Revit Architecture 2017 – Placing Basic Mass Elements

By John Flanagan

My previous blog gave an overview of massing for preliminary design. This blog looks at the basic mass elements that ship with Revit.

The most basic building blocks of massing are the mass families that come with Revit. They include standard building block shapes that can be resized using their element properties. They are loaded and used in a project. If no massing families have been loaded in the project, you are prompted to load them from the Mass folder in the Library.

If you know you will use these families in your massing studies, you might want to preload them into a template. Figure 1 shows some of the basic mass forms.

Fig 1: Basic Mass Elements

Modifying Basic Mass Elements

You can use shape handles to change the sizes of the mass elements in plans and elevations.

• The shape handle in the centre flips the Work Plane                                                

• If you want to move an existing mass element to a different workplane, click Edit Work Place in the Modify Mass Conceptual tab>Work Place panel, and specify the new workplane in the Work Plane Dialogue box.

Mass Element Properties

To make more precise changes to a mass element, you can make changes in Element Properties.

Conclusion

In my next blog, we will look at the different methods to apply materials to mass elements.

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