Using Cut Profile Tool to Modify Section Appearance in Revit

In this video, we're going to use a tool called Cut Profile. The Edit Cut Profile tool can change the way something looks that's being cut through. If you have a rectangular slab and you want to show it as sloping, you don't have to necessarily model the sloped slab.

You can simply edit the way it looks in a section or a detail. Let's go to the Typical Wall Section 2 view. Go to the View tab in the ribbon and in the Graphics panel, select Cut Profile. You have two options to choose from in the Options bar prior to drawing your Cut Profile lines.

You can either edit it by face or boundary between faces. "By face" edits the entire boundary around the face, where "Boundary between faces" edits the boundary lines between faces. If we select using the Face tool, what we're going to do here is change the way this slab slopes to show that it's draining away from the door.

If we select this profile of the floor slab, note that all sides of this cut profile have been selected, and that's because we used the Face option. Now what we're going to do is start our line two inches down from the edge of this slab. So once it's two inches down, click once, and then we're going to draw a diagonal line all the way up to the edge of the curtain wall, and then press Escape twice to get out of the command.

Now note we have an overlapping line here at the end, so if we were to try to just end this edit mode, we would get this warning saying highlighted line intersects the boundary of the face being modified. Basically, we have an overlapping line problem, so we can either quit or continue. Let's choose continue.

To solve this problem, we simply delete that line that we basically used just as a guide. Take note of this arrow that's on our cut profile line. Note that it's pointing up.

If we were to finish the sketch now, note that the portion that's remaining is the top. Let's edit the sketch profile by selecting the sketch profile and editing the sketch. If we click on the arrow and have it point down towards the thicker portion of our floor slab, click the checkmark.

Now you'll notice it keeps the portion that we do want to keep. Now we have the appearance of a sloping slab sloping away from the building and off the balcony edge. This is a great way to change the way something looks in a section or detail without doing a lot of complicated modeling.

In the next video, we're going to go over keynotes.