3D camera view

[Anonymous]

Hi. I am trying to render some 3D camera views on the top floor of a hopsital project. After placing the camera and looking at the 3D view it generates, everything shows up but the concrete floors and equipment pads seem to be transparent. This causes the ductwork and piping from the floor below to show up. Everything is selected in the VV overrides and when going into the edit type properties dialog for the concrete pads the material is set correctly as well as having a coarse scale fill pattern. Any advice?

[russellvee · Accepted solution]

Change discipline for the view to architectural or coordination. The mechanical discipline setting forces architectural elements to be transparent halftone.

[Anonymous]

WOW! You have no idea how many hours I have spent changing settings trying to figure that out. Thank you so much!!

[russellvee]

Yep, we've all been there. I spent quite a bit of time on this too before I stumbled across the answer. It doesn't make any sense why V/G overrides of wall/floor/ceiling/roof transparency wouldn't work. I hope they fix this in the new release. I run into this on nearly every project making site plans. I want to set the upper view limit to unlimited, but I only want to show MEP elements ABOVE the roof and not everything inside the building. So to get the roof to be an opaque object, I have to make the site MEP plan an architectural view and then it gets lost in the project browser sorting.

[CoreyDaun]

A View's Discipline has always affected the visibility of the View, and that's not likely to ever change. I see it as a "choose the lesser of two evils" scenario; if Revit did not automatically make the architectural elements half-tone and transparent in MEP Views, then we would have to always make those adjustments in our MEP Plan Views to attain the proper appearance.

For quite a while now, I have refrained from sorting the Project Browser by "Discipline". This is because, as you have described, we have a need to set certain Views to other Disciplines to attain the required appearance. We use the standard "Sub-Discipline" Parameter to designate both the intended DIscipline and Sub-Discipline at the same time and sort by that alone. For example, we may set our Views' Sub-Disciplines to:

11.Mechanical.HVAC

12.Mechanical.Piping

21.Plumbing.Underground

22.Plumbing.Suspended

31.FireProtection

41.Electrical.Lighting

42.Electrical.Power

etc.