Discover the flexibility of Revit Project Management by exploring the different ways to adjust visibility and graphic overrides for Revit links. This article provides a detailed walkthrough, explaining how to turn on and off Revit links, customize visibility settings, and create view templates for efficient project management.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to use the visibility and graphic overrides settings in Revit Project Management to turn on and off Revit links, offering hands-on guidance to toggle visibility for different elements like structural or plumbing parts in a plan view.
- It highlights the importance of work set settings, showing how to selectively turn these on and off for optimized visibility across different views. The author also discusses the process of adjusting visibility settings under the work sets tab.
- The article provides a step-by-step guide to creating view templates from current views, ensuring that specific visibility settings and overrides for Revit links and work sets are included. This technique allows for more efficient project management, eliminating the need to manually adjust settings for each view.
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Hello and welcome to the CAD Teacher VDCI video series for Revit Project Management. In the last video, we looked at a few options for adjusting the Visibility and Graphics Overrides for our Revit links, and this time we're going to look at different ways we can turn on and off those same Revit links. So the number one option that we have is we can use the Visibility and Graphics Overrides settings.
If I were to go to my Visibility and Graphics Overrides by either hitting VV on my keyboard or clicking Visibility and Graphics Overrides in the Properties palette, I can then go to my Revit Links tab, and the checkbox on the left either means it's on or off. When it's checked, that means it's visible; when it's unchecked, that means it's not visible. If I didn't want to see my Structural in this view, I could go ahead and uncheck Structural, hit OK, and Structural is no longer visible in this view.
Okay, I'm going to go ahead and undo that because I want to see Structural in this view, so I'll go back to my Visibility and Graphics Overrides, go to Revit Links, and check the box to turn Structural back on. Another thing I can do is I can selectively turn on and off the workset. If I go to my Workset settings, find my Structural workset, which is here, we have an option here which is Visible in All Views.
So I have this checked for all my worksets, but I'm going to uncheck it for Structural, and what that's going to do is it's going to turn it off in all of our views unless we override that particular view to show that workset. So I'm going to hit OK, and you can see now that Structural has turned off in our plan view, and if I were to go to the section we created in the last video, you can see I don't have any Structural elements showing here either. See, all the footings are gone; everything's gone.
If I were to hit VV to go back to my Visibility and Graphics Overrides, so instead of going to my Revit Links tab like we have in the past, I'm going to go to my Worksets tab. Under the Worksets tab, we can see that under the visibility settings, they're all set to Visible except for Structural. Structural is set to Use Global Settings, which is Not Visible.
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Now, if I want to see the Structural model in this view or the Structural workset, I have to change it from Not Visible to Show, and we do the same thing the other way. If I didn't want to see Plumbing, I could go ahead and say Hide. So the best thing to do here is you want to determine which ones you're going to use most.
When we look at the Visibility and Graphics Override settings again under Worksets, I need to determine whether or not I'll be hiding a workset more often or showing it if I'm going to use that setting. So I'm going to go ahead and put Plumbing back to Global Settings and hit OK. Now that we've got our Structural showing in section, which is definitely a view we want to see it in, we can go back to our Second Floor Plan, and now we're kind of in the dark on our column locations.
So I need to make sure to turn those back on in both my First Floor Plan and my Second Floor Plan. So I'm going to go to my Worksets tab from Visibility and Graphics Overrides, and I'm going to change my Structural setting again from Use Global Settings—Not Visible to Show. OK, that looks good.
So what I want to do now is I actually want to create a view template because if I had, you know, five or six floors, I wouldn't want to go through this process on every single one of those. So the first thing I like to do is I like to make sure I've got everything set the way that I want it, and this looks good. I mean, there are some changes that we'll have to have Structural make to this model because it looks like maybe the beams are sitting above the floor, but we'll deal with that later.
But everything looks good, so I'm going to go ahead and create a view template from this current view. So to create a view template from the current view, I need to go to my Project Browser. I'm going to right-click on my current view, which is Second Floor Plan, and then I'm going to go to Create View Template from View.
Okay, I'm going to call this Floor Plans and hit ENTER. And so now I have a view template called Floor Plans, and what I want to do is I want to make sure that I have checked here to include my overrides for Revit Links and my overrides for Worksets because those are the settings that we did most of the work to. OK, everything looks good here, so I'm going to hit OK.
Now I'm going to go to my First Floor Plan, and I want to apply those same properties to this plan as well. If I right-click on First Floor Plan in the Project Browser, I'm going to go to Apply View Template or Apply Template Properties, and then I'm going to select Floor Plans and hit OK. And there we go—got our Structural back in.
Okay, so this setting with the Worksets really comes into play with our elevations and sections because, as we saw before, our Structural model actually has multiple sets of grid lines associated with it, so I wouldn't want to have to go through every single one of my sections and turn off the Structural grid lines. So what I can do is this is my East Elevation that I'm in right now. I can go into my Visibility Graphics Overrides, go to my Workset settings, turn on my Structural model so I can see some of these elements, and then I'll go to my Revit Links tab and make the changes that we had done before. So Mechanical—I'll go to By Host View, change it from By Host View to Custom. From my Annotation Categories tab, I want to change that from By Host View to Custom, and then we don't want to see any Mechanical annotation categories here, so I'm going to go ahead and uncheck that. OK, looks good. Then back at our Basics tab, same thing as before, we want to make sure our detail level for all our Mechanical and Plumbing files is always set to Fine regardless of what the current view is. So that looks good. I'm going to hit OK. Then I'm going to go through and do the same thing to all of these views to the rest of these Worksets. OK, and then we'll create a view template.
Okay, so first with the Plumbing, same thing—we want to turn off the annotation categories and set it to a detail level of Fine. OK, everything looks good here, and the same thing with our Structural model as well. OK, so now that we've got a setup for our Plumbing, Structural, and Mechanical models here, we can go ahead and create a view template for our elevations. So I'm going to go to my East Elevation in the Project Browser, right-click, Create View Template from View, and I'll call it Elevations. Actually, let's call it Exterior Elevations. OK, and again, we want to double-check and make sure the Revit Link and Worksets are checked to be included in this view, and that looks good, so I'm going to hit OK. We've done quite a bit, so it's probably a good idea to do a Save to Central.
