Revit Tip: Producing Sketchy Elevations or Sections

by Dennis Collin

There is often a need in the initial stages of a project, to produce drawings that have a hand drawn effect. These sketchy drawings are just intended to convey the design in a more personal and emotional way than hard crisp computer-generated drawings.

The soft fluid nature of watercolour and approximate linework can create a visually pleasing and atmospheric representation of a design without getting bogged down in the early design stage with fabrication details.

In the past using AutoCAD there were add-on products like Squiggle and M-Color, but in the world of Revit these tools aren’t available so how can manually sketched looking output be produced from conceptual models without recreating it in pure graphical products like Illustrator and Photoshop?

Fig 1. Revit is ideal for quickly producing crisp, coordinated drawings

Whilst not a perfect or complete solution Revit certainly can make drawings look more like conceptual illustrations and if necessary be exported to have finishing touches applied by graphical programs.

Thinking outside of the box, fonts can be easily used as a form of clip art. For birds and other graphical elements custom fonts can be installed and applied to a text style.

Fig 2. A slight improvement with some graphical embellishments but needs more work!

Revit has a collection of planting families that are connected to the Archvision RPC plug-in. By setting the visual style to realistic, it provides some much-needed colour to the view, albeit perhaps a little too realistic and finalised.

Therefore , to create a more natural water coloured look, some custom backgrounds need to be added to the view to create a more conceptual cartoon look.

Fig 3. Adding a water-coloured background to a view improves the image immensely.

Once some suitable images have been obtained, a water colour sky image can be set as the section background. This is achieved via the graphical display manager, figure 3.

There are a range of resources online that provide images for free or for a cost, or they can be created using any graphics program and saved out to a suitable hi resolution JPG or PNG format.

For the walls and other surfaces some custom materials can also be created, using water-coloured styled images, scaled appropriately, and applied at a Paint on surface override. Alternatively, I duplicated Revit’s out-of-the-box precast concrete material and adjusted a few settings to provide a variable shaded surface look and applied it to relevant sections of walls. Use the split face tool to help reduce any kind of repeating texture artifact.

For conceptual sketch views, information such as grids or levels are generally not required, so turn off any categories that aren’t needed, but leave the text category on for the birds!

Fig 4. Getting there, just some final graphical tweaks to add!

The last view adjustments will be conducted via the Graphical Display manager.

Fig 5a. These graphical display options can be varied to suit the specific project.

As well as setting the visual style to realistic, set the options to show edges with applied line smoothing for a more natural effect. With silhouettes medium lines are applied to provide a more defined edge.

Shadows and Ambient Shadows are enabled to provide a bit of contrast and depth to the image.

For a more hand drawn look, sketchy lines are applied with a jitter value of 3 and an extension value of 2. Higher values will result in a ‘messier output’, but feel free to adjust values to suit individual situations.

Fig 5b. Additional settings applied to soften the image and shadow intensity.

For most drawings of this type, a distance fade is required, this can be achieved by applying depth cueing to create a misty haze effect. Adjust near and far options to adjust the level and intensity of ‘mist’. The default shadow settings are too stark, but reducing the shadow value to about 20-25 will be sufficient in most situations. Adjust the sun and ambient light settings to suit the background image and possible cloud cover.

Fig 5c. Adjust the settings or leave as default according to individual project circumstances.

For a more natural look, set the exposure to a manual configuration with an exposure value of about 12 which is fine for exterior scenes or values of about 8 – 10 for interior locations, exact values will depend upon light sources. If further adjustment is required, experiment with the colour correction dialogue to enrich or dull the final image output as needed.

If the resultant output is satisfactory, create a view template so Revit will remember the applied settings. These settings could be saved in a project template and become a standard preset for any future projects.

Fig 6. Our section is starting to look pretty!

The final step is to show our ground as more as a water-coloured paint area rather than the sterile looking hatch provided by the default material appearance.

Fig 7a.  If the ground plane is to look hand drawn a second view is required!

Fig 7b. In the below ground section only the raster image background is displayed.

To enable this, duplicate the section view. Our final drawing will comprise of two section views. One will show the building and site above ground with a sky background etc. The second will just show an image of the ground. These two views will be composited onto a sheet for printing or export.

Fig 8. Arranging the views on the sheet

On a suitable sheet drag the two views onto the sheet. Disable the title for the ground plane view and crop the views to suit drawing extents.

Fig 9. The completed view!

The technique listed here works for section and elevation views. If similar outputs are required for 3D or plan views some of the tools discussed here are not supported within Revit e.g. Depth Cueing and the application of background images. Although these effects could always be added as postproduction in another program.

All the standard families shown here such as the trees are Revit’s standard OOTB (out of the box) RPC tree families.

The bird font (Birds of a feather.ttf) used for the background can be accessed here.

The watercolour images can be made by most graphics programs, but it’s worth checking out some sample libraries here for ground and sky backdrops.

I also wish to provide a credit to the person inspiring me to write this post. Check out BIM Edin’s YouTube channel. There is some great content there. Do check it out!

Features like view filters, view templates, Tips and Tricks along with project template setup are some of the topics covered on our range of Revit training courses. For more information visit https://arkance.world/gb-en/training or ask a question on the Live Chat facility where we can provide more help.