Understanding Phases and Phase Filters in Revit: A Comprehensive Guide

Now that we have the view set up that we're going to use to create our model, we're going to go ahead and make sure we have the phase settings correctly. So before we dive into that, it really helps to understand what we're meaning by phase. And so to look at that a little bit closer, we're going to go ahead and we're going to jump to the 'Manage' tab.

And we're going to look for 'Phases' in here. You can see that we have the defaults, which are Existing and New Construction. And we're going to be working on the Existing phase by default.

Most of the views that you have created are going to be set to work on the New Construction phase. Now this is important because we want to make sure we have two things set up properly. The views phase, and then the views phase filter.

Now these things come into play for a few things. First off, you can see here based on the name of the filter, we have what happens to the elements that are on each one of these phases. If I am working on the New Construction phase and I'm using Previous + New, all elements that are part of that New Construction phase are going to be by category, meaning they're going to take on the object styles of that particular view.

So they're not going to be overridden. Existing is going to be overridden. Demolished is going to be displayed or not displayed and temporary is going to be not displayed.

When we see something like overridden here, that means this tab, the 'Graphic Overrides' tab is going to control what it looks like, and you can see the settings for each of these things here, and we're going to dive into this in a later video a little bit more, but I think it's important to see the overview really quickly. So back to phases, you can certainly add more to this. I've had projects that have up to 10 sometimes based on the needs of the client.

And so sometimes we'll just have Existing and New. Sometimes we'll have Existing, New, Phase One, Phase Two, Phase Three, Phase Four, whatever it may be for that particular project, it's also important to note that this is a timeline. This is not necessarily defining the different scopes within a project.

---

If you have two different things happening at the same time, you might want to manage that based on timeline and not use this as a way of dividing two different parts of a project. Cause that can get really messy really quickly. As far as Phase Filters go, when we're dealing with Existing, which we're going to be doing pretty soon here, we don't really have to worry about it too much, but when we get into the New Construction and the demo, that's when we're going to need to be worrying about it. Speaking of demo, you may have noticed that we don't have a demo phase here and that's because it's activity that occurs within the New Construction phase, and we'll also dive into that a little bit later.

So enough chatting about it. Let's go ahead and take a look at what settings we need to use for these views we've created. So I'm gonna hit OK.

A few things I want you to pay attention to are these tags here. If I were to be on my Existing Level One view and scroll all the way down, you can see I have phase and phase filter.

So two things are being phased here. We have our views, which have the view settings. And then each of our elements are going to have phase created and phase demolished settings.

For right now, we're going to go ahead and change this phase from New Construction to Existing, because that is the phase we're using for this view. And remember I was saying, pay attention to those elevation tags. Notice how they've gone away, but the views are still there.

And those went away because they don't exist yet. They're part of the New Construction phase. So they have not been created.

---

If I do the same thing with our Level Two view, just by clicking on the view in the Project Browser, I can change it to Existing. You can see here that the views look the same and we'll be able to work from it. If I were to go to this Level One view, which is still set to New Construction.

You can see that those exist, but if I were to just draw some walls in here. Just randomly. If I go back to my Existing Level One, notice those walls don't exist because they have not been created in the timeline of Existing versus New in this case.

But if I were to draw walls in this view, you can see that they're being clipped by those future walls. And they do show up here. But when we look at the graphic overrides, notice how Existing walls are showing different from the New Construction ones that I created.

And that has everything to do with the phase filters that we have applied. If I change this one to Previous + New, which is the typical New Construction view, we can see that the phase filter for Previous + New, when I go back to it again, Previous + New Existing is going to be overridden based on the graphic overrides that we see here. When I look at Existing graphic overrides are going to change the lines to this gray color here.

#BBD0E0