Creating a Clean and Organized Finish Plan Sheet with Interior Elevations in Revit

Let's go ahead and set up our sheet for our finish plan. So I'm going to go over to my project browser, and we had already created this sheet earlier on in the project. And I'm going to go ahead and open it up.

And what I want to do is I want to set myself up with a few parameters. So I know we've got this line here, that's going to represent the portion where we have like our keynotes and general notes and specific plan notes and legends and things like that. And so just to the left of that, I'm going to go and put my plan.

And then for the remainder of the sheet, I'm going to use that for my interior elevations. Since the plan is kind of the big deal on this sheet here, what I want to do is I'm going to go in to my floor plans, and I'm going to grab that one bedroom unit finish plan sheet, and just drag it over and place it. And then I can take a look at how that relates to the rest of the sheet.

And so I probably want to go ahead and slide it over a little bit, and maybe a little bit more, kind of tuck it into that upper right hand corner, like you see here. And then I'll adjust my view title, just so it looks a little bit better here. Right now it's just placed however Revit decided to place it.

And I can go ahead and slide it over here, and just adjust the extents and everything, make sure it looks exactly the way I want it. And then I can go in, and you'll notice that this here, where it says level one dash one bed unit finish plan, it represents the same as the view. And so what we could do here is when I click on the view itself here, I can go down, and you can see that there's a couple of different locations where you can give a name.

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And so right here it says view name, and then it says title on sheet. And so if I go into title on sheet, I can change this to say typical one bedroom, and then finish plan. And so that'll change what it says on the sheet here, but it leaves my views in organized fashion on the project browser.

So I could use a standard for these views to organize them the way I want to here, but then because this one isn't necessarily going to be only on level one, but multiple other levels in the project, if it's a multi-level building, then I can just change that to say typical, and then we're all set. Next thing we'll do is we'll place our elevations. And when I do this, I like to give myself a couple of parameters, and those parameters might involve drawing a couple detail lines on my sheet.

And the reason I like to do this is it gives me a boundary line or essentially a box that I can work within. So the first thing I'll do is I'll just take a detail line, and so that's going to be from our annotate tab detail line, and I use the keyboard shortcut DL for that. And then I'll just draw a vertical line here, and that was a very random location.

I'm not terribly worried about exactly where it's located, because what's going to happen is this will end up being the right-hand edge of my elevations that I'll use as a guide, and then I can use that to place the rest of them. So essentially what I'll do is I'll place say this one first, then I'll establish the elevations location and the view title, and then I'll match that as I go through on the other ones that I place. And so I want to start with let's say my kitchen.

So I'll go down to my interior elevations here, and I'll grab kitchen A, and I'll set it in at this point. And you can see there's a lot of information showing here, and this is something that we'll kind of take a look at in a But what we want to do is we want to set our view title so that this number two right here is essentially right on this edge, or maybe just a little bit over, and then we'll line up the extent of it with this point on the elevation. The other thing you want to look at is am I going to be dimensioning or tagging any of these elements? And if that's the case, you know, this is way too close to the plan, because if I went in here and just started adding dimensions for these pieces and put that in there, that's pretty tight on the view.

And so we want to give ourselves some space. And if we look at it here, you can kind of see that there's plenty of room. We're going to go ahead and do that.

And so first thing, I created this boundary, so I'll move that over. And I'm using the move tool, just keyboard shortcut mv, or you could use this button here. And I'll slide it over so it hits my new guideline that I'm using.

And then I'm going to adjust my view title. If you remember, if I want to move the whole thing, I just pick somewhere here in the viewport. If I want to move just the view title, I need to make sure and deselect.

And you can always hit escape a few times to get to that point. But then if I want to just move the view title, I need to make sure I select the view title, and then move it around. If you really want to get picky about it, you can go ahead and draw a detail line like I've done here.

And then I can move just that piece. It doesn't let you snap this, but you can get really close. And I can slide that over.

And then I'll delete my construction lines when I'm done. But you can see here, now I've got a setup that looks a little better. If you're looking at it, you're like, oh, man, we need to make a couple adjustments.

No problem. I can select this guy and say I want to just nudge it down a little bit. I could use the down on my keypad just to give myself a little bit more breathing room.

And keeping in mind that the next elevation I'm going to place is here. And I want these to line up. I want the level lines to line up and the whole deal.

So I'm going to go ahead and adjust this extent, slide it over until we get to that edge of my elevation line. And the first one's really the one that's the most important, because after I set those, it'll allow it to snap vertically all the way down. So you'll always be able to get, say, the next one down this line to align here and here if that was the case, but it won't be in ours.

But this will always line up there. So I'm going to go ahead and add elevation B now. And you can see it really wants to line these things up.

If I were to drop it in there, it'll line up to that point. You can see it's lined up all the way across. And then when I go ahead and grab my view title here, it'll want to line that up as well.

And I can do that same process where we keep it nice and tidy by drawing that construction line. And then I can use the nudge tool to get it as close as I can to lined up. And now I can adjust my extent here and set those that they line up.

And so this is the basics for getting our interior elevations on the sheet. So I'm going to go through and add kitchen number C or letter C here. And this one's looking back down this way, kind of at this wall here and the opening into the study and cutting a section through at that point.

And so I can take this and I can move it so that this extent hits the edge. And then what I like to do is I'll just draw two detail lines. And this gives me the basis for where my view title is going to sit below the view.

And so those detail lines, I'll go ahead and move those down. And these are, again, temporary just for this next row here. But it does give me an idea of where that wants to be.

And so that I can align these two up so that they're pretty much the same. And in this case, these two views are essentially the same width. They're slightly different, but they're pretty close.

And so I could line them up the same way. And then I can go in. And now that I've got this the location I want it, I know that I want this to line up with that point.

So I can drag it across till it locks in. And then I'll delete the construction lines that I created there. And so now I've got the three kitchen elevations on the view, and they're very consistent.

And so I can just keep rolling through. We'll do the living room next. And so I can grab the living room.

And this is where you kind of want to evaluate it. I know it's going to be the next elevation, but this might be a case where it's like, okay, I just want the kitchen ones. And then I'll return the line and do the next ones.

But there's also a chance that I might run out of space here. So I do want to be conscious of that. And then whenever you're laying out a sheet like this, always keep in mind that that first time you lay it out, it might need to change a little bit.

We always want to remain flexible. So I'll go ahead and place the next living room elevation in there. And I'd like it if these lined up down that edge, so that my two rows kind of have a bit of organization here.

And I think that's important, because it does help the view to stay nice and tidy, keep it clean. And so I'll go ahead and line that up. And these aren't the same width.

So I understand that the five and the three are not going to line up, and I'm totally okay with that. But they will on this side. And so I'll go ahead and make sure I get these guys lined up nicely here.

And then we'll just keep going. So living room A, now B. And then we'll get all these placed in there. And then we're going to take a look at how we can make these look just as good with a view template so that we can apply it to all the views.

And so now it's these three lines, because I want to make sure I've got the same amount of space between elevations, the view title, and the following elevation. And so if I want that to be an equal amount of space, or maybe a little bit more, I could. In this case, I think it looks pretty good there.

We might have to adjust it a little bit. Seems to be the theme of everything here, which is totally normal. But if I were to just move those construction lines down, I can continue on with my guide.

Grids are going to come off this view, so ignore the fact that that is going to be probably up into the view title there, which is fine. But we will adjust that in a minute. So I'm just going to go through and adjust the rest of these down.

And then I can get the view title where I want it, which we talked about having the bubble pretty much right at the edge of this guy here, and then aligning with the other views on the sheet at that point. And then I can delete the construction lines. So you always want to make sure you delete the construction lines that you're not using, and especially delete them before you go ahead and print.

We'll just keep adding these to the sheet. So I'll finish out the living room. There's a couple more in there.

And then I'll even add the next one here. Which is our living room D. And I didn't get them all placed perfectly right away, but that's okay because I could just throw them on, and then we can kind of go back through and set them up. And I think it's really important to establish your standard for how you want your sheet to lay out as early as you can, because then you've got a format that you want to hold to.

And then if somebody else were to come in and start working on this view, they would have the same standard that they know should be maintained. And that way, you don't have to worry about it. If somebody else is working on the project, you know that it's going to look the way that you want it to.

And when it comes to sheet organization and appearance, I think it's especially important on these drawings to make sure that you have that going for it. Because this is a design sheet and design set, so we want to make sure it's clear and easy to read. And you can see once you kind of get the flow and the rhythm of this, it starts to go pretty quickly.

And you can start to get your elevations placed. So that's living room A, B, C, and D. And then now we just have our bathroom and our study elevations to go. So I'm going to go ahead and place those, starting with the bathroom elevations.

And you can see I'm placing them in order here. So I've got three more than I need to place. And you can see there's really only space for two more.

And that would be, maybe we can get another row in here, but it looks like it'd be pretty tight. But this is kind of what I was talking about, where we want to start looking at the layout and placing them. And so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to use, I'm holding down control as I click each one of these.

And then I can use the nudge on my D-pad here to kind of push these up a little bit closer to the top. And I don't want to get too close because I am going to have dimensions for these upper cabinets across the top of this elevation. But what I can do is I can now use shift to remove those top two.

And then I can give it like two nudges and kind of do the same thing as I go through to hopefully clear up a little bit more space so that I can get that last row in underneath here. And so in this case, I can have my elevations sort of spill out onto this side because we're not going to have anything on this portion of the plan. And so what I'll do is I'll move this one over so that it's the edge and then get my two guidelines, which will be from the level line to the point of the following elevation.

And then I can place the views accordingly. So I've got that one, which is our middle bathroom elevation, which is the C elevation. And then I can move this one in over here.

And then this guy will just be the one that's left out. It looks like I'm not quite lined up here. And then the last bit is going to be to organize our view titles.

And then we'll have our elevations on a sheet. And then once we've got that all set up, then what we'll need to do is go in and start looking at our view templates and then also what these are going to look like when they print onto a sheet. And that's going to be important because when you look at these elevations, you can see even with thin lines off, you know, some of the weights are just not where they want to be right now.

And so that's something we want to take a look at to make sure we get everything looking the way that we want it to. So I'm just kind of cleaning up some of the line work here. And I'm going to slide, I'm actually going to slide this over, see if we can get it a little bit more proportional because there's a big gap there.

Didn't like the gap. And then just got to adjust these last couple pieces here and then we should be good to go. Once you get more views on the sheet, it does get a little bit more cumbersome trying to manage all of the different view titles and things, but nothing we can't handle because you did just go through and add wall base and crown molding in 3D, which is definitely not the easiest thing to do because of the need to click on pretty much the exact spot every time.

Okay, and this one kind of deviates from our columns a little bit, but I think it's going to be okay. It looks good on the overall sheet. And then can't forget about this last one here.

Just want to push that over and then adjust the end of the view title. And that would be the setup for our elevations. And if you notice, I did not include the ones for the study.

And that's pretty typical when you look at the finishes in here. So let's say if you did like wood molding or some type of like a chair rail or something that you really wanted to elevate, then you could do that. But this room, most of the finishes are just paint and crown and base molding.

And so there's nothing that we can't highlight in our plan or in our ceiling plans. And so totally fine doing that. But this looks pretty good.

I'm going to go ahead and save because that was a big step there. And then our next step is going to be to clean these up by using a view template.