Fading object in the distance

Many people will give you many theories about how to ghost or fade elevations in the distance in Revit, a lot of them work, but none are very easy or quick. Some suggest overriding graphics in view, some suggest creating a mass with a transparency, some suggest drawing in a filled region... But really, there is no good way in Revit. Revit is not developed enough to pick up subtle graphic presentations as that.

My image shows what happens when you ghost with a transparent white filled region. It is very bland and covers the color of the trees in the foreground. Right now, Photoshop (or similar) is the only way to get a real quality ghosting of building elevations that rest in the background. In this situation, the ghosted facade is 100 feet back from the color facade, right now there is no way to set a depth to be ghosted like you can in floor plans.

The absolute quickest way that we use is to create a filled region that is transparent white or gray to mask out anything in the background, it has the least amount of setup time and can be grouped and copy and pasted to other view if need be. However, trees will get masked too, and when using a transparent white or gray, bold colors come through as ghosted color and light colors come through as whatever the color of the filled region is :-( You can see in my image that the brick in the background shows through as a pinkish color, and is the only color on the whole masked section.

Since we're on the subject here is a list of things Revit CAN'T do well or at all:

• Automatically ghost distant elements in elevations
• Site and terrain modeling such as roads, sidewalks, and more
• Render Effects such as a freehand sketch look or anything else
• Adjustable lighting - for a rendering program, there is very little control over realistic and artificial lighting
• Limited selection of families and objects
• Does not offer ultimate versions i.e. Architectural/Mechanical/Structural/Landscape
• Offers NO Landscape version
• Sucky and limited selection of trees and foliage which look different in model view and in a rendering view. Model trees cannot be seen in a rendering and the rendering trees cannot be seen in a model view, and worse, you cannot create your own look for rendered trees without, you guessed it, more expensive software and lots of time.
• Add. Yes I said add. Revit cannot add rounded numbers in schedules. Example: 310.25 SF + 310.25 +310.25 equals 930.75 SF. If you are rounding to the nearest tenth in Revit, 310 +310 +310 equals 931. Punch it in on a calculator and you will clearly get 930 NOT 931. Can't tell you how many times Revit has made me look stupid because of that one.
• I'm sure I could think of more, but I'll stop, for now...