Saturday, May 05, 2007

Yes Virginia, there are match lines in the Revit world...

So, it seems my last post inspired a comment! (you all still care! :) ). To answer the question, yes in Revit 2008 there is support for a new family (not sure of the exact name) for creating inteligent match lines, which complements the new feature called "Dependent Views".

More on dependent views: Dependent Views allows you to establish a single view (per what we normally would do in Revit). The view can then have as many (there doesn't appear to be a limit, except for file performance) child or "dependent views" as you like. These child views can be cropped however you like, and for better or worse you can turn objects on or off. The one catch of course is that all views, parent & children, must remain at the same scale. To create a dependent view right click on the view in the project browser and goto "duplicate view" there is a new choice to duplicate as dependent.

The new family type "view reference" which is an annotation family, can inteligently report what sheet another child view is on when cropping your dependent views differently because your building is too big for a single sheet. All of this functionality is documented in the new help (I've used it.... :) ).

HTH,
-R

1 comment:

Dave Baldacchino said...

Hey Rob :) I've had to deal with a lot of revisions to a project lately (Cost reductions....post-bid addenda...cutting scope...ouch...) and we STILL haven't upgraded to 2008. But anyway, I've created a number of titleblock families, including scaled ones as you pointed out before, so we can plot revised views at a scale that is different than the original output. So for example if I have a 1/8" plan but I could fit all the changes in one sheet by making it 1/16", then I use a titleblock that's scaled at 2X and plot at 50%. Too bad there's no parameteric way of doing this, since we don't have control of text/label sizes through parameters.

I'm actually using a double titleblock technique. I have a "mask" that consists of a titleblock with no linework; just a filled region with a hole in it and the titleblock lines that are necessary for Revit to understand where my extents of the page are. Then I also add an additional titleblock on top. The reason I'm using two separate families is because if I combine them into one family, everything works fine in the family editor, but once loaded in the project, the linework gets hidden by the filled region. Yep, I filed a SR about this, but have not heard back yet.

Anyway, the reason I like this method a lot is that I don't need to crop the view at all. The problem I find with cropping is that dimensions and grid bubbles disappear/move with the crop region, etc. When you do a revision, you want an exact snapshot of part of the document sheet and you don't want things moving/disappearing.

Now in 2008 this might not be such an issue due to the new Annotation Crop region, but I think I might still use this masking method since it's very easy. You just nudge your titleblocks in place (or the view) until the correct portion of the view shows through the "window" in the titleblock "mask". The issue with scaling is that if I change a view from 1/8" to 1/16", my annotation gets too large, so you have to resort to a larger-than-real titleblock and then scale the output. I still wish Revit had better functionality and workflow for revisions.