Dimensions and annotation families - Revit Tutorial

- We're starting a new chapter now on documentation in Revit. Documentation is a really, really large topic when it comes to Revit, there's a lot of things to think about. There's text, there's leader lines, there's annotation, there's details, there's repeating component details, there's color schemes, color legends, and things like that that you can drop into your Revit project anytime. Hopefully what we're going to cover here will be enough for you to work through and generate enough knowledge for you to take into your certified, professional exam with you. Obviously, we can't guarantee that we're going to cover everything because we don't know what's in the exam. However, we can give you all the guidelines you need to take as much knowledge as you can into the examination room with you. What we're going to look at in this video is dimensions and annotation and the annotation families that are used in a Revit project. We have a new project for you, it's called Dimensions_Annotation.rvt and as you can see, when you load it up from the library, it should come in at level zero annotation in the floor plans here. If it doesn't, just double-click on that floor plan view and it'll open it up like so. So you can see we've got a floor plan there and we've got various bits of dimension annotation in the project. We're going to zoom in on the 3990 dimension here, so zoom in a bit, pan up a little bit. Always zoom in so that you can see what you're doing in Revit. It's really important, especially with annotation and dimensions because then when you select the dimension annotation like that, you can see where these little blue dots are and they're really important for the placement of the annotation in the project itself. So when we look at a regular dimension, you can see here in the properties it's a linear dimension style, it's using diagonal lines as the arrowheads, and it's 2.5mm and it's using the Arial font. Now that's one of my default dimension families that I have in my metric version of Revit. If you're using a different version of Revit, say imperial in the USA, you might have some different default dimension annotation families. However, the trick is to know what to do with that dimension annotation. So when it's selected like so, you can see obviously you've got the value there, if I double-click there, you can see it's using the actual value and I can change the dimension text if I want to. I can put prefixes and things in and so on. Now I'm not going to make any changes like that, I'm going to stick just with the dimension text. I can lock the dimension. That then provides a dimensional constraint, which means that that 3990 will not change regardless of how I try and tweak the geometry in the model. I'll undo the lock again now, like so. Now we've got various little blue dots on our dimension as well. This one here is the witness line. When I click and drag, I can move that witness line to a different place. Now what'll happen is the dimension will move and update accordingly. Let's do the same with the other witness line here. So I'm now lining that in nice and neatly into the internal walls instead of the external edges of the walls. And then what I can also do is to stop these extension lines crossing the geometry, I can click on this dot and I can just bring that out a little bit, so there. And I can click here and the lovely thing is it'll all line in like so, you'll notice it clicks in and lines in with the other dots. And there we go. So now my dimension lines are not crossing the geometry, which is obviously a much neater thing to have. When you then zoom out and look at that, you'll see it's much neater, much tidier. Now that's obviously working with geometry and the dimensions of cells, the annotations of cells. What about the annotation families that we're using here? Well let's go back to our newly 3410 dimension here. So this is new and it's newly placed, so we're going to select it like so. Now I've just selected it, I'm not going to make any changes to it, but you'll notice now up here modify dimensions, label, I can add a label, there are no labels at the moment because there's no dimensional parameters in place there. I can edit the witness lines, so I can add witness lines for a dimension you'll notice. Can you see that? I can add different witness lines if I want to for a dimension. But more importantly, when I select it again like so, I can come up here to the properties and at the moment I'm using a diagonal 2.5mm Arial so let's go in there and maybe edit the type here. So I'll select it again and edit type. Now the first thing you do always, when you're messing around with dimensional annotation, is you duplicate. So well we're not going to use diagonal, we're going to use arrowheads so we'll change that to arrowhead like so and we'll still have the 2.5mm Arial but what we're going to change basically, instead of having the diagonal lines indicate the dimensions, we're going to place some arrowheads in there. So you see there's all these different tools available too, so we've got tick mark diagonal like so. Now tick mark isn't just a tick, it can be an arrow, it can be a filled box, it can be a dot. There's my default arrow so I've now got arrowhead 2.5mm Arial, I'll OK that. Notice it updates for that particular dimension only. If I now come up here and select my 1645, I've got the option of going for the arrowhead 2.5mm Arial and that will update accordingly as well. So I'm doing those individually (mumbles). But can you see how you can work with different annotation families, but more importantly you can edit your dimensions and annotation quickly and easily in your Revit models.