Chapter 12

Presenting Your Design

As design professionals, we are deeply rooted in the art of representation and expression. Our
drawings are not just communication methods, they gain personal expression at our hands: Color,
contrast, light, and shadow are manipulated to give a drawing life and dramatic poise. From the
loose napkin sketch to the photorealistic rendering, we imbue our designs with a sense of purpose
and intent. This intent is a driving force in architecture and critical to its progression. Without
models and drawings that challenge the senses, that make us imagine the otherwise unimaginable,
where would we be today? For a moment, consider the drawings of Piranesi, Boullée, Wright,
Woods, and Hadid. Each is distinct, thoughtful, evocative—at times utopian. Consider your own
practice and your techniques—your role in shaping the built environment.
Think about how your drawings are interpreted, received, and understood. How do they shape
the evolution of a design? How have digital tools changed the way you present and evaluate a
design? Keep these questions in the back of your mind as we move through this chapter. Consider
how the techniques we look at can help you, and also think of how you might push some bound-
aries and extend your creativity using the tools available in Revit.
You’ve seen with Revit that many traditional documentation drawing types are generated on
the fly with little or no effort. With a few clicks of the mouse, you can generate entire building
sections and elevations. A perspective view takes a few seconds to generate. Revit does a fairly
good job of producing these drawings, but it can’t fully replace the skill and decision-making pro-
cess of an artist--design intent and the message still need to be considered by the designer, despite the
afforadaces provided by technology. Knowing this, Revit provides some tools to help you make your
drawings more legible and expressive. If need be, you can export a drawing as vector lines (

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Shadows tend to be used for two purposes: analytical (Figure 12.1) and expressive (Figure 12.2). For
analysis, shadows are used to see how a building will be affected by its environment and real-world
sun angles based on the location of the site. This analytic use is explored in depth in Chapter 14 and
is covered here primarily to introduce the shadowing tools. The expressive use of shadow, our

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focus in this discussion of presentation issues, conveys depth in drawings and gives them more
character; it may or may not be tied to real-world sun positions.
Revit provides a tool for both use cases, and you’ll see how to use each of these. The nice thing
about shadows in Revit is that it’s easy to enable them, and voila!—shadows are there.

Figure 12.1

Analytical use of
shadows in a site plan
shows the effect of
buildings on their
environment.

Figure 12.2

choose from a list of cities; the latitude and longitude are set for you automatically. If you don’t find
your city in the list, choose a nearby city, and then edit the latitude and longitude to match your
location.

Figure 12.3

Set your building
location using the
Manage Place And
Locations dialog.

You need to set your location only once in a project. This will affect all sun angle calculations.
To turn on shadows and see the effect of date, time, and location, choose the Shadows On option
from the view controls at the bottom of any view:

Enabling Shadows

Shadows are view specific. They appear in the view—but how are the shadows being drawn?
Where is the sun defined? To see how the light is being cast, you need to click the Advanced Model
Graphics option (Figure 12.4) where all the shadow settings are defined, including a direct link
back to the Manage Place And Locations dialog. From this dialog, you can access the Sun And

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and go from there, rather than editing the preset options. Or, if you really intend
to change the setting, go ahead and rename it to an appropriate and meaningful name.

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DRAWINGS WITH SHADOWS

399

Intensity

To get different graphic results, try experimenting with the Sun and Shadow intensities in the
Advanced Model Graphics dialog:
If you give the sun 100% intensity, the model appears brightly lit, and shadows appear more
subdued. Figure 12.6 shows the different effects that can be achieved by adjusting the intensity val-
ues. The sun only affects views set to Shading or Shading With Edges. In other words, for Hidden
Line views, you can only change the darkness of the shadows but not the intensity of the sun.

Figure 12.6

Adjust intensity to
get different graphic
results

To apply different settings to the same type of view, you need to duplicate the view and apply
different Sun settings using the Advanced Model Graphics dialog. Be aware that Sun settings
(shadows and intensity)

are


Figure 12.7

Sun locations in the
default template

The combination of Azimuth and Altitude with these presets produces 45° shadows on an
elevation.

High-Contrast Black and White Effects

Using Hidden Line display and increasing the shadows to 80–90 percent produces nice, high-
contrast elevations. As you can see in Figure 12.8, this is a great way to create visuals that will read
from far away.

Figure 12.8

High-contrast black
and white elevation

Soft Shadows

For a softer appearance, try using a Shading view (without edges) and setting Shadows to
30 percent and Sun to 70 percent. You’ll get a very even-colored, washed-out feel (Figure 12.9).
Shadows = 90%
Display mode = Hidden Line
model courtesy of
Felipe Manrique Diaz

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For example, you can create a department floor plan by assigning departments to all your rooms
and then apply a color fill scheme to the view that changes the color of rooms based on what depart-
ment they’re assigned to.
Sun = 70%
Shadow = 30%
Display mode = Shading

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Figure 12.10

Use color and
parameters
to generate
color-fill plans.

To make a color-coded plan, first duplicate an existing plan view. The colors are based on the
room element, so you need to place rooms in the plan before you can create a room color scheme.
You can also create new area plans, and use area separation lines to divide space at a more macro
scale, and then assign values to each area that can then be colored with a color fill scheme. You can
select any room and access its element properties. All of the properties in the Identity group can be
color-coded. Using project parameters, you can also add custom parameters to rooms. In the View


Information in this dialog is also used to fill out color-fill legends, which are essentially graph-
ical tags of the color scheme and are placed next to the plans to explain the color coding. The legend
shows the title, values, and color swatches for the scheme applied to a view. To place a legend in
a view, use the Color Scheme Legend command in the Drafting tab of the Design bar.
The color-scheme legend allows you to edit its type properties to control the visibility of the title,
swatch size, fonts, and color (Figure 12.12).

Figure 12.12

Color-scheme legend
properties

Note that the order of the values in the legend coincides with the order set up in the Edit Color
Scheme dialog. The default behavior lists each entry alphabetically, but you’re free to change that

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by using the Move Up/Move Down buttons when a row is selected. Doing so simultaneously
updates the color-scheme legend:
Another important graphical control of the legend is the Values Displayed parameter. This gives
you the option to show only values in the legend that are also in the view (By View). In a project

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COLOR-CODED PLANS AND SECTIONS

405

Colored Sections

In architectural practice, section views are often color-coded as well, showing the stacking of various
functional zones (Figure 12.13). In Revit, you can’t get automated coloring of the rooms in section
as you can in plan, so you need to use more traditional, methods to manually draw colored filled
regions and assign color to each region. Follow these steps:

1.

Open a section view.

2.

From the Drafting tab, choose the Filled Region tool (Revit’s definition for Hatch), and click
the Region Properties button on the Design bar. Select Edit/New, and then duplicate the
type—give it a name like

Transparent Fill

. Change the Fill Pattern setting to Solid Fill and
Background to Transparent, and choose a color.

3.


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Figure 12.13

Use transparent filled
regions with solid
color to color
section views.

Figure 12.14

Plan view with walls
and columns filled
with solid black

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