revit - presenting floor plans -...

TUTORIAL C-29A:

REVIT - PRESENTING FLOOR PLANSThis Tutorial explains how to create multiple small-scale presentation floor plans from an example transit station project placed on to a 30x42 sheet of paper, then applying a color fill scheme based on room name, and generating a reference color fill legend. The following topics will be discussed in the next pages:

1) Color Fill Schemes by Room Name.2) 30x42 Titleblocks.3) Adding Revit Views to Drawing Sheets.4) Placing Color Fill Legends onto Sheets to Reference Room Names in the Color Fill Scheme.

By Jeremy L Roh, Professor of BIMethodsUNC Charlotte’s School of Architecturehttp://www.jrohdesign.com/revit/

When presenting a design in floor plan and especially for buildings that are high rise buildings such as our projects, it is necessary to find ways to place the multiple floor plan views on a sheet and to label them in a way that is legible at the scale presented. Large scale building will typically need methods of presentation that allow for someone to identify spaces without the use of text labels since floor plans will be at scales less than 1/8”. In general, this means that regular text labeling may not always be the best presentation technique. This is where color fill schemes and color fill legends can work to your benefit. The next pages will walk you through the steps and problems with text labeling at small scales and how to produce presentation plans with color fill schemes and legends for a better method of floor plan presentation.

If you’re able to present your floor plans at scales 1/8”, 1/4”, 3/8” and up, labeling spaces will be feasible; however, in order to label spaces or even eventually create color fill schemes, rooms need to be placed.

1) Click the “Home” tab.2) Select the “Room” tool icon.

Notice for this example, the scale of this floor plan is set to 1/8” = 1’-0”.

If the “Tag on Placement” tool is highlighted in blue that means that each time you place a room in a space, a room tag will be placed at the same time as the room. You can click this tool so that it is shown in gray and then you can place rooms without a tag with text showing in each space.

Click in each of the spaces to place a room. Rooms are 3D volumes of space that are placed within the model that act as containers of information to describe that space. Rooms can report Area, Perimeter, and Volume Data; as well as, Rooms hold other bits of information that are inputted by the User such as Occupancy and Code information.

Note: A room only needs to be placed once; however tags for that room can be placed multiple times. The tags require a room to be placed before a tag can display the information about the room such as Room Name and Room Number.

Room Tags will appear similar to what is shown here. You can double left-click on the Room Name and even the Room Number to change the text.

The scale of the text seems fine at 1/8”; however, the next few slides will show what happens when the drawing is scaled to a smaller size.

1) Left-click on the scale display

2) Choose a scale such as 1” = 40’-0”

At 1” = 40’-0”, the Room Tag Text scales up overlapping other tags and the floor plan. That is because the text in Revit scales up and down depending on the overall drawing scale to keep the text readable when printed on paper. This is what is known in all CAD programs as “Annotation Scale”. When you change the scale of a drawing in Revit, the model doesn’t change scale (the model is always “Full-Scale”); however, the text changes scale.

One way to solve the readability issue of tags at a smaller scale is to create a “Leader” for each tag. A “Leader” is a line that attaches to the center of the room space and to the end of the room tag.

1) Left-click on a Room Tag

2) Click the box next to “Leader” so that is shows a “check”.

3) Hold in the left mouse button over the “Move” cross hair symbol on the Room Tag and drag the tag outside of the room.

You could put a leader on every Room Tag and drag the tags around the outside boundaries of the floor plan, but you can see that even then there are too many tags and the drawing looks really cluttered.

The next logical choice for plan presentation is to create a color fill scheme and then add a automated legend to describe the spaces in a more visual way.

1) Right-click on a Room Tag

2) Hover over “Select All Instances”

3) Then choose “Visible in View”

Let’s delete all of these room tags quickly.

Press “Delete” on your keyboard to erase all room tags placed.

Note: When you delete a Room Tag, you are only deleting the room and not the Room Volume that was placed in the model. This means that the room still exists and reports information; thus, the space can be tagged again when needed.

Create a color filled plan by doing the following steps:

1) Left-click on the “<none>” button next to “Color Scheme” in the properties dialog box.

2) Choose “Name” in the “Edit Color Scheme” dialog box.

3) This will automatically generate random colors assigned to specific Room Names that exist within the model.

Note: Your rooms need to be named for the color scheme to be generated. You can name the rooms before or after the scheme is applied.

To change colors in the Color Scheme, do the following:

1) Left-click on the “Color” button associated with a room

2) Then select a new color with the color picker or by entering in a new RGB value. Press “OK”.

Note: Every Room that is named for instance “CONDO” will all have the same color.

The result of this plan with a color scheme by Room Name is shown here.

Notice that now that the Room Tags are gone, some additional text appears related to objects such as stairs. To Remove this text, see the next few slides.

1) Type in “VG” on the keyboard to get your “Visibility Graphics” dialog box open or click the “Edit” button next to “Visibility/Graphics” in the “Properties” dialog box.

2) Scroll down and expand the “Stairs” section by clicking the “+” symbol. Uncheck the items shown here. Then press “OK”.

We can add to the presentation effect by adding some shadows and tweaking the settings a bit to make a more graphically appealing presentation plan.

Click the “Shadows On” button at the bottom of the screen.

Click on the “Sun Path On” icon at the bottom of the screen and then select “Sun Settings”.

1) Click on “Sunlight from Top Right” or you can choose the other (your preference) and then uncheck the box next to “Ground Plane at Level”. Click “OK’

2) Click the “Edit” button next to “Graphic Display” in the “Properties” Dialog Box.

Turn the Sun up to a value such as “85” and the Shadows down to a value such as “15”.

The result is a color filled plan with soft accent shadows as seen here.

Now that this plan is set up, you can set up a view template to be applied to all the other floor plans so that you don’t have to repeat ALL of the previous steps. See the next slides.

1) Right-click on the floor plan name in the “Project Browser”.

2) Select “Create View Template From View...”

Enter a name for the “New View Template”

The “View Templates” dialog box will automatically set all the settings per the floor plan view that you have worked on to edit into presentation mode. The only item that does not get included in the template is the “Color Fill Scheme”. Just click “OK.

1) Left-click on the next floor plan view in the “Project” Browser” and then hold in the “SHIFT” key on the keyboard and left-click on the last floor plan view.

2) Right-click on a floor plan view and then select “Apply View Template...”

Select the name of the view template you just created and then click “OK”.

This will apply the settings of the first floor plan to all of the other floor plans that were selected.

You then need to click into each floor plan to view it and apply the color fill scheme set to “Room Name” as shown in this tutorial.

Then all floor plan views will be consistent.

TUTORIAL C-29A:


1) Color Fill Schemes by Room Name. [COMPLETE]2) 30x42 Titleblocks.3) Adding Revit Views to Drawing Sheets.4) Placing Color Fill Legends onto Sheets to Reference Room Names in the Color Fill Scheme.


To create a sheet, perform the following tasks as shown on this slide and the next few. 1) Select the “View” tab.

2) Then select the “Sheet” tool icon.

Choose “E1 30x42” from the “Select Titleblocks”

You’ll notice that a sheet with the number “A101” and the title “Unnamed” appears in the “Project Browser.

By default, Autodesk gives you a title block to start with for your drawing sheet. Let’s make some edits to this so that we have a presentation drawing sheet instead.

1) Left-click on the title block.

2) Click the “Edit Family” tool icon.

The screen and tools will switch into a “Family Environment” tool bar setting.

If you measure from the outside border in the vertical and horizontal dimension, you will notice that this is a 30x42 sheet of paper. Since our projects are high-rise buildings, it will make more sense to make this sheet a vertical sheet so that the vertical dimensions is 42” and the horizontal is 30”. Then next few pages will walk you through the steps.

2) Window around and select everything except for the very outside boundary lines. Then press “Delete” on your keyboard.

1) Draw dimensions for the horizontal and vertical boundaries. See the next page for a “How To” on getting your dimensions to look like this example.

1) Once you have drawn your dimensions, select one of them and click “Edit Type”.

2) Scroll to the bottom of the dialog box and change the “Text Size” to 1” and then click the button next to “Units Format”

3) Uncheck the box next to “Use project settings”

4) Set the properties to “Decimal Inches” for the units, Rounding to “0 decimal places” and give it the inches unit symbol < “ >.

1) Left-click on the top horizontal line.

2) Left-click on the 30” text on the dimension string and change it to read 42”.

3) Left-click on the left vertical line. 4) Left-click on the 42”

text on the dimension string and change it to read 30”.

Click “Load into Project”

Choose this option to Overwrite the existing version

TUTORIAL C-29A:


1) Color Fill Schemes by Room Name. [COMPLETE]2) 30x42 Titleblocks. [COMPLETE]3) Adding Revit Views to Drawing Sheets.4) Placing Color Fill Legends onto Sheets to Reference Room Names in the Color Fill Scheme.


To place a view onto a sheet, from the “Project Browser”, Left-click and hold in the left mouse button, then drag the mouse cursor to the drawing sheet. Left-click again where you want to place the view on the sheet.

All views will automatically come with a view title. You can tab over the view title until it is highlighted and drag it where you want it on the sheet. If you don’t want a view title, see the next slide to create an untitled viewport. You can also click and drag your entire viewport around to place in another location on the sheet.

View port numbers can be changed here.

By default the view title is the same as the “View Name” in the “Project Browser”If you want a

different name to show up in the view title, you can add it in here without affecting the “Project Browser”

1) Left-click on the viewport.

2) Click “Edit Type”

3) Click “Duplicate” and give the new Viewport Title Name something similar shown on this slide.

4) Click in the “Yes” portion of this box and change it to “No”

5) Press “OK”

1) Continue to set up your sheet with more floor plan views by repeating the drag and drop method previously shown.

2) If you drag your new view port around on the screen a bit, you will eventually see a dashed vertical or horizontal line that shows up. This line indicates an automatic alignment meaning that the new view port will be aligned to the previous one.

3) Once placed, click on the view port and if you are making the view port titles not show go to step 4.

4) Click here and choose the “Viewport Untitled” that was created in a previous slide and the view port title will go away.

As you start to place more and more views onto a sheet, you may notice that your views will need to be cropped so they don’t take up so much room. You can tab over your view and then right-click to reveal a pop-up menu. Select “Activate View”.

This will take you into that particular view without having to leave the sheet.

In the activated view, select “Show Crop Region” at the bottom of the screen to reveal the crop boundaries of this view.

1) Pull the Drag Handles to box in what you want the view to show.

Note: Everything within the box will be shown.

2) Select “Crop View”

1) Select “Hide Crop Region” to make the boundary crop box invisible.

2) Right-click anywhere on the screen to reveal the pop-up menu.

3) Select “Deactivate View” to return to the “Sheet”

Continue to repeat these previous steps to place all floor plans onto a sheet.

Note: I changes my title block to 72x30 in order to get all of my floors onto one sheet. Remember 30x42 was a minimum dimension for the assignment.

TUTORIAL C-29A:


1) Color Fill Schemes by Room Name. [COMPLETE]2) 30x42 Titleblocks. [COMPLETE]3) Adding Revit Views to Drawing Sheets. [COMPLETE]4) Placing Color Fill Legends onto Sheets to Reference Room Names in the Color Fill Scheme.


Color Fill Legends are great because once you’ve applied a color fill scheme, you can automate a legend to place on your sheet. The only issue is that they don’t quite work the way I’d like to see them work.

Ideally, if we’ve placed all the plans that you see in this example, I would like to see that I could drag a color fill legend onto a sheet and it would populate from all the views shown.

The way Revit currently works is that in order to place a color fill legend, you have to be in the activated view; therefore, that means in this example shown here, we’ll end up with 6 color fill schemes.

See the next slides to learn more.

First, right click on a view and select “Activate View”.

Second, Select “Legend” under the “Home” tab.

Third, Drag the legend onto the screen and place it. Notice it only shows the colors and room names that are currently showing up for this particular view. Repeat these steps for all the views. Also notice that my floors 7-18 are all the same; therefore, I only placed the color fill legend on view 7. See the next slides.

Note: Prior to continuing, see the next slide for setting up a temporary annotation line to help align the legends on the page.

Select the “Annotate” tab and then the “Detail Line” tool icon. Draw a vertical line on the left side of the legend all the way up the page. This will serve as a temporary alignment line for all the legends. Then at the end, simply delete the line.

In the end, you will have a sheet that looks like the example here which shows technical information for explaining your project with color coded plans and legends.

One thing is that in this example I don’t like that the name of the legend is called, “Room Legend” in upper and lowercase text. In architectural drawings, all text is to be uppercase; therefore, we need to do one last edit to change that heading.

See the last few pages to make that adjustment.

1) Right-click on a view, select “Activate View” and then when within the view port, select the color fill legend.

2) Select “Edit Scheme”

Select the text in the “Title” box and rename it to what you’d like to see the legend title to read. This example changes it to “ROOM LEGEND” in all caps.

All legend titles now update to the new change.

TUTORIAL C-29A:


1) Color Fill Schemes by Room Name. [COMPLETE]2) 30x42 Titleblocks. [COMPLETE]3) Adding Revit Views to Drawing Sheets. [COMPLETE]4) Placing Color Fill Legends onto Sheets to Reference Room Names in the Color Fill Scheme. [COMPLETE[


revit - presenting floor plans -...

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