thing that we want to do is we want to make it so it's opaque. And instead of having 75% transparency, we're just going to drag that down to zero.

Another thing I like to do here is I like to give it a surface pattern so that we can actually see the difference between the standard clear vision glazing and the Spandrel glazing. So I'll go in here and I'll set the pattern to be a solid fill. And black in most cases is just way too dark because it'll just be a black blob on the sheet.

So I'm going to go ahead and change this to a light gray material. And this one works pretty good. And hit OK.

Now we've got that all set up. The next thing we could do is we could adjust the color. And so this'll just be for some of our colored 3D views if we ever get to that point.

So you want to make sure that you've got a decent color that's not going to look too blue, kind of like this one's pretty blue here. We'll adjust those a bit. And this is a preference thing, but you can use certain settings to get it to look right.

And so I'm just going to go towards a more gray color here. And this is what I have written in my notes as a decent color. So it's kind of like a light bluish gray.

And you can follow these values here, the 210, 223, and 227 for the RGB. Or you can use one of your choice. So I'll go ahead and hit OK.

And we want to make sure we're still selected on this glass Spandrel here. Double check our settings. Everything looks good.

And we'll hit OK. Now we have a new glass Spandrel type that we're using. We're going to make sure that is selected under Type here.

And then hit OK. Now that we have the glass Spandrel and you can see clearly which one is which. And so we can apply this material to all of these faces a couple of different ways.

So the first way is we can use the Match Properties option, which would be from your Modify tab. And it's this little paintbrush here. And this Match Type Properties will allow me to select the Spandrel panel at the window.

And then I can apply it to all the windows that I'd like to add it to. That's a pretty easy way to do it. And it goes pretty quickly.

We only have four plus three panels that we need to add it to. So it's not that big of a deal to use the Match Type. But let's say you had a number of panels along one really, really long wall.

And so to avoid all that clicking, what you could do is if you select a panel here, you could right-click and then you could say Select Panels. And I could say Along Horizontal Grid. And what that'll do is it'll actually select all four along the horizontal grid.

So you can imagine if you had a curtain wall that was, you know, 100 feet long or something like that, then you might have, you know, 20 panels that you have to select and adjust. Well, this way we can just do it with one. And then I can change it to Spandrel in the Type Selector.

And then you can see these have all been adjusted. So I can do the same thing here by just selecting it and right-clicking on it and saying Along Horizontal Grid. And then I can just change the type to Spandrel.

And then we're all set and done there. So there's definitely multiple ways that we can apply it. And the way that you go about it is totally up to you.

But I think it's good to have all the different options because each case is a little bit different.