Walls - The Learning Slope

Harlan Brumm of The Revit Clinic blog and Autodesk wrote on Sept. 26th about walls.

We get these questions about walls a lot and it is no wonder. What do Architects do? They define spaces, 99% of the time what defines that space? – A Wall. I would bet that creating and modifying walls is probably one of the most used functions in the application besides, panning, zooming, and using the esc key to cancel.

Here's the key part that he wrote a few lines later...

Creating a sloped wall is not very difficult, once you realize that you can’t just use the Wall tool to draw it.

The last thing he probably expected was me taking this and twisting it around to say something else? Uh oh...

He goes on to explain how with a video.

When I read the portion of his post that I quoted above my reaction was, "Well why is it such an effort to do this then?" If walls really are used as much as he says then walls should be one of the most effectively implemented features in the software and yes it should be capable of representing "any" wall we need. I like the massing feature and what it offers but to require it to slope/tilt an otherwise normal wall seems like requiring me to go from average driver to formula 1 driver in one step.

We can edit the profile of a wall easily enough. Perhaps we ought to be able to edit the sketch in more planes such as edit top profile, edit base profile? Maybe we just need a shape editing capability akin to the floor/roof tools? We could add points, define offset forward/backward...?

I'm not trying to define a specification of what to do. I'd encourage the team to challenge the status quo of "well to do a sloping wall, just do....". Again I'm not picking on Harlan, he is dealing with the reality of "now" with support. How do I get it done now with the features as they are. But in his role he can helps us also get the message across that it is too "hard", too many steps, too too something...? Just my reaction.

Oh and thanks for the video!!