Welcome to the fifth and final part of this series on using Revit’s Massing tools. If you missed the rest of the series, you may want to start here.

Let’s take a quick overview of what we’ve done so far: We’ve used the massing tools to create some basic mass elements- a rectangular block for the main body of our office block and then a cylinder to form a feature to the corner of our building. We then created a series of levels to define the floors and roof level within our building. Then by using Revit’s “Building Maker” tools, we generated walls and floors automatically from faces within our mass elements. In this final article we will add roofs to both the main body of the building and the cylindrical tower.

OK. Lets load up the Revit file as we left it in Part 4. And here it is…. 

Now we need to get back to using the Massing and Building Maker tools. So go ahead and select the “Massing” Design Bar….

We’re now going to use the “Roof by Face” tool to add Revit Roof elements to our building.

The problem is that (at present) there are no faces visible in the places where we want to create our roofs. We know that we did have faces in those positions previously, because we created the two basic mass elements- Remember this…….

So where have all these faces gone. There still in our Revit model, just not visible. Every time we open a  Revit file that contains Mass elements, their (the mass elements themselves) visibility is turned off. This is easy to rectify- just hit the “Show Mass” icon near the top of the screen…

We can now go ahead and select our “Roof by Face” tool and then select the face on the top of the main body of the office block. To do so, you will have to carefully hover the cursor over the top inner edge of the perimeter wall until a “+” appears next to the cursor- when it appears, you can go ahead and click to add the plane to the selection set. At this point you will also see that the Options Bar has changed to give you various parameters for creating your roof elements…..

You will see that there is a choice of roof construction from the drop-down panel, a properties button for defining new roof constructions, “Create Roof” button (and a “Clear” button”) as well as a selector to confirm which level the roof element is to be created at. So let’s get back to making roof elements! I’ve selected the face that makes up the top of my mass element- the face is now coloured red to show that it is selected…

Before I actually create a roof element in this position, I’m going to choose a different roof type to create. I’m going to select “Basic Roof: Generic- 125mm” from the drop-down list…

I now just hit the “Create Roof” button on the Options Bar and a roof element is instantly created…

Let’s do the same for the top of the cylindrical tower. Again, select the face on the top of the cylinder and then hit “Create Roof”…

Proceed to Part B of this Article