Better & Easier Detailing thanks to Object Override

As some may know Rvit 2008 allows you to override and object's graphic style at the object level now, and not just the category and subcategory level. If you actually think about this concept for a moment, it actually breaks all the rules of databasing and Revit, because an object isn't dependent upon the group it belong to to drive its appearance. This means that you could end up with many objects all over your model, that should theoretically look alike, but don't actually, because their properties have been overridden at the object level. (think of what happens in 2D CAD when each person decides to make their own layer for walls, now a project with a 6 person team, has 6 different layers for walls, ahhhhh!).



All that said, the tool is helpful when used in moderation. If you find that you're needing to use it often I would say you need to revisit how the family is built, or how you're manging your family types, categories and subcategories.



Where I see this tool being particulary helpful is in detailing. It always drove me crazy in Revit that you either had to build detail components with all sorts of additional subcateogories (which made it hard to manage) or you had to use the linework tool to get detail components to look just right, and then, depending on view scale it might be even more difficult to manage since in one scale the component might look right, but in another not so much.



Now with this tool the problem is solved. You can quickly drop a component into your view (that you're detailing) and quickly adjust how the component looks in that particular view. Since we're dealing with detail components, I'm actually completely OK with having their graphic appearance be completly unmanaged. Since they are 2D elements they're not real model elements, so we're not depending on them from a database stand point, we only want them to look good in the detail view we've used them in.