Revit door and window families with splayed jambs/surrounds

I needed to make up some door and window families with splayed jambs typical in northern UK 19thC and earlier traditional vernacular

Elevation clip plane missing

Keeps happening to me - the elevation tags are showing in plan but mysteriously the clip plane lines and drag arrows disappear.
Revit Help 2014 http://bit.ly/18vmCzT solves this.

This is what it should look like with the green dashed clip plane marker and drag arrows.

In props palette under "Extents" below crops "Far Clipping" should be set to clip with line. No idea how this keeps getting turned off - possibly its a vew template

Rendering glass with realisticly non-flat appearance

Good post by The Revit Kid http://bit.ly/1eZHy1t - glass sheets in curtain wall are never truly flat and often distorted by differential exterior - interior pressure so that whats reflected in the real world is often slightly distorted. Hers his solution which involves changing the material used from glass to glass block (material > appearance cube and change to a bump map (research needed to find suitable) follow YouTube http://bit.ly/1eZLgb8

Plan views of phases and shading

How to simply differentiate between new and existing using shading and hatches. I want to acheive this

Existing phase shaded grey, new phase shown as hatched layers.






METHOD:- starting with an existing plan showing just existing:

Revit and corner curtain wall joins

I am quite mystified why a simple angle junction between CurtainWall or Storefront is so difficult to get to work cleanly- these methods seem to be common but flawed:

This is what I want!

• Embed ought to be the easiest method as allows simple parameter control of cill and head height. But it doesnt work properly: the intersects don't join as a wall should and you invevitably get a silly stub of parent wall overhanging the "join". And how do you join in a way that Revit doesnt throw up an error?
• Divide and delete the wall corner and then add back parent wall below cill and above head. The curtain wall does join properly but why should you: windows and doors dont require 2 operation cut hole then add in a hosted component!
• There are lots of methods posted but none seemed to satisfactorily do it in one. 

REVIT overriding with view templates

In this example, a schematic electrical layout I wanted to grey out everything other than the electrical content. Also I want to make sure none of the over-rides permeate into other views

I have already set up a number of view templates and then copied one to adapt to the current electrical view. It must all be done with V/G overrides AND NOT Object Styles. Event you this option is within a View Template it is effective over other view templates UNLESS Object Style overrides are made in these which override the override! Why include this in View Templates if it is global and not view specific?

Some complex objects such as doors quite allot of trila and error to be effective across all components of the family

ALSO override Graphics in View - these override view templates SO wherever possible make view overrides using a template otherwise undoing requires manual selecting overriden objects and changing.