Understanding Phases and Phase Filters in Revit: A Comprehensive Guide

Setting Up Phases and Phase Filters in Revit Views: An Essential Step for Project Development

Learn how to set up views and phase settings for creating a construction model. This article will guide you through setting up the phases, understanding the functions of the phase settings and how to manage the timeline within a project.

Key Insights

  • The article provides a detailed guide on setting up views and phase settings which are crucial when creating a construction model. It emphasizes the importance of correct phase settings, how they affect the elements and the need to set up the views phase and the views phase filter properly.
  • It explains how different phases, such as existing or new construction, can have different effects on the model. For instance, elements in the new construction phase take on the object styles of a particular view, whereas elements in the existing phase can be overridden. It also mentions the possibility of managing multiple phases based on a project's needs.
  • The article also points out the significance of managing timelines within a project. It cautions against using phases to divide different parts of a project, as it can lead to complications. Instead, it suggests managing two simultaneous happenings based on the timeline.

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Now that we have the view set up that we're going to use to create our model, we're going to go ahead and make sure we have the phase settings correctly. So before we dive into that, it really helps to understand what we're meaning by phase. And so to look at that a little bit closer, we're going to go ahead and we're going to jump to the manage tab.

And we're going to look for phases in here. You can see that we have the defaults, which is existing and new construction. And we're going to be working on the existing phase by default.

Most of the views that you have created are going to be set to work on the new construction phase. Now this is important because we want to make sure we have two things set up properly. The views phase, and then the views phase filter.

Now these things come into play for a few things. First off, you can see here based on the name of the filter, we have what happens to the elements that are on each one of these phases. If I am working on the new construction phase and I'm using previous plus new, all elements that are part of that new construction phase are going to be by category, meaning they're going to take on the object styles of that particular view.

So they're not going to be overridden. Existing is going to be overridden. Demolished is going to be displayed or not displayed and temporary is not going to be not displayed.

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When we see something like overridden here, that means this tab, the graphic overrides tab is going to control what it looks like, and you can see the settings for each of these things here, and we're going to dive into this in a later video a little bit more, but I think it's important to see the overview really quickly. So back to phases, you can certainly add more to this. I've had projects that have up to 10 sometimes based on the needs of the, of the client.

And so sometimes we'll just have existing and new. Sometimes we'll have existing new phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four, whatever it may be for that particular project, it's also important to note that this is a timeline. This is not necessarily defining the different scopes within a project.

If you have two different things happening at the same time, you might want to manage that based on timeline and not use this as a way of dividing two different parts of a project. Cause that can get really messy really quickly. As far as phase filters go, when we're dealing with existing, which we're going to be doing pretty soon here, we don't really have to worry about it too much, but when we get into the new construction and the demo, that's when we're going to need to be worrying about it, speaking of demo, you may have noticed that we don't have a demo phase here and that's because it's activity that occurs within the new construction phase, and we'll also dive into that a little bit later.

So enough chatting about it. Let's go ahead and take a look at what settings we need to use for these, these views we've created. So I'm gonna hit.

Okay. A few things I want you to pay attention to these tags here. If I were to be on my existing level one view and scroll all the way down, you can see I have phase and phase filter.

So two things are being phased here. We have our views, which have the view settings. And then each of our elements are going to have phase created and phase demolished settings.

For right now, we're going to go ahead and change this phase from new construction to existing, because that is the phase we're using for this view. And remember I was saying, pay attention to those elevation tags. Notice how they've gone away, but the views are still there.

And those went away because they don't exist yet. They're part of the new construction phase. So they have not been created.

If I do the same thing with our level two view, just by clicking on the view in the project browser, I can change it to existing. You can see here that the views look the same and we'll be able to work from it. If I were to go to this level one view, which is still set to new construction.

You can see that those exist, but if I were to just draw some walls in here. Just randomly. If I go back to my existing level one, notice those walls don't exist because they have not been created in the timeline of existing versus new in this case.

But if I were to draw walls in this view, you can see that they're being clipped by those future future walls. And they do show up here. But when we look at the graphic overrides, notice how existing walls are showing different than the new construction ones that I created.

And that has everything to do with the phase filters that we have applied. If I change this one to previous plus new, which is the typical new construction view, we can see that the phase filter for previous plus new, when I go back to it again, previous plus new existing is going to be overridden based on the graphic overrides that we see here. When I look at existing graphic overrides are going to change the lines to this gray color here.

photo of Michael Wilson

Michael Wilson

Revit Instructor

Bachelor of Architecture, Registered Architect

Mike is recognized by Autodesk as one of North America’s leading Revit Certified Instructors. He has significant experience integrating Revit, 3ds Max, and Rhino and uses Revit Architecture on medium and large-scale bio and nano-tech projects. Mike has been an integral member of the VDCI team for over 15 years, offering his hard-charging, “get it done right” approach and close attention to detail. In his spare time, Mike enjoys spending time outdoors with his wife, children, and dog.

  • Autodesk Certified Instructor (ACI GOLD – 1 of 20 Awarded Globally)
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