New Support for Filled Regions

We draw Filled Regions in Revit to denote areas in project views or as part of detailing in a component or annotation family. Within the Filled Region's type settings, we can find what patterns and colors the type uses, and whether its background is transparent or opaque.

Fill Patterns in Revit are hatching patterns that can be applied to surfaces or materials, or that can be used in Filled Regions as background and foreground patterns.

There are two types of patterns:

• Model - Scale is independent of the view scale and refers to real-world dimensions. Example: "Brick Course" is a pattern that represents bricks, the dimensions of which don't change depending on the drawing scale. Bricks are proportional to building elements across all drawings.

• Drafting - Scale is dependent on the view scale and is used to represent annotative elements. Example: "Diagonal Hatch" is a pattern that represents an area on the drawing and should scale based on drawing scale. Hatch lines are identically spaced across all drawings.

While the use of Fill Regions within Revit families is often quite basic – an occasional solid fill or a crosshatch – they are used extensively in projects. It is often the case that, despite our best efforts, a Revit project ends up with the following nightmare set of Fill Regions:

• Filled Region 1

• Filled Region 1 (1)

• Filled Region 2

• old do not use

What a mess!

If the above sounds all too familiar, then we have some great news. Filled Regions and Fill Patterns are now supported in Kinship!

As always, we've made them super easy to use. First, select Filled Region types in the Revit Project Browser, or select their instances in a view. Then add them to your library or collection using the Kinship add-in in the Revit ribbon. All selected region types will be added to Kinship, ready to be used in other projects.

If you use the option to upload "Current Model's Families", you will also find Filled Regions and Fill Patterns included in the content that gets added to your Kinship account.

Best of all, we automatically generate a thumbnail image to show exactly how the fill pattern will look in a Revit model. Different foreground and background colors and patterns? Transparent or masking in view? We've got you covered.

Fill Patterns and Filled Regions also get picked up during Model Sync. Check your most recent model's families! You can now curate your office Revit standards from the website by selecting the Fill Patterns and Filled Regions in an exemplary model that's synced with Kinship and adding them to your library.

If you are currently using a container model to store your standards, and that model is not synced with Kinship, you can try the following workflow:

1. Add "Current Model's Families" to a temporary collection (just to keep them separate).

2. Select desired regions and patterns and add them to your library (or any other collection where you want to keep them).

3. Finally, delete the temporary collection.

If your container model has views with legends or swatches showing Filled Regions, you can select those instances of filled regions and upload them to the library or collection directly - use the "Current Selection" option in the add-in panel controls.

That's it! No need to upload related Fill Patterns separately to make regions work.

In a follow-up post, we'll look at the naming for Fill Patterns and how to avoid potential issues with Revit's default functionality for system families.

Also, when the region is loaded into the model, it will bring along the fill patterns that it uses. It's worth noting, however, that if a fill pattern with the same name already exists in the model, it will not be overwritten. This is a limitation imposed by how Revit handles system families – see section on naming below on how to proactively avoid such situation.

This feature also allows for Filled Region types to be removed from project templates, and instead deployed to your team via project/region specific collections or lists.

If you are already using Fill Patterns in your model template (rft), you may want to keep them. Fill patterns can form other dependancies in the project – such as when used in the cut and surface pattern of a material's Graphics asset. Even if that material is saved in your Autodesk Materials Library, the Fill Pattern is not saved with it and has to be loaded separately and manually re-mapped in some circumstances. This is covered in more depth in this post on the Autodesk Forum (reproducible at time of writing - Oct 2021 with Revit 2022).

A word on naming:

In addition to user interaction, naming plays a crucial role in how Revit loads, overwrites, and uses existing families. This adds to the importance of consistent and purposeful naming and will have direct impact on the workflows required to reliably maintain, and deploy your content.

The names used below are just examples to illustrate the concept rather than as suggestions for actual names. The format will depend on your use case and the company standard.

• Name Fill Patterns after the pattern, not its use within the project. It's not the pattern's responsibility to know how or where it is being used. For example, a diagonal crosshatch fill pattern should not be named "Masonry". Instead, "Diagonal Crosshatch 3 mm" is a more suitable name. There are some nuances where the pattern is very specific, such as particular brick course or roof shingles styles. But the same logic applies – "Running Bond" is good, "Brick Wall" not so much.

• Name Filled Regions after what they represent. The name "Red Diagonal Up Transparent" is redundant - this can be seen by going into type properties and provides the modeller with no indication as to its use within the project. What is helpful is being able to pick "Clearance Zone" when drawing clearance zones, or "In Abeyance" when drawing in-abeyance zones.

These guidelines allow the Fill Pattern to be what it really is – a low-level definition of a hatch (e.g. "Crosshatch") that is agnostic to its use in the project – whereas the Filled Region type, say "Clearance Zone", represents the type of the actual zone. The pattern used, colors etc. are just properties of a particular region type.

The aim of the above is to decouple Filled Regions and Fill Patterns which

Decoupling regions and patterns as described above will tremendously help when changing or updating project standards. This being said, the ability to make your Kinship library the single-source-of truth when it comes to drawing standards is a leap towards more consistent models. There should be one more sentence here that closes the whole thing.