My Second Revit Project - Part 4

It's been a while since I posted about the latest project that I've been working on for a while now. Below are some images from last week. There's still work to be done (the weather has NOT helped) but hopefully it will be finished by the end of the year. The last major work consists of demolishing some existing parts during Thanksgiving and then the staff and students will move into the new parts of the building.

It is pretty enlightening to follow a job in construction. Regardless of how many drawings you crank out and how carefully detailed something is, you're still at the mercy of how someone interprets notes/markings on a submittal (or whatever mood they woke up in that day!). Sometimes it feels like there's not enough leadership at the subcontractor level and no amount of hand-holding from the contractor side (superintendent and PM) or the Architect is enough. But I'm finding that by maintaining a collaborative spirit, being nice, understanding and firm, you can take care of the Project and help steer it in the right direction.

We're currently helping our client by creating Evacuation maps for occupied spaces. Revit comes in really handy for this task. Here's a snapshot of one such map (the screen color is off, but the printed output is correct!):

Here are some tips about the tools and techniques used:

1. An Annotation family was created to manage the graphic border layout, title and legend (title block).
2. A floor plan view was created and the appropriate categories were left visible. Everything was set to halftone with the exception of rooms.
3. A color scheme was applied (for Area, By Range set to be at least 1SF). This made all rooms show solid with the orange color we wanted.
4. A Filled Region was applied around the building to make it pop more.
5. The exit paths were drafted in the sheet view after setting two unique line styles.
6. Multiple plans were created by Duplicating as Dependent and placed on sheets (with no View Title). Room fills were controlled by overriding visibility in each view. The Reveal Hidden Elements tool made it easy to un-hide one room at a time for each plan view and hide other irrelevant rooms.
7. An empty sheet was kept handy in the Project Browser with nothing but a title block. To create a new sheet, I simply selected the sheet in the Project Browser and used the copy & paste keystrokes to duplicate the sheet (thanks Luigi for reminding me of this tip!).
8. The Project Browser was filtered to display only these views and sheets, making it easier to work on this particular task.
9. When one area of the building was complete, I used a recently added feature to position a new area on a sheet: Pan Active View by activating the view, selecting the crop region, right-clicking on it and selecting Pan Active View. This is similar to just moving the crop region around, but I found panning the view within the crop to be more user-friendly for this task. This function is only available for views placed on sheets.
10. I'm up to 55 sheets created with about 12 to go, but interestingly enough, the file only gained about 1MB in size!

My Second Revit Project - Part 4