Explore the detailed steps of initiating a demolition phase in a construction project using Revit. The guide breaks down the process into manageable parts, starting with the simpler tasks such as selecting and setting elements for demolition to more complex tasks like breaking apart floor or roof elements.
Key Insights
- The demolition phase of a project in Revit starts with choosing the elements to be demolished, which can range from simple tasks like selecting a window to more complicated ones like segregating a floor or roof element into two.
- Elements like walls can be broken apart using the split tool, but flooring and roofing elements have to be handled differently. Once separated into their components, they can be set for demolition.
- Revit allows users to see the elements to be demolished by changing the phase to new construction and setting the phase filter to previous plus demo. The visual style can be altered to shaded, which visualizes demolition elements in red.
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Let's get started on the demo phase of this project and what that's going to involve is selecting the elements that we want to demolish for this phase of the project, and that can be as simple as selecting a window and setting its phase demolished to new construction, or it can be as complicated as having to break apart a floor or a roof element into two pieces, keeping existing to remain and existing to be demolished pieces separate. We're going to start with the easy part so we can get the hang of it first, and the project that we're doing is going to involve redoing this entrance portion. We're essentially going to demo out this section of the building right here, going all the way from the slab all the way up through the roof.
And so as you can see this wall is one piece, this wall is one piece, and those are going to have to be broken apart. So that's done with the split tool, but floors and roofs and ceilings, even if we had those, those actually need to be done a little bit differently. And so what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at that as well as we go through this.
So first we're going to start with this window. If I wanted to demolish it, I can go to the modify tab, look for the sledgehammer here, and then I can go to the window and say demolish. Notice how the graphics have changed because I've changed the phase of this element to be demolished.
I can do the same thing with this one because the whole thing's going to be removed. But when I look at other elements like this wall and this wall, they have to be broken down into their own components before we can demolish them. One other thing to take a look at here is this piece is being demolished because now we can see the phase demolished is set to new construction where the phase created is set to existing.
Using this tool is what that did. So I could do the same thing by using my split tool and splitting this element at the grid line or really close to it at least. And then I can select the wall and I can change the phase demolished from none to new construction.
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What that'll do is that anything that's hosted within that wall will also be demolished as well. And so what I've done is I've now set up to have this whole wall demolished which is going to demolish these windows as well. If we were to say demolish this wall for whatever reason, which we're not going to, but I'll just show as an example, if I were to demolish this wall you can see everything that's hosted within it are removed.
So you can see the wall, the door, all the doors here, everything has been demolished. So the host is what's going to determine if something's being demolished or not. Now the curtain walls are a little different because they are their own element and so if we wanted to demolish this piece we would need to do so the old-fashioned way here.
And we're not going to see any graphic changes in our 3D view because the phase is not set correctly. If I were to say phase set to new construction and then I set the phase filter to previous plus demo, then we're going to start to see the elements being demolished. I can even take it one step further and change my visual style from hidden line to shaded and it'll show the demo elements in red which I think is a pretty cool feature.
So I'll go ahead and demo this upstairs window and then we're going to go to our level two plan because it's easier to see here and we're going to split this wall and we want to split it right at the face here. So you see how my mouse kind of locks in at that point? That allows me to break this into two pieces which then will allow me to take the sledgehammer to it. Now I can take a look at my 3D view and what I should have is this entire corner is demolished and so that's how we can demolish our wall and window elements in Revit.
In the next video we're going to take a look at how we can demolish the floor and roof elements.
