Understanding symbolic lines - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, I want to talk to you about symbolic lines. Symbolic lines are two-dimensional linework that you can add to a family to represent details that only show in a view that's parallel to the view that it was created in. Good example of this is doors. If you think about the way that we symbolically represent things in architectural communication, we often extract them at different kinds of views to focus on certain aspects, and door's is a great example of this. Here we're using an arch for the door swing, and in the elevation, we're using this dashed diagonal line, and neither of those is actually showing in a 3D model. In the 3D model, we're actually just seeing the door geometry. Furthermore, notice the door is actually closed in 3D, but it looks like it's open here in the Plan view. So symbolic lines allow us to achieve those things. Now there's other examples of symbolic lines in this file as well. If you look at the toilets and some of the plumbing fixtures, they are simplified from what you would actually see if you just look down on the 3D model, so often you'll see symbolic lines used in place of more complicated or more detailed 3D geometry. So I'm going to focus on the door here. And I'll select this existing door family. And I've just tiled it in these three views just so that we can see it clearly. And I want to make sure that I'm in the Floor Plan here when I do this next step and edit the family because I want the family to open in that larger tile. So if yours opens up in one of the smaller tiles, you can just sort of drag it over here. Now this is the 3D view of this particular family. Now that I'm in the family, I can go over here to the Project Browser and I can expand Floor Plans and it's got its own views like Ref Level Floor Plan, and I'll double-click to open that up. Now I'm going to zoom in here on the Floor Plan, and this particular family's a little more complicated that what I described, so it's going to throw us a small curveball here. If I hover over the door swing, it doesn't actually say symbolic line, what it says instead is that it's another door. So it's actually possible to nest doors or any family for that matter inside of one another. So in this case, there's a 2D version of the door family nested inside the 3D version of the door family. So we're going to have to repeat the steps and edit it again. That takes us to the 3D view of that family which doesn't really show very much of what we want to see. So one more time. I'm going to go to Project Browser and expand, and then Floor Plans and expand, and then double-click its Ref Level Floor Plan to open it up, and then we finally get to the geometry that I want to show you which is this arc swing right here is actually a symbolic line. And the door panel itself is actually a detail item called a Masking Region, and these behave kind of the same way as symbolic lines. So whether or not it's a symbolic line, or a masking, or a filled region, they're just 2D geometry that will only display in views parallel to the one they're drawn in. So in this case, all of this has been drawn in a Floor Plan view, so that's where we're going to see it back in our project is in any of our Floor Plans. I don't need to do anything in this particular nested family so I'm going to do Control + W to close it. It'll ask me if I want to Save. I'm going to say No. There's nothing that I want to Save there. That takes me back to the parent family. And then here you can see that we've got an Exterior side and an Interior side. And I want to do a quick example here on the Interior side. So I'm going to expand the Elevations, and then double-click the Interior Elevation to get a look at that view. Now here it's a little simpler because the symbolic lines are drawn directly in this view. There is no nested family here for that. That's a simpler way of understanding how the symbolics come into play here. So what I want to do is let's pretend that we wanted to swap out these two doors here in the toilet rooms with the door that has a louver. Now you might argue that the proper way to do that is to actually create an actual louver element in the door. So cut a hole in the door panel, fill it in with a real louver object that's made with 3D geometry, and you certainly could do that. But you could also argue that that adds more overhead than we need and all we really need to do is suggest that there's a louver there and that should be good enough. So in this example, I'm going to show you how we could do that using symbolic lines. Now I'm actually going to use two kinds of lines. I'm going to use both model lines and symbolic lines just to kind of show you that a model line is another way that you can simplify geometry and suggest that something's there without getting super carried away. So maybe in the 3D, I want to just kind of suggest that there's a louver there, but then I want to show the more detailed version of that in the 2D elevation. So to get started, I'm going to go to the Create panel, and here's Model Line, but because model lines are actually part of the model, it's as if you're literally painting those lines on the surfaces, you need to set a Work Plane. So I'm going to do Set Work Plane. I'll use the Pick a plane option here and click OK. And then I want to set the Work Plane on the panel itself, the door panel itself. Then I'll come over here to Model Line, click the Rectangle tool, and I'll just sort of eyeball a suggestion of where this louver is and about how big it is. You can make yours more precise if you like to, but I'm not really too concerned with the size right now. So there's my basic louver. Now I'm going to switch to symbolic lines. So here on the Annotate tab, I'll click the Symbolic Line tool. Now I get all the same shapes over here, I'll just stick with the simple Line, and I'll draw in a couple of them to get started. And then it might more a little more quickly if I use my Copy tool. So I'll select the one that I just did there, use Copy. Make sure I've turned on Multiple copies, and then pick a good base point, and then make several copies here. Now you certainly could add more detail here, but I think this is enough to suggest what we have here. And what we're going to do now is Save this family. But I don't want to Save over the existing family, because that would actually replace every family in my project with louvers, and I'm only interested in louvers in these two locations. So what I want to do instead is perform a Save As. So I'm going to go to File, Save As, and then Family. And it's going to try and save it to the original folder, I'm going to put it on my Desktop and give it a new name. So I'm just going to add with louver to the end of the name here and Save it. So now this is a brand-new family, and what I want to do now is load this into my project to try it out. So I'm going to come over here and click the Load Into Project button. And you see how that switches back over to my Floor Plan view from the project? And it actually puts me in the door command. So it's trying to create a new door. Well, I don't want to create a new door, so I'm going to click the Modify tool to cancel. I want to instead select these two existing doors and change those to the new one that I just created. So notice that it's here on the list. I'll pick an appropriate size, and then if we look here in the 3D view, you can now see just the outline of where the louver is, if we look in the Elevation view you can see all the individual louver blades suggested by the symbolic lines. And we do have one small problem there in the Floor Plan view. Because the outline of the rectangle is actually a model line in 3D, it's showing in plan as well. So I left the file open in the background. What I'll do is just go back to that Interior view. So then I'll hover over the edge here and I'll press Tab, and I see I got a little problem there because it's only selecting three of the edges, so I think what happened was I ended up making one extra symbolic line that I didn't need. Do you see it right there? So I'm going to actually delete that one, and that leaves the model line underneath. Now I'll press Tab and it selects all four. So that's what I want. And then with those four selected, there's a Visibility Settings button here up in the ribbon, I'm going to click that and I just simply uncheck PlanRCP. So what I'm saying is this 3D geometry, these model lines in this case, I only want to see in 3D views and Elevations, I don't want to see it in Floor Plans. And I'll click OK. And then let's load that back into the project. Here, I'm going to Overwrite, and you're going to see the lines disappear in the two Floor Plan versions, but they stay in the 3D. That's a really simple example of how you can start to add simplified linework, both model lines and symbolic lines, to suggest detail that you don't really think is worth modeling in full 3D geometry.