topic Vertical detail of a curved wall in Revit Architecture Forum

Vertical detail of a curved wall

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 08:40:01 GMT

Hi!

I am currently in the process of drawing a detail of a curved exterior wall. I'm using a default section as a detail view. The problem I'm having is that even though the section is exactly perpendicular to the curve of the wall, nothing will snap to vertical lines - similar to how an elevation misbehaves when it's not exactly perpendicular to a face. This makes annotation and aligning extra difficult. It looks correct and the measure tool gives the right numbers.

Is there a way get this working properly without drawing an straight dummy wall + floors etc. off to the side of the project and make the section through that? It semi-works as it is, but I'd really prefer to be able to align and annotate. Ideas? I'm pretty new to Revit so I fell I may have missed something.

This is the offending section/detail:

Re: Vertical detail of a curved wall

BIM.Consultant — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 10:20:39 GMT

Select your section and set far clip offset to 1, then try again. Let me know how it goes.

Re: Vertical detail of a curved wall

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 10:28:50 GMT

Thank you for the reply! Unfortunately it didn't make any difference.

Re: Vertical detail of a curved wall

BIM.Consultant — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 10:36:50 GMT

Ok so instead of creating a dummy wall I would suggest 1 of the following two methods:

A. Draw detail lines with segment ending on each of the wall layers, then place dimensions snapping these lines.

B. Draw reference planes then use them to snap the dimensions.

Material tag shouldn't have any problem. I believe your problem is just with placing dimensions.

Re: Vertical detail of a curved wall

ToanDN — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 23:42:04 GMT

Draw reference planes tangential to the curved wall at the section line as suggested by @BIM.Consultant is a goos idea and probably the simplest way.

I have another approach that is more involved but it will get you to dimension the geometry directly. See screencast.

Re: Vertical detail of a curved wall

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 08:46:20 GMT

Thank you! This works and is a very simple solution.

Re: Vertical detail of a curved wall

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 08:53:29 GMT

Thank you for the reply! I went ahead and tagged both replies as solutions, as they both solve the problem. This was the more elegant solution and the kind of solution I was looking for, but Revit would still not snap to the vertical lines for whatever reason. So I ended up using BIM.Consultant's reference plane method. I assume this is due to some mysterious issue with my section alignment or whatever, so this is probably a really helpful solution to anyone else having similar issues to mine.

Re: Vertical detail of a curved wall

ToanDN — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 09:02:04 GMT

The trick is the line splitting the wall in two parts must be exactly where
your section cut is. And the detail view must be set to Show parts, or Show
both (originals and parts) in order for the dimensions to work.

Re: Vertical detail of a curved wall

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 09:11:07 GMT

I have show parts set, and I split the wall using a reference plane snapped to the two endpoints of the section line, so it should be perfectly aligned. However i just noticed that using linear Dimensions now works by snapping to the ends of the parts, so that's something. Can't get aligned dimensions to work though.

Re: Vertical detail of a curved wall

ToanDN — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 09:34:04 GMT

If you can extract that portion of the model to a new file an upload it
then I can take a look.