by Martha Hollowell
Thank you everyone who was able to sit-in on our webinar Making Revit Models “Pretty”. I hope you enjoyed it. You can now watch it on the ASCENT YouTube channel here.
Instead of covering everything again in this blog post I want to answer a few of the questions and comments that came up.
Silhouettes and Thin Lines
I was trying to show how silhouettes work but it wasn’t working. So, here is why my silhouette wide lines didn’t show up – I had Thin Lines on. (Thanks to Craig who pointed this out.) Here is an example of how it should look. You can see that the edge closest to you has very wide lines but the roof behind it has thinner lines and the mullions of the curtain wall has the thinnest lines.
Displaying the Camera in Plan
One person asked how to display the camera in the plan view after you created it. My favorite way is to tile the perspective view and the floor plan view as shown below. Then, when you select the crop region of the perspective the camera displays in the plan. When you are in a plan view you can also right-click on the 3D view in the Project Browser and select Show Camera.
Printing Sketchy Line views to PDF
One of the participants asked, “Have you had any problems with printing to PDF in Sketchy Line? The raster image option makes PDFs very low quality.” I personally haven’t tried this out but I looked it up and it turns out there isn’t much hope at the moment. Views that include many of the Graphic Display Options I showed in the webcast including shading, shadows, gradients, sketchy lines, and depth cueing are automatically processed as raster, not vector. I tried several different print settings (as seen in the graphic) and all of them came out rather weird.
Press Quality was actually the worst for an elevation with sketchy lines as shown. Perspective views were a little better.
One workaround solution takes several steps. In the graphic below I did a screen capture using SnagIt, copied it into a Word document, and then Printed to PDF. It is much nicer than printing to PDF from within Revit.
Wide-angle Interior Views
Another participant asked: “So I always have an issue with the view being skewed on the edges when I increase the far clip offset if it's a small room and the camera can't move too far back to get a proportionate view. How do I avoid the stretching of the view in such cases?
The easiest thing to do in this case is to move the camera outside the room and then hide the wall as shown in the following graphics.
Camera placed outside the room
Resulting View
Perspective view when the wall and door are temporarily hidden
Have fun making your Revit models “pretty”. Don't forget to visit the ASCENT YouTube channel to watch the full webinar Making Revit Models “Pretty”.
If you have any examples you would like to share you can post them in the comments below.
