Showing Ceiling Grids on Floor Plans

So this video is about showing ceiling grids on floor plans. So for some kind of nerdy reasons, Revit doesn't Revit kind of struggles to show ceiling grids the way we really want to. So here's a floor plan. This is my m one zero one, just normal mechanical floor plan. And as you can see, there's no ceiling grid shown on this, but we do see the furniture, we see the doors, we see the windows, we see everything the way we want.

We would just like to have ceiling grids on this view. It turns out the only way to get ceiling grids to show up in this view would be to change the cut plane and to bring it up higher so that you can see the ceiling grid. But if you do that, then you wouldn't see the furniture, you wouldn't see the doors and some other things. So that's not an option. Revit does have a view type called mechanical RCPs.

We have these in the template, but it's also not really quite what we want. Again, because the cut plane is higher just the way the view range works, we're not seeing the furniture. The way doors cut, it it has these lines which we can live with but not ideal, and it it's a little funky. So sometimes the reflected ceiling plan view type is what you want. It it suffices, but other times you don't.

Other times what you really want is actually just to show the ceiling grids on a floor plan. Well, I'm gonna show you a workflow now that works for doing this on your sheets. And so this project that I'm in the projects, it does not have the grid only views in it. Current templates have been updated. So if you've got a newer version of the template, you will have views under this category that will say like mech ceiling grid only o one.

So you can just use those. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to make that view. It's quite easy so that you will also understand the full process here. So this is my RCP. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna right click duplicate this view, and I'm gonna rename this and call this mech ceiling grid only one.

Close it with the RCP. Then I'm gonna go into the, into VG. Actually, first, I'm gonna take the view template off. And in the template, there's a view template for grid only. But just to make this simple, I'm gonna turn the view template off, and go into visibility graphics and I'm gonna turn off all categories, all model categories except for ceilings. I'm gonna turn off all annotation categories except for reference planes. And then in Revit links, I'm gonna make sure that, the architectural link model is set to have by host view. If you have other link models, probably just turn those off. Alright. So that's all I need to do there.

So now all I see is the ceiling grids and I also see my reference planes. So in this project, I previously drew reference planes and those are the intersection of grid line one and d here. So I can just do that. If you haven't done that yet in a project that you're working on, you can just add them. That's RP for reference plane and draw it there.

Okay. So I've got my floor plan view on my floor plan sheet. I've got my max ceiling grid only view. What I'm going to do is simply drag and drop it, onto this sheet into the sheet space, and I'm just pulling it over here so you can see what's happening. So I've got my, ceiling grid view.

By automatically, it populates it with a view title. We don't want that, so we just come up here to properties and save view port none. So now we just got some floating ceiling grids, and then I'm going to click that once to select it. I'm gonna enter the move tool, gonna select there at that reference plane intersection, gonna move it there, And we now have ceiling grids on our floor plan, and it looks good. And so I've still got that ceiling plan, selected, and I'm going to pin it, p n to pin, and we we would like both of these to be pinned.

And now if you wanna select one or the other, if you look down here in the lower left, I'm gonna mouse over the view. So I've mouse over it and you see it says view port none. I'm gonna hit tab, and now it's it's saying viewport scaled number and sheet reference. So the viewport none is the ceiling plan because remember I just put it to view to no viewport, and the one with scaled number and sheet reference, that is the view that is the view of my actual floor plan. So not only can you have your sheets display in this way, but you can work in this environment.

So I'm gonna unpin that. No. Actually, don't need to unpin it. I'm just going to select it and then double click it and now I'm actually in the view, my floor plan view and I can model and I'm seeing the ceiling grid here. So if you wanna model in a floor plan in a sheet view with the ceiling grid, you can here on a sheet by selecting it and going in activating view. So that is, the workflow for this. It's actually quite simple and easy. It solves a few headaches. It seems like a hack. When I first heard about it, thought, no way.

This is hacked. There's gotta be a better way. I haven't found one to date. If you come up with a better way that solves the issues of visibility of different elements, let me know. Till then, this is the recommended way to show ceiling grids on floor plans.