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Michael Wilson/5 min read

How to Customize Curtain Walls in Revit: Adjusting Parameters for Improved Layouts

Curtain Wall Customization

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So the first thing that we're going to do here is we're going to go in and I'm just going to select one of these curtain walls because they're all the same type.

So the first thing that we're going to do here is we're going to go in and I'm just going to select one of these curtain walls because they're all the same type. And I'll just go to edit type here. And one important thing to note here is that the unconnected height is at 10 feet.

And so we're going to want to keep that in mind because we want to have at least our first horizontal grid at 10 feet. And so I can take this and I can change some of these values. When we look across the top here, we've got exterior as the function, and that's perfectly fine.

And this ‘Automatically Embed’ option—you'll see how that's going to come into play later. But that's a great, great one to have checked because it saves us many steps when we try to draw curtain walls into walls, into basic walls. And then we want to leave the panel set to one that we're going to use most likely, which is this glazed one.

And so every time we draw a curtain wall, the panel is going to be this glazed type. And then the join condition has to do with these vertical joints here. And you can see that one runs continuous through and it breaks at the horizontal.

And that one's going to work out for us as well. As we move down through the parameters here, this next one is probably my favorite because it saves you a ton of time when you're trying to lay out these curtain walls quickly. And it's this layout for the vertical grid.

And so if you know that you can't have more than five feet or five foot six or something like that for your maximum spacing, then you can easily go in and just say maximum spacing, five feet. Now in complete contrast to that, our horizontal grids, which is this guy you see here, we have that set to fixed distance. So that means every eight feet that we have a wall, it's going to jump up and create another grid.

So you can see here we've got at eight feet, 16 feet, then we'd have one at 24 and 32 and so on. But if we change this value to say 12 feet, then what it'll do is if you have a wall like this one, that's only 10 feet high, it'll draw no horizontal grid. But then when you have these taller ones, it'll set them at the elevations that you might want.

And so we're going to leave that at 12 and then we'll go down and just take a look at these parameters real quick so we have a good understanding what we're dealing with. So our vertical and horizontal mullions, and this is pretty self-explanatory, but essentially when we put in a mullion type here, what it will do is it'll automatically add one for our border type one and two, which you have this one here and this one here, the verticals and the horizontals. And then you have your interior type, which are these guys that automatically get assigned that particular mullion type.

And that one I think is a take it or leave it because it's really easy to add mullions to the entire wall, but it's not bad to have something automatically created because as you know, all we did was draw these walls and now we have a semi-finished product. So it's easy to get a close-to-finished product with having this set up in a way that works for your project. So I'm going to hit okay, and then we'll take a look at what changes are made.

And now we've got a pretty decent setup here with our curtain wall because by changing the settings, we were able to get rid of that one horizontal we did not want. And it's kind of cleaned up some of these guys here because they don't have as many within it. This one is a unique case, so we're leaving it that way.

And the one at the entrance, we might want to consider doing the same thing with that, but we're going to take a look at what it takes to modify these walls that have parameters already associated with them and making them more custom. And it's a little bit more of an effort, I think, than just doing the curtain wall one. We're going to do both options and then we can evaluate which one's going to work best for us.

Our next big step here is going to be getting these windows in on level two. And before we do that, though, we really want to have the columns placed in our model based on our grid because that's going to help inform where we're going to put the glass on level two because we're going to have columns at these locations. We'll take a look at adding those columns in the next video.