Welcome to the fourth in a series of 5 articles on Revit’s Massing Editor and Building Maker. In this article we look at adding curtain system to our office block model that we developed in the proceeding articles.

If you haven’t read the previous articles in this series, you will really need to read and work through Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 in order to have a model that we can take forward in this tutorial.

So to start with load the model that you ended up with upon the completion of Part 3. Your screen should look like this:

If you can’t see the massing elements themselves (ie the blue parts of the model, as shown above) you need to hit the Show Mass button near the top of the screen:-

OK. Se we have our basic office block model. It was created from a couple of primary mass elements which we joined together. We created a number of Levels in order to accurately define the heights of our floors, walls and roofs. We then created floor and wall faces and used the Building Maker to turn these faces into floor and wall elements respectively. Now we are going to add a curtain wall element to the circular tower.

First of all rotate the model so that we can see the circular tower more clearly

Now before we can add the Curtain Wall System we need to make sure the Massing Design Bar is visible. If it not currently active, click the Massing Design Bar:-

From here you can proceed and select Curtain System by Face:-

Upon selecting this option you will see that the Options Bar has changed to reflect the current command:-

If you access the drop down selector on the left you will see that there is only one Curtain System family defined. Next to the drop-down selector is the standard Revit Properties button. If you click on this you will see the properties control panel fo the “Curtain System” family:-

Hit the Edit / New button and you will see all the options you have available to configure and fine tune the curtain system to your exact requirements.

I suggest you finish this tutorial with the standard default settings and then go back after and play with some of the settings to see their effect.

Going back to the remainder of the Options Bar settings you will see that we have a tick box for “Select Multiple”:-

This allows you to select multiple faces in your model before you convert them all to a curtain system. The next button is “Create System”. This will add a Curtain System to any currently selected mass faces. And finally “Clear” deselects all faces from- ie clears the selection set if you are using the “Multiple” option.

So lets go ahead and select the two vertical faces of the tower. I say “two”, because the cylinder is actually formed from two semi-circular vertical faces. We will need to select both of these faces to add the curtain wall system to.

Carefully hover you cursor over the front face of the cylinder. Note how when you hover over a currently unselected face, the cursor displays a small + symbol, to show that it is available for adding to the selection set.

Go ahead and select the front face. Once selected it should turn red:-

and then select the rear face of the cylinder. Be careful when selecting the rear face- it is very easy to select the wrong face (ie one of the adjacent wall faces). As you hover over the cylinder you will know when you are selecting the correct one when it’s boundary highlights like this:-

Once both faces are selected just hit the Create System button on the Options Bar and a curtain system is added immediately.

If you hit the “Show Mass” button again…

…you will turn off the display of all mass elements in this view and be left with only Revit building elements (ie walls, floors and curtain wall systems). Your model should look like this:-

I hope you’ve found this tutorial on mass elements and curtain wall systems useful. In the fifth and final part of this series we will create a simple roof for both the cylindrical tower and the rectangular body of the office block.

If you have any comments or feedback on this or any other tutorial at Revit Zone, please e-mail me at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Part 5 coming September 2007