Roof plane by 3 points

[panastos]

I want to create a roof by using 3 points. This must be a planar roof I can use as a work plane, I cannot use shape editing.

What is the best method to do this? I'd love to create a reference plane, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do one using 3 points in Revit, which is... surprising. 

Is there a Dynamo solution?

[syman2000]

Can you post a screenshot what you want to achieve?

[panastos]

What I would really like is to model a reference plane with 3 points... not sure how I could illustrate that. Maybe I could try to just rotate a flat plane in 2 different views?

But in terms of the roof, maybe I can describe it a little better. If I am not using a reference plane, I want to model a rectangular roof by specifying 4 sketch lines in plan and then creating a slope by specifying the elevation at 3 of the points. The roof has a diagonal slope.

[syman2000 · Accepted solution]

Easiest way is to use adaptive 3 point family. Load it into your project. Then select the point and move to location you want.

Afterward you click on set reference plane and pick the adaptive point surface as your plane.

If you don't want the model to display, you can hide it and the points will still be there.

After that, you can use the roof by face

This will create your roof

[Alfredo_Medina]

@panastos 

Why do you say that you cannot use shape editing? Can't you find out the elevation of the points in the project using Spot Elevation? and then can't you create a roof as a triangle, the footprint of the roof, and then elevate each corner to the correspondent elevation?

[panastos]

@syman2000 

Thanks a lot, this works. It is a little finnicky to get the points in the right place, the snaps for some reason don't work in 3D, and you can't input the elevations directly. Also this only forms a triangle, to get a rectangle I had to extend the edges and cut out the shape I needed. Next time I might take a look at getting the family rectangular.

@Alfredo_Medina 

As I mentioned above, if you edit the shape, Revit no longer recognizes a plane and you can't use the face as a work plane (which with a bidirectional/diagonal slope is a must for modeling the framing.) I'm not sure if this is always the case or only if you edit it out of being planar, but with the 1/256" precision Revit uses (which is pretty strange to me), it would be extremely difficult to keep it planar regardless.

[Tas__]

Following up on this to add that editing the insertion behavior of the points achieves what folks are looking for (as I understand it) - see attached.

I edited the original family, selected all three points, then changed the Adaptive Component "Point" property  to "Placement Point (Adaptive)." This allows you to select three points in a 3D view when inserting the family into your model. I hope someone finds this useful in the future. 

This is quite the relief after hours of trying to simplify a workflow related to manually defining sloped analytical panels. Thanks for everyone's previous input on this. 

[jackmcwaters]

How was that plane created in the Family in the first place?

[Tas__]

I just modified the previously posted family, but this is probably where I'd start if I were to do it from scratch (I'm not an experienced Revit user).  

https://help.autodesk.com/view/RVT/2025/ENU/?guid=GUID-6E0ECA27-AF40-4B1D-9E0B-1DE5FBBD45F2