Autodesk Revit Building 9 Detailing Improvements

Peter Gehring
Director of Building & Infrastructure Solutions, Synergis Technologies, Inc.

Autodesk Revit Building 9 has strived to improve its detailing documentation tools in several areas. The detail component library has 500 new 2D detail components organized in folders following the CSI divisions and numbers.

Tags can now call out several Type and Instance parameters of detail items. The type parameters Type Mark, Type Comments, Assembly Code, Assembly Description and the instance parameter, Comments, can now be assigned as the parameter for the tag annotation.

Many Revit users use Windows Copy-Clip and Paste from Clipboard to avoid work duplication and to get content from other projects. Revit has now made that process easier. Standard 2D detail views can be saved and reused to get these from project to project, or to create a library to pull from. Only views containing view-specific elements can be saved. You can also save and reuse schedule tables to allow you to preset the appearance, fields, filters, formatting, sorting and grouping. The schedule will populate the fields with the data from the current project. To begin the process of exporting or saving views, you go to File > Save to Library > Save Views.

This will bring up a dialog box where you can select which sheets or views to save. There is a pull down menu that allows you to filter out sheets, views, drafting views, schedules and reports.

If you are saving a sheet with many typical detail views, it will automatically grab all of those views that were placed on it. (When this sheet is then imported, all of the detail views will be created.) After selecting the views or sheets to save, you are prompted for a location and file name. The file name defaults to the name of the current view or sheet, but you can rename it. To reuse the view in another project, open or switch to the destination project and from the File pull down menu, select Insert from File > Views. Browse to the location and file that you saved in the previous step and Open.

You will then be presented with a dialog box similar to one you used to save out the detail sheets and views. In this you can select the sheet or specific view and also filter the list based on sheets or views.

Remember, as mentioned before, if you insert a sheet, all the views come in with it so it is not necessary to select the views. If you want them in without inserting the sheet, you can just select the views you need.

If you are bringing in duplicate types, you will get a dialog box indicating that as well as the typical warnings.

The top image in the figure below shows the Project Browser in a project prior to inserting the sheets, while the lower image is the same Project Browser after inserting the saved sheets.

If you look at the Undo pull down, you'll see that the action Revit just completed was Paste from the Clipboard. Another way of doing this is to use File > Save to Library > Save View, and select the desired drafting view to export. You can then create a new drafting view and from the File menu, select Insert from File > 2D Elements.

You will also have to browse to the exported file, select the detail view, and then place it in the drafting view, much like pasting. Selecting Transfer view properties will override any of your existing view properties and inherit them from the imported view.

Another method of exporting views is to select them in the Project Browser (one at a time or multiple selections with Shift or Control), right mouse click, and choose Save to New File.

As stated earlier, you can also save out schedule tables to capture the table parameters and then Insert from File to populate the fields with data from the current project.

The source project door schedule is at the top of the following figure, while the lower image shows the destination project door schedule.

Some other areas of improvements for detailing in Revit Building 9 are the Display/Show Obscured Detail Elements, and a new 2-Pick Detail Component template. I will address these further in a future article.

About the Author

With 18 years of industry experience, Peter Gehring is Director of Building & Infrastructure Solutions for Synergis' Engineering Design Solutions, an independent division of Synergis Technologies, Inc., a leading Autodesk Value Added Reseller for Manufacturing, Infrastructure, and Building Solutions in the Mid-Atlantic region. He is responsible for spearheading the delivery of solutions, technical expertise, and resources to increase customers' productivity and profitability in the Building & Infrastructure industry. Gehring is an Autodesk Architectural Desktop Certified Expert, an experienced CAD instructor, and architectural and engineering designer. He graduated from Bucknell University with a B.A. in Fine Art and previously worked for 10 years with Perks-Reutter Associates, an architecture and engineering consulting firm. He can be reached at: peter.gehring@synergis.com.

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