Explore the comprehensive process of updating and enhancing a CAD drawing using Revit. This step-by-step guide demonstrates techniques to adjust text sizes, rename drawings, streamline detailing, and ensure consistency across all design elements.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to rename a drawing in the drafting view detail and emphasizes the importance of checking and adjusting text sizes for readability and consistency in the design.
- It further illustrates the procedure to replace text with the correct text size and introduce new leaders and arrowheads to maintain uniformity across all drawings. The addition of Revit leaders to the text improves design dynamics as they move along with the text.
- The article also discusses the significance of maintaining the clarity of symbols by setting the background to transparent and saving changes appropriately. It concludes by indicating the next steps of updating line weights and moving the enhanced drawing onto a sheet.
Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 322 course. In the previous video we went ahead and got our information from our CAD detail populated into the drawing and exploded. We're going to go ahead and start actually detailing this stuff out and adjusting it and revitizing it, again to coin a term, so that it looks correct.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I want to rename this first. So under the drafting view detail, under call of sheet view 1-plumbing, I'm going to right click, rename. I'm going to change this to domestic water heater detail.
Hit ok. And there we are. Now the first thing we want to go ahead and do is actually check on the text.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and select everything. And we want to go make sure we're checking the text size. Again I'm just going to drag over everything, make sure I have it all.
And I'm going to go ahead and go up to filter. I'm going to filter here and I'm going to go ahead and check none. And I'm only going to select the text notes.
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I don't want to edit any of this other information. Just want to select the text notes, hit apply, and hit ok. And as you can see it's selected only the text notes.
What I'm going to go ahead and do is that I'm going to change these to the 3.25 inch, 3 and 3.32 inch aerial. Hit ok. And there we are.
Now it looks a little freaky right now, I know. Don't worry about it. What's happening is this is a very small scale for this drawing.
We're going to be changing the scale and then we'll go ahead and adjust the actual text boxes to match. I'm going to go ahead down to my drawing scale and take it up to 12 inches equals a foot. Perfect.
What I want to go ahead and do now is I want to go ahead and actually edit these text boxes. The reason why it looks so crazy is because of the fact that these text boxes are smaller than the actual text is long. So I just select one, I'm going to grab it, drag it over until I get to the point where I like it.
I'm going to go over here, grab this guy, drag it out, grab this guy, drag it out here, grab this guy, and drag it out here. And there we go. I'm going to go ahead up here, grab the shape handle for the text box, bring it out here, shape handle for the text box, and the last one here.
And I think we've got them all. Perfect. That was really easy.
Super simple. Now, we could just leave this out here, but there's one other thing that I want to go ahead and do that hasn't been done quite yet. If you zoom into the text down here, if I select it, do you notice that the leader is not part of it? I want to go ahead and give these actual Revit leaders.
What's going on is that these are actual three individual pieces, two lines, and a filled region. And it's a detail item filled region, and the problem with this is that if I move the text around, this will not move with it. So what we're going to go ahead and do is I'm going to go ahead and select everything here, just like that, delete it.
I'm going to go ahead and select for anchored requirements, structural drawings, and I'm going to go ahead and add right side straight leader. There we are. And just adjust it slightly.
I'm going to go on to the next one, delete it, select the text, add a leader, and then just adjust it to fit as I need to. Select this, delete it, select the text, add a leader, and there we are. I'm going to go up to the next one, select the leader that I need to get rid of, delete it, select that.
I'm going to go ahead and create a straight leader, and there we are. I'm going to go over here, select that piece, delete it, select here, add a straight leader, and bring it to here. Select this guy here, select the actual leader portions itself.
If you needed to add things to your selection set, remember to hold control, select the text, add a straight leader. I'm going to go ahead and take it down to where it was before. Again, I'm going one by one rather than selecting all of these and getting rid of them all at once because I want to kind of remember where these are actually pointing to.
Go up here, get rid of that guy, select the text, add a leader, and there we are. Select this guy, delete, and then on this end I'm going to add a left side straight leader. There we are.
Now, if your leader arrow head looks slightly different from mine, don't worry about it. I'm going to add a straight left leader here, drag it here, drag it up to here. If your leader head looks slightly different from mine, don't worry about it.
All you need to do is select the text, go to edit type, and then go ahead and change that leader arrow head to whatever you'd like. Typically, we like to use the arrow filled 15 degree. As you can see, we have the arrow 30 degree, arrow filled 15, so on and so forth, all the way down.
The one that I'm using here is the arrow filled 15 degree. I'm going to select this guy. Why we're doing this, it may seem like busy work, but what we're doing is we're going to try and maintain the same look across all of our details and all of our drawings.
We're replacing the text with the correct text size, and we're going to go ahead and make all the leaders and the arrow heads new so that we can actually get everything to look the same across every drawing. I think I've got them all. One up here, select it, add leader.
I'm just going to go ahead and one more up here. Select the text. I'm going to add a right side leader, drag it to where I want it to be placed, and there we go.
I'm going to go ahead and zoom extents, control s, and save the file. Now, one thing that you may notice is that I have these different water heater symbols. Do you see how it's starting to cut things off? Well, text boxes and text notes have a background, either opaque or transparent.
What we need to do is we need to go ahead and give these two items a text style that has a background of transparent. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select the water heater symbol and the water heater one number, the storage tank symbol and the storage tank number. There we are.
Right now, they're only set to aerial. I'm going to pull this down, and I currently have an aerial transparent. All this aerial transparent is the duplicated version of this 332ndsAerial, so I'm going to select that guy.
If I go into the edit type of it, I can see that the background has now been set to transparent. If you want to go ahead and create that, all you need to have to do is I'm going to go back to my 332ndsAerial. I'm going to go edit type.
I'm going to duplicate, give it the name 332ndsAerial transparent, hit okay. What it's telling me is because I already have it in use, it's already there. That's fine.
Then all I would need to do is in that background, I would just need to change it from opaque to transparent. That's all you would have to do. I'm going to escape.
I'm going to select those guys and make sure that they are on that correct text style. Go here, aerial transparent, and as you can see, the lines are no longer cut off by the actual text itself. I'm going to go ahead and zoom extents, control s, save the file, and there we are.
The last thing I want to go ahead and do is get this onto a sheet because it's already ready to go. Everything's good to go, but let's just check one thing first. Let's go ahead and turn off our thin lines.
Everything's looking pretty good, but I do want to make some more adjustments. I'm going to go ahead and pause the video here. Go ahead and double check to make sure you got all your leaders and all your text the correct sizing.
I will see you in the next video where we'll be going ahead updating some of these line weights and then moving forward. I'll see you then.
