Revisions

The Revision features in Revit have received some well deserved additions in the 2009 family of products. Things are not perfect, however we are a lot closer to achieving the expected end results especially by keeping in mind some simple facts and tips.

Facts

1. The Revision Schedule will NOT report instances of revisions that have been hidden in the view.


2. The Revision Schedule will STILL report instances of revisions that have been set to not be visible through the Sheet Issues/Revisions dialog box.
   



3. If a sheet contains these revisions, you cannot uncheck their visibility through the parameter Revisions on Sheet in the View Properties dialog. See the highlighted, grayed-out rows below. You can however have the schedule show revisions that are not on your current sheet by checking them in this dialog. This function is mainly intended for when you want to track what sheets were issued for and when there is no associated clouding. Another example would be when a whole sheet is added to the drawing set during an addendum and you don't want to cloud the whole thing. In this case you manually check the revision that applies to this sheet so it shows up in the schedule (thanks to Aaron Maller for helping me rationalize this!).
   

Tags

Some firms like to place a more descriptive tag for their clouds rather than the sequence number or an alphabet letter. So for example for a revision that occurred in Addendum 3, we would want to see “AD3” instead. You can use the Description parameter to house that information and then create a tag with a label that displays this parameter. However, if you want to have a lengthy description for each revision to show up in your revision schedule, you won’t have this parameter available for this purpose. In Revit 2009, we can change the Revision Number to be Numeric, Alphabetic or None. I think we need a Custom option added because of what I just described. In the meantime, if you don’t need to use the Issued to or Issued by parameters, you can use either of them to house this information. As described above, change your tag label to read the relevant parameter.

Issuing revision sketches

When issuing a revision sketch on a small sheet (letter or tabloid size), you probably only want your schedule to display the relevant revision only. If you’re doing things in sequence, then you should be able to achieve this by doing the following to your revision schedule settings (within the title block/annotation family):

• In the Sorting/Grouping tab: Sort by Revision Sequence in Descending order;
• In the Appearance Tab: Set the Height to User Defined....watch out for the “Grid lines” checkbox as it might automatically check/uncheck itself! Then size the schedule to only display one row, which will now report the latest revision in the sequence.

If you’re working on multiple revisions and you want your schedule to show a revision other than the last one, you’ll have to at least hide the clouds of revisions that come AFTER the one you’re trying to print. In the Sheet Issues/Revisions dialog box, you can set revisions to not show, but remember that the schedule will still report them. When done, please remember to unhide the hidden elements to prevent your BIM Manager or other team members from hurting you :)

TIP When creating multiple revision clouds in a view that belong to the same revision, use the same sketch rather than creating new sketches. It will make life much easier later when you want to hide a specific revision by selecting a single sketch instead of multiple ones. It is also highly recommended to place your clouds on the view and not on the sheet. The exception to this rule is for schedules, where you have to place clouds on the sheet. EDIT: If using dependent views to split a large plan into smaller views to fit on sheets, place your clouds in separate sketches for each dependent view (you can place them in the parent, but make sure you create a new sketch for each dependent "zone"). This is necessary because your annotation crop region will prevent the clouds from displaying and scheduling since the entire sketch has to be encompassed by the annotation crop extents and that's obviously not what you want to do in dependent views. Also, if you want to itemize every cloud instance, you are forced to create separate sketches, but this is uncommon in my experience.

Revisions