Creating Enlarged Plans and 3D Views for Rebel Mechanical Course Documentation

Enhancing Documentation with Enlarged Plans and 3D Views

Get the most out of the Rebel Mechanical Course with a clear walkthrough of creating an enlarged plan and a 3D view in Revit, enhancing the depth and detail of your documentation set. Learn how to draw a call out, set the detail level, duplicate views, unlock views, and adjust the section box to highlight specific 3D features accurately.

Key Insights

  • The article provides a step-by-step guide on creating an enlarged plan from a plan perspective in Revit. This includes drawing a call out over a specific area, renaming the default name that Revit creates, and adjusting the scale to make it larger.
  • A 3D view is created by duplicating an existing view and renaming it. The view is then unlocked, allowing it to be rotated and adjusted, and a section box is used to give more control over what is highlighted within the 3D features.
  • Once the enlarged plan and 3D view are created, they are added back to the documentation set. The view scale and orientation may need further adjustments, and the view title should be moved accordingly. Both a plan view representation and a 3D representation are now included in your mechanical course documentation.

Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.

Welcome back to the VDCI video course content for the Revit Mechanical course. In the previous videos, we went ahead and brought some details in here. In the next couple of videos, we're going to add to our documentation set.

So what I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to create an enlarged plan. Now, I want to create an enlarged plan of specific views. I'm going to create an enlarged plan from a plan perspective.

I'm also going to go ahead and create a 3D view to help me maybe give some more information. So I'm going to go to my Ceiling One Mechanical sheet view. The area that I want to go ahead and create this enlarged plan is going to be this area down here.

It's a little complicated, so we want to go ahead and give some more information. To create this enlarged view, I'm going to go over to my View tab. I'm going to go here to Callout.

And I want to go ahead and draw a callout over this space. And this is a pretty simple process. Hopefully you've done it before, possibly with other Revit stuff, but it's pretty straightforward.

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You might want to adjust some of your tags a little bit just so that they're all readable still. Maybe this vestibule—I want to check the leader, pull this out. One of the things with the tags—and we're going to get into tags in the later portions of this documentation process—

You just want to go ahead and make sure that your tags and everything are readable. You always kind of want to look at them as you go through this. We have this enlarged view here. So I'm going to go back to my Enlarged Views sheet, my M401.

I'm going to go to find my enlarged view. Here's my one adds in—or my 1Ceiling Mechanical sheet view, Callout Number One. Now this is the default name that Revit creates.

I'm going to go ahead and drag it onto the sheet, but we'll probably end up changing the name. So I'm going to drag this over and place it in. There we go.

Now you may notice that this view looks a little bit different. The reason why is we need to change some settings here. I have this at the 3/16-inch scale.

I'm going to go ahead and change the scale. Let's go ahead and make it, say, a quarter of an inch just to make it a little bit larger. I'm also going to go ahead and adjust my extension line here—kind of move a few of these things around.

There we go. I'm also going to go ahead and set the detail level of this to Fine in my Properties palette. That's so I can actually see the ducts.

Perfect. The other thing I want to go ahead and do is have a 3D view of this up here. So I'm going to go ahead and duplicate the 3D view that I already have.

Now this is the HVAC 3D. So I'm going to right-click and duplicate. I'm just going to go ahead and hit Duplicate.

I'm going to go ahead and rename this. So I'm going to rename this Enlarged HVAC. Now, when you're enlarging, say, a 3D view, first of all, remember we locked this view.

If I hold Shift and try to pan, it won't allow me to do that. So I need to go ahead and unlock this view. It's not unlocking our original HVAC 3D—it's just unlocking this Enlarged HVAC.

So I'm going to go here, Unlock View. I'm going to go ahead and rotate around. Now, I could just use a view crop to go ahead and do this, but I also want to use a Section Box.

The Section Box allows me a little bit more control because I want to be able to highlight some of these 3D features and how these ducts are crossing over one another. So I'm going to kind of get in here. I'm going to turn on my Section Box.

And let's see, where is my Section Box? I might need to zoom out. Maybe it's turned off in this view. So I've checked it on, but it's turned off in the category.

So let's go to our VV, Annotations, and there are Section Boxes. We'll go ahead and check that on. There we go.

I'm going to go ahead—sometimes I like to adjust the Section Box from, say, a plan. It makes it a little bit easier to figure out exactly what I'm cutting off.

There we go. I'm going to go to a 3D view here. That's looking pretty good.

Let's see—I kind of want to find an orientation I like. There we go.

Then I'm going to go back again and lock this. So I'm going to Save Orientation and Lock View. I'm also going to turn back off my Section Box.

I don't want it to print, so I'm going to hit VV, go back to my Annotations, Section Boxes, Apply, hit OK. And there we go.

This is the enlarged system here. So I'm going to go back to my Enlarged Views, my M401. I'm going to grab my Enlarged HVAC and drag it over.

Now that scale's obviously a little bit too small. Let's go ahead and scale this up a little bit. What do we put this at? Well, let's see if a quarter inch fits.

It might be nice to have those at the same scale. It doesn't quite fit. That's okay.

I think we can get it to fit, though. I'm going to go back into this view. I'm going to unlock my view.

I'm going to orient it a little bit differently. There we go. Then I can go ahead and lock that view again.

I'm going to deactivate the view. So right-click, Deactivate. I'm going to drag this up.

There we go. I'm going to drag my view title up. To move the view title, you have to select just the view title.

I'm going to drag this guy over. And there we go. We have both a plan view representation and a 3D representation of that.

Great. Now I can go ahead—let's take a look through our sheets.

We have our Mechanical Cover Sheet. We have our Mechanical Plan, Level One, Level Two, our Roof Plan showing some systems, our Mechanical Enlarged Views here. One thing you can go ahead and do—it's not going to print per se—but I could uncheck the Crop Region Visible just so that it doesn't show. Mechanical Details and our schedules.

We're going to go ahead and add some more in the next few videos. We're going to go through these different views and begin tagging and creating some additional schedules—just a few other ones that we want to go ahead and list here.

And then we'll be finishing up the course. See you.

photo of Tyler Grant

Tyler Grant

Revit MEP Instructor


Tyler Grant is a BIM Manager a Delawie. A dedicated, goal-oriented, and experienced architect. Tyler has managed multiple design/build BIM projects from inception to construction completion, through all phases. Technology-driven and experienced educator to train and instruct users, both novice and advanced, in the workflow and processes of the modern architecture, engineering, and construction field. 

More articles by Tyler Grant

How to Learn Revit MEP

Specialize in MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing) systems within Revit for advanced design solutions.

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