Creating Exterior Lap Siding

[colinX7B66]

Hi,

I am currently taking a program at a nearby college for architectural design, and one of the classes I'm taking focuses on Revit fundamentals. I have been doing extra research and practice with Revit outside of class. I am trying to design a residential house for practice and I ran into some issues with designing lap siding for the exterior of my walls. I am aware that I can simply edit the structure of the wall, add another layer to it, and apply an image that looks like lap siding, which I suppose would suffice for rendering purposes. However, if you just use this method, when you look at the wall in a section view, you can't see the overlapping panels. So what I did is created a wall sweep, loaded in a profile that looks like a siding panel, and kept duplicating and offsetting until I was able to cover my whole wall (this was really tedious). This looks great in a section view, but when I go to my elevation views or 3D views the panels are intersecting with the trim of my windows and the frame of my front door. Also, the panels are not aligned and cutting incorrectly with the wall openings and curtain glass walls I have on the back of my house. I have already tried toggling on and off the "cuttable" option in the wall sweeps dialog box. I'm wondering what process architects use to design siding in Revit. Is there some kind of siding tool that I'm missing? It doesn't make sense to me to just apply an image to the wall because you can't see the paneling in other views that you would use in an architectural project, which seems to defeat the whole purpose of designing in Revit. Thank you for reading this post. I attached the Revit file with my house. 

[barthbradley · Accepted solution]

Replace the Windows' Opening Cuts with Void Cuts - one to cut the through-opening through the Host Wall and one to only cut away the portion of Wall that the Trim overlaps.  Get it?  

See your attached Window, revised to put in the Opening Cuts, for a better idea of how to approach this.  It's just a quickie revision. You can fine-tune it.  

[colinX7B66]

Your file works great when I load it into my project. However, when I try to create the voids on my own, it doesn't seem to work. I must not be creating the voids correctly. I attached the rfa file I have been editing.

[barthbradley]

You need to remove the Opening Cut and replace it with a Void Cut to cut the Host Wall.  Also, the Void Cut for the Trim needs to be constrained to (e.g. Locked to) the Window frame so it's pulled with the Window Inset.  

[colinX7B66]

Here's what I tried this time around: I deleted the opening cut, used the void extrusion tool to create a void from the interior side of the wall to the exterior frame of the window. Then I created another void around the trim and extruded it to touch the exterior frame of the window, and I also constrained it to this frame. I then tried loading the rfa file into my project and got this: 

I apologize that this is taking a while for me to grasp, but thanks so much for your patience and help.

[RDAOU]

@colinX7B66 

Looks like you forgot to cut open the wall with the void in the Family editor...If the void still look Yellowish orange in the family editor ... Use Cut Geometry >> Select Wall >> Select void

PS: Also make sure the void(s) is aligned and locked to the wall from both sides (exterior and interior)

If that doesn"t work, attach the last family u used in the above posted image

[colinX7B66]

I definitely made some progress here! :

The 46.5" X 46.5" window looks great. The only issue now is the wall appears to be intersecting with the 33" X 70" window. I am assuming I'll have to go back to the family editor to fix this.

[barthbradley]

 Family doesn't flex correctly.  

Window Inset 0'-0":

Window Inset 0'-6". Notice Frame and Trim don't move.  

With Frame and Trim - AND VOID AROUND TRIM - constrained correctly: 

In Project:

See attached Project with revised Window.

[colinX7B66]

I'm having difficulty setting the constraints you mentioned but I  did constrain the void to the top and bottom of the frame which helped fix my previous issue:

If you look closely, there's a sliver of gray around the frame, which doesn't normally appear on the windows. This could be something wrong with my constraints. Or am I just being too picky and this is something I can ignore?

[colinX7B66]

Yeah, it must be something with the constraints because when I load the windows from the project file you sent me it works perfectly, and there's no gray interfering with the window. If you could show me how you set these constraints that would be great. Thanks a ton.