Auto Plaster Tools

Auto Plaster Tools

Models finish layers — plaster, render, skim, screed, tiles, paint — as a separate Revit Wall, Floor or Ceiling on the faces of walls, floors, roofs, stairs, beams, foundations, ramps and columns, in this project or in a linked model. Every finish is an ordinary Revit element of a type you choose, so your own schedules and material takeoffs count it, it cuts in sections, shows in plans and reflected ceiling plans, and can be edited like anything else. Every run is one Revit undo step.

When to use it

• Plastering every wall, column and beam soffit of a storey without drawing a single finish wall by hand.
• Ceiling plaster or skim under slabs, roofs, stairs and ramps, sloped where the soffit is sloped.
• Screed or tiles on slab tops and foundations.
• Room-by-room finishing for a fit-out, with the finish types and areas written back into each room for a room finish schedule.
• Skirtings, tiled dados and friezes as their own layer on top of the plaster.
• A structure that lives in a linked model: the finishes are built in the open project, against its own levels.

The rule behind everything

Starting rules: walls on both faces; floors on their edges and soffit (as a ceiling); roofs, stairs and ramps on their soffit (as a ceiling); beams on their sides and soffit; foundations on their sides and top (as a floor); columns on all sides, round ones as curved walls. Every rule can be changed per category, and every category can have its own finish types.

How to use

1. Open Auto Plaster Tools from BimCode's plugin list inside Revit, with the project open.
2. What to finish — the Revit selection (including elements Tab-selected inside a link), elements or faces you pick, the active view, the whole model by level (this project or a link), or chosen rooms.
3. Finish types — a Wall, a Floor and a Ceiling type. No suitable type? Click + and build one from its layers, with new materials and colours.
4. Faces — check the table of categories, or flip them all at once: from below, from top, or both.
5. Preview — every surface that will be finished, what it becomes, its type and its area. Nothing is built yet.
6. Create finishes — one Ctrl+Z in Revit removes the whole run.

The tabs

• Create — the six steps on the left, the preview and results on the right.
• Finish types — the wall, floor and ceiling types in the project, and the type creator.
• Manage — every finish in the model, grouped: select, isolate, hide, delete, or join them all again.
• Quantities — area and volume by finish, type, category, level and material; export to a spreadsheet, or create six Revit schedules.
• Settings — named presets, export and import of a whole setup.
• Help — the full guide, searchable.

Good to know

• Openings. Doors and windows cut the finish (the hole follows the door), or a fixed opening is made where the family cannot cut. Holes in slabs are kept in floor and ceiling finishes.
• Trimming. Each finish is cut back wherever another element is in the way — the part of a beam soffit inside a wall, a column passing through a ceiling — so nothing is counted twice. Linked elements trim too.
• Joins. Wall finishes are joined to floor and ceiling finishes with the priority you choose, to each other at corners, and to the element they cover. Only pairs that really meet are joined.
• Height bands. Full height, from the bottom (skirting, dado) or from the top (frieze).
• Running again. Each finish remembers the face it covers and its Finish name. Run again with the same name and the old finish is replaced; a different name adds a separate layer.
• Settings are remembered between sessions, can be saved as presets, and can be exported to a file for a colleague — types are matched by name in the other project.
• Revit's own warnings are kept out of the way during a run and written to the log instead.

The full guide is the Help tab inside the plugin, and docs/USER-GUIDE.md. Build and structure notes are in docs/DEVELOPMENT.md.