Archive for June 30th, 2010
Working with Revit title blocks from Architects
As a MEP consultant working on a Revit project, chances are the architect’s title block will be used by all disciplines. This title block is usually peppered with parameters from the architect’s shared parameters file, rendering them blank in the MEP model. Those shared parameters can be added to the MEP model’s shared parameters file, but with multiple architectural clients, the shared parameters file for the MEP model can become a bit larger and more complicated than necessary. This post will demonstrate a method to control the chaos and free the consulting engineer from the ever changing shared parameters they encounter.
The plan is simple.
- Create a set of generic shared parameters to replace any architect’s parameters.
- Replace the label in the architectural title block family to use one of the generic parameters.
The details below may make it sound more complex than it really is. Don’t give up; it’s worth the effort.
Family Creation: Locking Center Points to Reference Lines
Note: Everything discussed below is in reference to family creation, but could also apply to working in a project file. This post assumes some level of pre-existing Revit knowledge – post a comment UPDATE: we’ve disabled comments due to spam… send me an email at joe@clubrevit.com if you’d like to have anything in this post explained in greater detail.
I was reviewing a family recently where we had a solid cylinder, created from an extruded circle, sitting on top of another surface. The extrusion’s radius and height were locked and/or parameterized, but in a 3D view, you could select the extrusion’s radius grips and move the cylinder around – it was not locked into place. Additionally, we wanted to locate the center of the cylinder relative to the family’s origin by measuring its angle from vertical and distance from origin.
