Using object styles

- [Voiceover] As you work through your projects in Revit you will find many times where you wish to change the way various items display on screen and in your final output. There's various tools available in the software to make such changes both globally or across the entire project and in more specific an isolated ways. So each of the movies in this chapter will start with a much more global approach and then with each movie we'll get progressively more specific and kind of drill down to vary isolated and sort of special case overrides that we can apply. So I'm gonna begin in this movie with a command called Object Styles.

And this is sort of our global control panel for all of the graphical settings in the software. Now I'm looking at a section view right now and what I want to do is zoom in over here in the joint condition between this exterior wall, the floor, and the ceiling. And kind of talk about one of the issues that might prompt you to go into Object Styles. So as you can see the outline of the wall is a little bit bolder than the outline of either the floor slab or the ceiling plane.

Now there are various ways we can adjust that. And is sometimes tempting to sort of dive right in and select the floor, and look for some way to modify it. But what I want you to do is resist the urge to immediately go in and start attacking a problem at a specific object. I want you to kind of back up and assess the problem first and think about first of all, is it something that is more broad reaching and can I solve it in a more global way. And so, what I mean by that is that if I kind of zoom out here and we look around. What we actually see is that all of the floors are kind of displaying that way.

And then over here we got this little thing and that's actually a small wall that's like a small little soffit wall here to close off the ceiling. And we start to see that this is a broader problem. Now if we opened up another section like perhaps this transverse section and we zoom in. We see that the problem is not isolated to just the longitudinal section it actually occurs everywhere. So, this is a job for Object Styles. So let's talk about where we can get that command and what we can do with it. So I'm gonna go over here to the manage tab and on the settings panel we have lots of different settings we can configure and the Object Styles command is right here.

Now this will display a multitab dialog with a list of all of the categories in Revit. Now it's organized into model objects, annotation objects, and so on. So we are gonna focus on model objects because that's what we're seeing here in these various section views. And as you can see if you scroll through this list here all the various model categories are listed here. So there also is a filter list here at the top where you can actually deselect certain disciplines if you want to and that will actually shorten the list and remove certain categories from the list.

Now we're gonna focus on the architectural discipline because that's where we'll find the ceilings and the floors and the walls. So make sure that you keep at least architectural checked but if you wanna uncheck some of the other disciplines you're welcome to do that. So let me go ahead and select ceilings here and then let's talk about the settings that are actually in here. There's a line weight column. And that line weight column branches two sub columns. Projection and Cut. And what we can see is that ceilings has both the Projecting and the Cut at the moment, set to a pen weight one. Now if I click in either of those fields and I open up that little drop down list, what you're gonna see is there's one through sixteen.

So they get progressively bolder as you go. So most of the time you're gonna see pen weights maybe one through five. In occasion you might see a six used for most of the settings. It would be rare to see something higher than a six or a seven. Perhaps maybe on the borders of a title block but that's about it. You'd almost never see a 10 or 12 or 16 but there available. Ok and those are just very very fat lines. But if we kind of scroll through the list here you can see that most of the Projections settings are either one or two.

And then the Cut settings occasionally we'll see a three. And if I continue to scroll down here and I locate walls we could see that's at three. Notice that topography is at six. So when we cut through topography you can actually see it right here in the background. There's a really bold line there when we cut through the ground plane. So that's appropriate for topography because we really want our building to feel grounded. We want it to sit on something substantial. So putting a nice heavy pen weight there makes a certain amount of sense. But what I want to do in this case is I want to take a queue from the walls we can see here in the background the walls had this certain level of boldness when we zoomed in.

And I want to match that with the floor and the ceiling. So what I'm gonna do is come over here and locate the Floor and Ceiling categories. Here's the Floors, and I'll just simply change this to a pen weight three. I'm changing that in the Cut column because we are in a section view and we are actually cutting through those elements. The projection is when you're seeing it off in the distance. So we're not actually seeing the floors or the ceilings off in the distance at the moment. And then let me find the ceiling again and do the same thing there.

And change that to pen weight three. Now line color is fairly obvious, right? You could change the color of the edges of those objects if you want to. The line pattern is whether it's a solid line or a dash line. And if you look here you can see that there's lots of choices. We're gonna leave those settings alone. Let's click OK. And let me zoom back in on this joint here. And as you can see now the pen weights match for the ceiling for the floor and for the wall. And if I reopen that transverse section and zoom in.

You're gonna see that the same is true here. So when you apply a change at the Objects Style level it's actually gonna apply across the entire project. So it's really important to get Object Styles to your liking first. Because that is actually gonna solve most of the problems because they apply globally. Now often firms have office standards so there's a pretty good chance that the Object Styles have already been configured in your firm template by some CAD or BIM manager that works in your firm.

But if that's not the case you can spend a little time in there going through and kind of configuring them to your liking first before you consider doing any of the overrides that we are gonna talk about in the next several movies.