Sunday, April 19, 2015

BORDERS AND TRIMS FOR CEILINGS IN REVIT

Turns out when we use ceilings in Revit there are no tools for closing and trimming borders, nothing beyond a flat ceiling open in the edges. Then How can we achieve something like the following image?

I know most people use ultra-thin walls or Model-in-Place families to trim ceilings, but I try to avoid that in Revit because if you
start to use the incorrect categories (walls instead of ceilings) things start to get complicated at the time of scheduling, automating and parametrizing.

Here I propose a solution that has worked very well for me. First is to use the SOFFIT tool instead of CEILING.


Why? Because Soffits can take Fascias as a natural Revit tool, and these fascias allow us to do any kind of border shape to soffits. Besides we're not changing much. In the real building a soffit is a kind of ceiling. Earlier Revit versions didn't allow us to schedule soffits (don't ask me why), but since 2014 or 2015 we can!!

Now let's take a look at the families used for this example. The plain border is made using the Profile family template and assign it a "Fascia" profile usage:

Sketch a rectangular profile taking care of the origin and assign dimension parameters so it can be flexible at the time of using it in the project.

Assign parameters in the "Family Types" according to your needs.


Load into project, activate the Roof-Fascia tool, and duplicate the existing Fascia to create a new one with the loaded profile:

And that's it. Apply the Fascia directly to the soffit edges.

Same is done for the indirect lighting trim. Profile's geometry is something like this:

Apply to the soffit. In some cases it will be flipped or upside down, but Fascias can be manipulated with the blue control arrows.

TIP: If control arrows are not visible, go to the view properties and uncheck  "Section Box":
Finally we can achieve something like this with Revit's own tools without modelling in place or making walls that pretend to be ceilings.

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