Monday, September 15, 2008

Curtain Walls Part I

There is one big difference to a curtain wall and a basic wall as far as Revit is concerned. You can’t host a regular door to a curtain wall nor can you host a curtain wall door to a basic wall. The reason is because a curtain wall has no core boundary. In fact the parameter to edit the structure doesn’t exist. There are 3 curtain wall types that exist right out of the box, Curtain Wall 1, Exterior Glazing, and Storefront. The next three post will discuss each one. Curtain Wall 1 is the most basic curtain wall out of the three. This curtain wall comes with no curtain grids and therefore no mullions. You create it the same way you would create a basic wall. Select the wall button on the design bar and choose Curtain Wall - Curtain Wall 1 from the Type Selector. On the Options Bar you can adjust the options to suit your needs. Notice that you can’t change the location line. Wall centerline is selected by default and grayed out, but all other options are the same as a basic wall. Once placed you’ll notice it’s just a wall of glazing. You’ll first need to add curtain grids to be able to add mullions later. You can go about this a couple different ways. First you can click on the Modeling tab of the design bar and select the Curtain Grid button. Place your cursor over the edge of the glazing and left click to place. If you hover over the middle of the Curtain Wall you’ll notice your cursor snaps to the middle of the wall. The cursor snaps to one third and two thirds of the wall as well. After placing the curtain grids you can select each one individually and adjust it using the temporary dimensions. The other way is to go to the Element Properties → Type Parameters to change the look of the wall there. Here you have the ability to change the layout of the vertical and horizontal curtain grids as well as the mullion type for the curtain wall. You should know however, that by using this method you are pinning the curtain grids to their specific locations. You can still move them using their temporary dimensions, but you’ll have to unpin them first. Remember, if your curtain wall has a radius to it, it will look straight until you add curtain grids. It’s a segmented radius like you might expect from a curtain wall. So there you have it. If you’ve never created a curtain wall before, this should help you. If you have, I hope you learned something new.

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RevitED (Revit Education) and general BIM topics. I've been using Revit now for 11 years, and though I feel I've got a pretty good handle on the software it seems each day I learn something new. I want to share that with the readers of this blog and hope you learn something new as well.