Best Practices for Film and Stage

Best practices for using Revit in the film and stage industries may have a lot in common with standard architectural practices, but sometimes they'll be significantly different. We'll cover both the similarities and the differences in the following sections.

Level of Detail

As mentioned earlier, the level of detail that you will model in these types of projects will greatly exceed what is customary in a standard architectural project, where a high resolution of detail is either not necessary for construction or is resolved in 2D with detail components during documentation. In this industry, modeling generically in 3D and then attempting to show more detail in 2D can be a distraction to an exacting art director. So don't be surprised if you're expected to model to less than an inch in detail—and expect what you model to be a fairly literal representation of what will be built.

Geometric Flexibility

Maintaining flexibility during design is critical to a successful project because once production starts, everything starts moving quickly. Use generic representations of an approximate size and category. As the design progresses, you can easily swap these design placeholders out for more specific elements.

Design Alternatives

In the film and stage industries, phasing and design options will also be used in 3D and documentation views to illustrate alternatives where pieces of the set need to convey some sort of movement—for example, if an object needs to be opened and closed or extended and retracted. In this case, simply assigning a unique phasing or design option to those elements will allow you to filter the views to only show one condition or another at a time.

In the case of the Comedian's (Eddie Blake's) apartment in Watchmen, phasing was used to illustrate the shattered curtain panel. The existing panel was unbroken, while the proposed panel was shown in the broken state (Figure 26.31).

FIGURE 26.31 Use phasing or design options to show alternatives.

Nesting Geometry

Nesting is extremely useful for creating a component once and then using it in many different components (Figure 26.32). The advantage is that it's significantly faster (sometimes more than 95 percent faster in some cases) to update family components rather than groups. Keep in mind that a lot of the elements that you'll model will themselves contain nested components. This allows you to manage and update repetitive relationships quickly (Figure 26.33).

FIGURE 26.32 Nesting showing the door open in VIKI brain, I, Robot

Family Category

Choosing the right family category is also important, but not in a way that often comes up in standard architecture practice (“Hmm...furniture or furniture system?”). Most of the time, the Generic Model category will suffice. But there remain a couple of subcategories that are really important.

FIGURE 26.33 Nested components in VIKI brain, I, Robot

First, you will have to select a Lighting category if you anticipate using the component to render lighting effects. Second, use face based rather than hosted.

Either face-based or hosted components can cut their host. With a face-based family, you need to model a void to cut the face, whereas with a hosted family, you must add an opening or a void. That's not so much of a difference, right?

Wrong. If you select hosted, you need to also know what kind of host is going to be cut (Wall, Floor, Roof, or Ceiling). But in this industry, what is a floor one moment might be a ceiling the next. And what is a wall today may turn out to be a roof later! So, specifically selecting a hosted category (which requires you to know what sort of host is going to be cut) can lead to disastrous results when the design changes (and it will...a lot)! Using a face-based family avoids this nasty consequence.

Another reason is that face-based families will easily orient themselves to the face of either component or system families, whether in the project or in a nested family environment.

Finally, a face-based family can cut the face of both system families (in a project environment) as well as when nested into another component family. Overall, face-based families offer a lot of flexibility during the design process.

Keep in mind that in many cases nested components are likely to end up in multiple families as well as in the project environment. This adds another layer of complexity when you find yourself in the awkward situation of having to open and edit multiple families in order to make whole project changes to a nested component. This is where sharing the parameters of the nested components will save you a lot of time and trouble.

Here's how: If you expect that the nested family is going to be nested into other families—or used directly in the project—you'll want to consider setting the Family parameter of the nested family to Shared (Figure 26.34).

FIGURE 26.34 Select Shared in the Family parameters.

Simply select the originally nested component and edit its Category And Parameters setting. Select the Shared option and then reload this nested component in your family. The next time this family (containing the nested and shared component) is loaded into your project, both the component and the nested/shared component are loaded into the project. Whenever you edit this special shared/nested family (from either the project or one of the many families it's nested into), it will update everywhere in the project.

Advanced Geometry Creation

Modeling complex forms in Revit often differs from modeling in other 3D applications. Think of sculpture. First you can create something by building a formwork and then casting what you want within that form. This is an additive approach.

In Revit, the process, sculpturally speaking, is more subtractive. In other words, the complex form that you're trying to create is going to be accomplished by creating more geometry than necessary and then carving away the results with a void. This can be accomplished by building up layers of geometry (and perhaps joining them). But when you add voids, selectively cut only certain layers of the geometry.

See Figure 26.35 for a simple example. Although the family looks complicated, it is composed of only five elements: two solids and three voids. This file is also available for download from the Chapter 26 folder as the c26 Complex Cube.rfa file.

FIGURE 26.35 Creating complex forms through layering geometry and voids

Carving geometry to resolve a desired shape is a simple technique but absolutely essential for being able to quickly create and (more important) to iterate complex forms in Revit, such as the airlock door in Figure 26.36. According to Bryan, nonlinear solid/void relationships give Revit the edge over other more generic modeling tools (Figure 26.37).

FIGURE 26.36 Single section of the airlock door

FIGURE 26.37 Completed airlock door, Fantastic Four

The file of the airlock door (c26 Airlock Door.rvt) is also available for download from the Chapter 26 folder. It's a great example of using overlapping solids and selectively placed voids to cut away portions of geometry while leaving adjacent solid geometry intact. This technique was skillfully used to cut away the reveals that surround the airlock door (Figure 26.38).

FIGURE 26.38 Final rendering of the airlock door assembly, Fantastic Four

Worksharing

Worksets are typically not needed in the film and stage industries unless the project is large or contains a campus-like collection of other Revit projects. Although this atmosphere is highly collaborative, it's also task-centric—one person dedicated to working on one part of the project or file is not uncommon. So, using worksharing to distribute Revit files across multiple team members is not common.