Preparing View Templates and Sheets in Revit for MEP Mechanical Course

Welcome back to the VTCI course content for the Revit for MEP mechanical course. In the previous videos, we went ahead and finished up our systems on the first and second floors for this portion of these portions of the buildings. If we take a look at it in 3D here, you can go ahead and see that we have the different items.

We have the south side that we put together, and then we have this system that we put together here with the actual deductive returns. Now what we want to go ahead and do in preparation for the deliverables, we want to go ahead and put this on some sheets. Now what we're going to end up doing is we're going to talk about working views versus sheet views.

And then we're also going to talk a little bit about view templates. View templates are a very important thing for a project. It helps maintain consistency across plans, sections, elevations, interior elevations, really any kind of view that you can think of within Revit.

It also allows us to quickly apply settings, and we're going to go ahead and create the view template based on the view settings that we create, and then apply that to separate views. Now, an office may have a lot of view templates already pre-set up, so make sure that you check those out or speak with whoever may be in charge of those templates to say, hey, I want to make sure I'm using the right view template. Could you tell me what that is? There may be a standards book around, something that kind of gives you an idea of, you know, what are my standard scales? What are my other sizes? What are text sizes? What should be showing on a floor plan? What should be showing on a reflected ceiling plan? Again, view templates can help control all that and maintaining consistency across a job.

Getting that right in the smaller jobs is a great practice for when you get a big job coming up, you know, something that may be 10, 15 floors, if you're so lucky, that those view templates are going to be critical to your success with the software. So what I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to go to my ceiling one mech plan. Here we go.

Learn Revit MEP

• Nationally accredited
• Create your own portfolio
• Free student software
• Learn at your convenience
• Authorized Autodesk training center

Learn More

And I want to go ahead, I'm going to define this view, how I want it to look. And then I'm going to create a view template upon this and then establish it to the ceiling two mechanical plan. Then the roof is actually going to be a floor plan because it's not going to be a reflected ceiling plan.

It's just a floor plan. We'll use that for our roof plan. It will create three sheets in this instance.

What I'm going to do first though, is I'm going to go ahead under my where it says my ceiling mech. This is going to become my working view. So I can go ahead and rename these.

I'm going to either right click and hit rename or a new trick I like to kind of use is I select on it and hit the F two key. And then that allows me to rename. I'm just going to go dash working.

Same here, dash working. Let me make that correctly capitalized. And then the same thing with roof, select it, F two, working.

And then if you get this, would you like to read in corresponding level and views? Just hit no. We want the level of roof to still maintain the name roof, but we're just adding working to the end of the view. So make sure you hit no here.

We don't want to rename the level. Then what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to take these. I'm going to duplicate them and I don't have any detailing on these views.

So I'm not worried about duplicating with detailing currently. So I duplicated the ceiling mechanical working and the ceiling of the levels one and two ceiling mechanical. And then I'm going to go ahead and duplicate the roof.

What I'm going to go ahead and do here is I'm actually going to rename this to be sheet view. So remove that working sheet view. I can go F two here, sheet view, go here, sheet view.

And there we go. When looking at a sheet view, I'm going to return to my level one ceiling mechanical. The first thing I want to do is, is the building properly cropped? Is all I have it where I want it to look like on the sheet? Well, it's not really.

So I currently don't have a crop assigned and the crop region isn't visible. If I turn on the crop region and it was cropping, you can kind of see it kind of goes out here. Well, if you see this green dash line in here, this is what in Revit is called a scope box.

And a scope box will allow you to define the crop and assign it to views so that your crop is consistent between views. It's a very powerful tool. You can also assign 3D elements to it.

So actually, do you notice here how my levels here are kind of in line, but then I look at this other level and it's not quite in line. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that level. I'm going to say, I want it to go to the scope box of scope box one.

And there we go. Now you can see it's keeping all the 3D extents of my levels, nice and aligned. The other thing I'm going to go and do is I like to give my scope boxes a specific name.

So this scope box here is going to be the overall scope box for the entire project. So I'm going to go ahead and select it. I'm going to change this to just be overall.

If I have a building that I need to break down in parts, I might have like an area A, area B, area C, area D, so on and so forth. And I'll use those scope boxes to define those areas of work. So let's go to my level one ceiling mechanical sheet view.

I'm going to go ahead and adjust this scope box so it encompasses the entire building. There we go. And that looks pretty good.

I'm gonna leave it as such. I'm now going to assign this view to be dependent upon this scope box. So what I can go ahead and do is I go over here to scope box, pull down choose overall, and you'll see your crop adjust to where that scope box is.

I'm going to uncheck crop region visible. So I no longer see the crop region. And we've defined the extents of our view.

Great. The next thing we want to go ahead and take a look at is going to be the view range. So I can see that I'm kind of seeing some doubles here.

It's kind of a, you know, it's not the way I want it to look. That's probably something going on with the view range here. So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to go to my view range, hit edit.

And let's look at this. Now my top is level above, which is level two to zero feet, zero inches of level two. So it's right on that level two line.

But you can see my view depth goes all the way up to the roof. Well, I'm going to go ahead and change that. And I want that to go ahead and be level above.

And then I'm going to set my offset there to be zero feet, zero inches, if it's not already, I hit apply. Now I'm only viewing up to level two, I'm not seeing whatever is at level two through to the roof level, hit OK. There we go.

And that's looking pretty good. I'm going to set my scale at a specific scale. Also, I could know just from working through this course that the scale for this drawing wants to be 330 seconds, 330 seconds inch equals a foot.

So I'm gonna pull down here, choose 330 seconds inch. There we go. And we're looking pretty good.

So what I'm going to do the last thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to populate my space tags here. So I'm going to go up here to annotate. Now I could place them individually just by just by using space tag here.

But I'm actually going to go to tag all. I'm going to go down find space tags, hit apply. And hit OK.

Now we'll come back and edit these in a second. I just wanted to see them on the view and on the project. It's looking pretty good.

So but they may need some adjustment here, you know, it's kind of hard to read these, we might put some leaders on things like that as we work through this. But we're pretty much ready to establish our view template. If I go over to the view here, and I do a right click, I'm going to go down to create view template from view.

So I've set this UI want, I have everything how I want it to represent on a sheet. So I'm going to go ahead and do create view template from view. It's going to ask me to name that I'm going to go ahead and do let's go RCP for reflected ceiling plan, underscore mechanical or Mac, we can just go Mac.

And I'm gonna go underscore again, 332nd inch. When I've named a view template, I typically like to actually give the type of view a discipline if it's necessary. I'm going to give also overall to tell people that hey, this is the Oh, this is the view template for the overall plan.

And then I usually like to give the scale at the end. I'm going to go ahead hit OK. It shows up in my view templates now.

So you can see that there are already some predefined ones based on the template that this was using. But we want to go ahead and use that RCP Mac overall hit OK. Now, just because we created it based on this view does not mean it's assigned to this view.

So I still need to go over here to view template. I'm going to check this here and I'm going to select that new one that we just created RCP Mac overall. Again, your office, wherever you're working may have a bunch of different view templates already defined.

I'm going to hit apply, hit OK. I'm going to go to my level two view. And I'm also going to do the same thing here.

Now, I don't need to go through and set everything because I've already established a view template. So all I need to do here is I'm just going to go to view template here. I'm going to select RCP mechanical overall, hit apply, hit OK.

And you can see it's changing my view because I adjusted the view range just a little bit. I'm also going to assign the scope box here. So make sure you assign the scope box.

There we go. And then I can uncheck crop reach invisible. I'm a big proponent of making sure your sheets are ready to print at all times.

So turning off scope boxes, even though I know that they're not going to print based on Revit settings, I like the view to look like how I want it to print. I'm also going to go ahead here and create my space tags. So under annotate tag all, I'm going to go down here to space tags, apply, hit OK.

And we'll come back and clean that up here in a little bit. Now the roof plans a little bit different. I'm going to go here to roof sheet view.

Now this is a floor plan, right? So I want to go and make sure we're seeing the entire roof. And I don't really think that I'm seeing the entire roof here on this level. It kind of looks like my roof's being cut.

So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to move my cut plane really high. So I'm seeing the entire top of the building. Roof plans are a little different in that fashion.

So I can go view range here. And I'm going to move this, I'm going to go the top is going to be unlimited. But I'm going to take the cut plane to like, let's go like 50 feet, I know that's going to be above everything.

The view depth, that's fine. I'm going to go ahead and apply. Let's see how this looks.

And there we go. So you can tell I no longer my roof is no longer being cut. I have the full parapet here, you can see my rooftop unit here.

And everything there is good. I'm also going to assign the scope box to this. Overall, there we go.

And I'm going to go ahead and create another view template. So under roof sheet view, right click, create view template from view. I'm going to go ahead and name this FP for floor plan.

That's the type of view it is in Revit underscore roof. Overall, I think I did a dash overall in the previous one. And then underscore, it's going to be 330 seconds of an inch.

Now you may have noticed that I hadn't set that yet. That's fine. We'll change it.

I'm going to hit OK. So with this view template, now that I have this view template kind of set up, I can change all these different parameters. So view scale, I forgot to set it previously.

Let's go ahead and change that to 330 seconds of an inch equals a foot. I'm going to go ahead hit OK. There we go.

And then I think everything else there is good. Oh, wait, we created the view template. And this has a mechanical plan view template assigned.

I want to set change this to the floor plan roof overall. Apply. Okay, and notice how it did everything I needed it to create.

Let's go and stop this video here. In the next video, we'll start getting on some sheets. See you then.