Color Schemes R2008

So there was some big improvements in Revit 2008 in regard to how easy it was to create color schemes. Unfortunately it contains a rather big bug that Autodesk have managed to mostly fix in the 2009 release. So what’s the bug?



Plan before color schemes are turned on.

Color Scheme turned on. - Furniture form the lovel below is showing through.

Well, it has to do with how floor entities behave when color scheme is activated in a view. It caused floors to become transparent, and thus if your view dept is below the slab you will see everything in the view dept which is suppose to be hidden by the floor slab.

What’s more is it does not just make the floors transparent, it also brings any floor entities which are less than 1200mm below the associated level up to the view range. Thus, if you were using the old way of drawing your concrete beams as floors, they will come out on your color scheme, even with the view dept set to the associated level.

So the workaround:

This is a difficult one. On a large job you could spend hours hiding elements in views you don’t want to see. My general recommendation is to set the view dept to the associated level. If you are still seeing floor entities, turn off the floor category in visibility graphics.

If you need to set up a view where you want to have the view dept going down to the level below, I suggest you create a separate plan of the level below for this function. In its view properties set it as an underlay. Place this view on your drawing sheet, and then place the color scheme view (as per the above view dept settings above) over it.

It’s not ideal and if you have a split level floor you still may have view issues.

Unfortunately this is just a big bug and difficult to get a workaround that will fix every instance.

Revit 2009 is the only real solution.

(P.S. if you ever used the make item transparent in color schemes so the color fill is in the background, it won't work in 2009).