Organizing Building Sections and Wall Sections in Revit: A Step-by-Step Guide

Now for our next exercise, we're going to take a look at our building sections and wall sections. And so there's not a ton for us to do here from a building section standpoint, but we do want to make sure we get all of our wall sections organized and on sheets. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take inventory of the sections that we're creating so we know how many we have so we can put them on the sheets appropriately.

When I look here on a 501, you can see we have a wall section for the lobby with the skylight, which makes a ton of sense because it kind of shows the stair and the lobby. It's a unique condition. And then we have one that's going to cut through our curtain wall condition.

And then when we look at our next section down here, these are pretty much the same as some sections that we're going to create on our other sheet. If we go to 502, you can see we don't have any designated here, but there is a pretty typical condition along grid line A where we have the building offset, where we have the storefront, soffit, and then this typical wall condition that we have on multiple sides of the building. So I think that's a good one to include.

And then on the second section, we have that metal panel pop out that occurs on the west side of the building, on the southwest side of the building, where we can have a section there. So let's start by adding those two. And it's kind of nice to be able to just work from the sheets and then jumping in and we can add that view.

So it's just like how we did the callout for our elevation. We can go from here and I can say view, callout, and you notice it'll automatically set this to wall section. And then I just have to draw it around the border, just like we did for that enlarged elevation.

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And the same principles apply. We want these things to be legible. And we also need to understand that this is real.

And moving it around will impact both this view and the section view that we just created. So that section was created in the wall sections category here. Yours might be not expanded or expanded either way.

But you can take a look. It now says section two, callout one, which is fine. And then we'll do the same thing over here.

And then we'll go back in and kind of take inventory, rename, and put these on sheets as appropriate. So I'm going to go ahead and create that wall section. Adjust it around.

And you can see here we got section four, callout one now. And we can go in and give these the appropriate names. And so I'm just going to make some adjustments here to make sure I can see what I'm doing and that everything is looking correctly.

And then I can give it the name. So this one is the section four callout one. And I'll go ahead and rename this one wall section at metal panel pop out.

Okay, and there's no magic to these names. I'm kind of just making up as we go just so that we have an understanding of what they are for later. And you can look at it and say, okay, that's where that was.

But there's no real right or wrong answer here. And I'll rename this one. This is going to be wall section at punched openings.

Okay, so we've got our four different wall sections here. And we're going to use two different sheets, our A701 and A702 to locate these. So on A701, I'm going to put wall section at entry and wall section at curtain wall, which is the ones that were on sheet A501.

If we jump over to A701, you can see we have a blank sheet. And like we did before with our blank sheet, we want to make sure we place a couple of things in here so we have some guides. So I'm going to jump over to A602 because it has the thing I'm looking for here, which is our keynote legend.

And I'm going to copy that to clipboard and then jump over to A701. And then using the modify tab, paste the line to current view. I'll go ahead and paste that into A701 and paste the line to current view on A702.

So I now have those keynote legends placed so that I have that guide for where I can put some of these views. So the first one I talked about was the wall section at entry. So I'll go ahead and set that.

And I think, you know, it doesn't take much for us to tell that there's something clearly not right here. And it's really just the scale. Like we can make these much larger and we can use a scale that's going to be more appropriate for our wall sections.

And in this case, we're going to go ahead and double these up. So instead of quarter inch, we're going to go ahead and make these half inch. So I'll change this one to half inch.

And I can move this to the location I want, which is going to be somewhere kind of around here. Obviously, that final location is to be determined because we're going to put another view on here. But I do want to sort of get it ordered a little nicer so I can see what's going on and make sure that this view is going to fit and the scale is going to fit the way I want.

Now that's one of the four wall sections that we want to create. And it seems like it makes sense to have a view template that's associated with our wall section. If I go to my view tab, you can see we've got our view templates option here.

And I can go to manage view templates and I can see the ones that I have available to me. And so when you look at these, you don't really see one that is a wall sections. You can see architectural section and site section.

But not necessarily wall sections. And some of these are default, right? And we will never use. And other ones are ones that we could use depending on how far we take this project.

But ultimately, you'll want to make sure you get rid of the ones you're not going to use, especially when you're working in a team environment because you don't want to end up in a situation where you've got one person using architectural plan or structural plan or vice versa. You know, it's like having too many of the same thing in here just causes confusion. Like you can see here, we've got architectural presentation 3D and then 3D views.

And it's like, we don't really know which one you're supposed to use. So you want to make sure you keep that clean. That's just a good management procedure to make sure everybody knows what's going on in here.

So what we'll do is we will go ahead and jump into this section view. And you can see it's relatively set up the way we want. We're going to check a couple of things.

So first, our detail level, we're going to go ahead and set that to medium. And then our scale is set the way that we want it to. Everything else looks pretty good.

There might be some changes down the line, but for right now, this is what we're looking for. So while I'm in that view, I can go to view templates here and I can say create template from current view. Now from here, what I could do is I can go ahead and give it the name.

So this is going to be our wall sections. And I'm going to make it all caps. So I know that it's one that I created versus the ones that came in the default.

If you notice the other ones were more title case, we're going to make them all caps. We know that's one we created. All right.

So wall sections, that's the one we got. It's going to include all of these things until we decide that it doesn't need to. And we'll leave it at that.

And so now one of the cool things we can do is we can go into our type properties for the wall section and then we can have it apply that view template on any of the new views that are created. So anytime I create a new wall section, then it'll create with that view template. And then now we don't have to worry about always going through and applying them.

The next thing we need to do is all of these wall sections that we created here, we want to go ahead and apply that view template. Wall sections to that. So I just right clicked on the views that I selected here, hit wall sections and I can hit okay.

And now when we look at these views, they have the view template of wall sections assigned to them. And they're all going to be at that half inch with the course detail level set up all ready and ready to go. We just saved ourselves a little bit of time and made things a little easier for ourselves.

So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to do a close hidden windows here because I have many windows open from our previous exercises. And I'm going to go ahead and hit save and then jump back into A701 so we can get the other section onto the sheet, which is going to be our wall section at curtain wall. So I'm going to scroll up in the project browser.

I'm going to find my wall section at curtain wall and I'm going to throw that on here. And one of the things you'll notice is that these want to align with each other. So that's the view title aligning to the other view title.

That doesn't necessarily mean that my views are going to be lined up. But if I were to move it just a little bit more, you can see that blue line that dashes across from view to view. That means they're going to align.

So level two is aligned with level two here and roof and all top of parapet and so on. So that's the look we're going for. Obviously, we don't want to see these not aligning.

We will go in and make that adjustment. But now you can see that we've got both of these set up in the view the way that we want them to. And so we're going to go ahead and do the same thing on A702.

Now let's jump over to A702. And we've got two more wall sections that we haven't placed yet. You can tell again, because the blue signifies that this has been placed on a sheet where these two have not been placed on a sheet yet.

And so the first one we're going to grab is the wall section at metal panel pop out. And so that'll be this guy here. And we'll do the same thing where we kind of just place it in a location that looks appropriate for us here.

And that looks good. I'm just going to make a little adjustments to the view title so that it doesn't look too scrunched to the view that comes in by default like that all the time. And so you will get used to making those adjustments throughout your Revit career.

Then I'm going to push this one over a little bit. And then I'll grab the wall section at punched opening. Using that same process we used before on the previous sheet, we want to make sure we line it up from view to view, not from view title to view title.

And then I'll go ahead and align the view titles and use that same process where I can adjust the view title by picking the viewport. Now I can grab the end and move it around to make it look nice. And so now what we can do is we can go into the process of adding in some more annotations to start to show more of the information within this portion of the project.

And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and start with the views on A702 even though it's the second sheet in the set, but it's okay. And we're going to add a few annotations in here. We're going to start and make some adjustments in the model and also adding the tags like we did in the elevation and plan views.