The Need for Organization In Views

I love standards.  Standards let everyone in the firm hop from project to project with ease.  Hopefully this isn’t something I have to sell you on.

Something standards related that a good BIM user needs, is organization.  Back in the days of CADD, individual file management was important, but one could muddle through a directory filled with crap and find what they needed ultimately.

With Revit, we’re mainly talking view management as a replacement for file management.  Setting up an organizational structure and standards and strong guidelines for views is crucial for your team to get the job done efficiently and with fewer headaches.  Below are some tips that we have found beneficial:

• Name views that go on sheets IN ALL CAPS.  This is a quick visual cue that the view is for printing or working.
• For jobs with multiple disciplines, create a parameter in the view that you can sub-organize view by.  We called it ‘View Types’, and fill it with “Architectural Elevations” or “Structural Plans”.  Then we create a View Browser Type that filters and groups by that parameter.  The same can be easily done for projects with multiple wings or buildings, to keep those related views grouped together.
• We have also tweaked our default view type so once a view is on a sheet it no longer shows under the Views list.  We found that at some undetermined point in design development, most people on the team start referring to views by the sheet, and not the view name.

Whatever guidelines you set up, make sure that your people stick to them, so everyone can benefit.

Rotated Views

Sometimes you are going to find yourself in a situation where, darn it, you want that plan rotated.  Maybe you are working on an area of your design where the walls are not orthogonal to the project cardinal points. 

Actually, that’s probably about the only reason for a sane person to rotate a view.

This is not Project North vs. True North.  You can very easily tell a plan view to change orientation to True North in Revit.

That’s easy.  But let’s say my view is set to Project North, and my plan is looking like this…

Please don't check for code

I want to do a callout plan, but I want that view to be “parallel” to the walls.  There are two ways to do this.  First off, I need to drop my callout box on the view.

Not parallel

From here you can select the border of the callout, and simply use the ROTATE tool to rotate it to the angle you want.  And as we know, in Revit the border of the callout is exactly what the border of the called out view will be.

After rotate

That’s a piece of cake.  Nice, intuitive, what you see is what you get kind of thing.  But let’s say the view you want to rotate is NOT in a callout.  This is where the second method comes in. 

The first thing is to make sure your CROP REGION is visible in the view you need to rotate.

Tiny yellow light-bulb? Check

Then, select the crop region border, and use the rotate tool on it.

Now your entire view will be rotated, and you can work “orthogonally” based on the new orientation.

Please note some things:

• This will NOT change your Project North or True North.
• As far as I can tell there is no way to determine if a view has been “rotated” thusly.
• For good model management, including the bullet above, it is recommended that you duplicate any view and rename prior to rotating.  Put a suffix on it like ” – ROTATED”.
• It’s probably my brain, but I always seem to want to rotate the wrong way, when using the rotate crop boundary method.  Have your hand over the CTRL-Z for a quick undo!
• The rotate callout will work with any view type (plan, elevation, section).  The rotate boundary will work on plans and sections, not elevations.  Although you get some WEIRD results when rotating sections.

So, spin away!