By Dennis Collin
The Parts feature came with the release of Revit 2012. In Revit, you can divide elements into smaller parts.
Parts can be generated from elements with layered structures, such as:
Walls (excluding stacked walls and curtain walls)
Floors (excluding shape-edited floors)
Roofs (excluding those with ridge lines)
Ceilings
Structural foundation slabs
The idea of dividing into parts is for scheduling and tagging purpose. For example we would like to separate a floor slab for different concrete pours. (A common practice in construction) This also means we can deliver schedule report in more detail, and also flexibility to work with smaller parts. This information can then be taken through to Navisworks or similar products to demonstrate construction sequencing.
To enable parts select your slab or wall and click the Enable Parts button on the ribbon.
The user can then select each component and divide the part either by references, Levels, Grids or (named) Reference Planes... Or editing by a sketch, which allows for more bespoke shapes.
By default the original component will be turned off and the separated construction parts will be shown. To customise other views, to display original elements, or parts or both can be set via the property dialogue.
In the above image the user is drawing sketched lines to break a slab part into different segments.
After finishing the sketch the slab will be shown as separate shapes as shown. This can be seen when generating a parts schedule. Said schedule can be filtered to just show desired categories if necessary.
This tool could also be used to provide nice look 3d detail views also..
NB. remember to lock 3D view before applying tags!
