Revit Tip – Making use of Revit Parts

by Dennis Collin

I was asked a question recently about how to improve the join display between adjacent roof elements in a building. Although Revit has had dormer roof tools, they don’t often display the joins correctly or as users wish. Situations frequently result in something like the image below:

Fig 1. Revit doesn’t show dormer and primary roof joins correctly.

Where the dormer roof cuts through layers of the primary roof incorrectly, typically, materials should merge and join with other materials in each roof element. Unfortunately, Revit’s roof tools don’t have quite the same flexibility as the wall join tools, where different join types can be cycled until the correct solution is (usually) reached.

Fig 2. By using parts elements can be stretched, merged, divided, and hidden to show the correct design intent.

A workable solution is to make use of Revit’s parts. By modelling each slope of a roof as a separate component, these components can be converted to part elements. These parts can have control handles

enabled, and be adjusted, cut and merged until the correct solution is achieved.

Fig 3. By enabling shape handles individual parts can be manipulated

Unlike regular Revit components, users cannot join parts together; however, parts of the same material can be merged resulting in clean geometry joins as per the section box view below:

Fig 4. Roof parts of the same material can be merged or unmerged as desired.

Parts can also be used for awkward wall join situations, like party walls, roof – dormer cheek joins and other scenarios where the normal display of elements shows geometry incorrectly. This will be covered in a future post.