Rina’s Random Revit-isms #6

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The Invisible Line Trick.
The Invisible Line Trick.

Rina’s Random Revit-isms #6

This is a series of Revit tips and war stories inspired by my daily experiences working with the software.

The Invisible Line Trick #1

There may be times when the position of overhead elements – tv monitors are an example – need to be indicated with hidden lines in the plan views.

You could add an Underlay to the Plan view and draw Symbolic Hidden Lines around the element, then remove the Underlay. But why? For every single TV monitor? Too much trouble, right?

It’s more time efficient to build them into the Family!

Here are two ways to build Symbolic lines in the Family

1) Use Symbolic Lines. Set the geometry to not be visible in plan, create the Symbolic Lines. Load the Family into the project to test.

2) Sometimes this does not give the desired result!

You need The Invisible Line Trick.

To the previously created family, in an elevation view, add an invisible line that extends from the geometry to the base level.

3) Load the Family into the Project. Now you will see the hidden lines (in a manner of speaking – take a look at the last paragraph of this learned treatise for the reasons why!) in the plan view.

The reason for this is that sometimes the cut plane of the plan view is not ‘aware’ of the Family geometry above it. The invisible line that was added to the Family ‘taps’ the cut plane on the shoulder and says “Here I am!! Look at me!!”

Enjoy the Screencast!

https://autode.sk/38ZgyRS

As the final step – you would have noticed that though we did see the family instance in the Project plan view, it was not graphically correct. The Symbolic Lines were set up as hidden lines in the Family – so where did they go in the Project??

 Here’s the deal – any settings in the Family are overridden by the settings in the Project Object Styles. I needed to go to Object Styles and set the Hidden Lines for the Furniture category to be Hidden 1/16” lines instead of the Dashed Linestyle that was there by default.

Stay safe and healthy! Till my next Revit-ism…..

 

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