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Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Revit Challenge: Demo Hole in Existing Floor

Need to demolish a portion of existing floor in Revit? It is not as easy as it should be. The result should be something like adding a new door in an existing wall; in existing views there is no hole in the wall, or any sign of the area to be removed. It should look, existing.

This post will quickly cover the various options one might try. But none of them are perfect. I hope a few readers will comment on what they do...

The three main ways of adding a hole in an otherwise monolithic existing floor is:

  • Edit boundary
  • Shaft element
  • Void family

Let talk about them...
Edit Boundary
In the plans and sections below, you can see Edit Boundary knows no boundaries when it comes to phasing. However, adding another floor within this area and setting that filler element to be demolished is easy. But the existing does not look exactly right, as the perimeter of the area to be demolished still appears. But we do not often have existing plans in our drawings. However, the demo plans do not show a dashed line indicating something need to happen.

Shaft element
Using Revit's shaft element seems like the logical choice. It even has phase parameters as shown in the penultimate iamge below. However... a New Construction element still shows up in an existing view, meaning the hole incorrectly persists in all phases.
Revit Ideas: Please take a moment and vote for this Revit Idea to fix the phasing issues around openings: Ability to phase wall openings (demolishing in new phase)
Void family
This option is a family which mainly contains a void; I also added lines which can be toggled on and off to make it easy to see/select when need (see last image). This option looks correct in an exiting view and shows a demolished floor in section, but dashed lines are lacking in the demo plan which would require the Linework tool, perhaps.





The Shaft element does have phase properties but they don't work.


My "void" family can be used in conjunction with the Modify\Cut command to define a hole in a floor, or anything. There is a type property that toggles on/off linework to aid in seeing and selecting the void when needed.


I look forward to hearing how you handle this in the comments below.

BTW, a similar "void family" was used to expose the new underground utilizes desinged by LHB for this urban street renewal project. In this case, I could move the void up 100' and the "trench" would go away. NVIDIA wrote a customer success story on this project: How VR Is Helping Revitalize Downtown Duluth. Image: Revit model rendered in Ensacpe.



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