Discover the process of adding annotations to a Revit model, including adjusting the annotation crop, creating text labels, adding leaders, and utilizing dimensioning for further clarification. Learn to control the precision of your annotations, copy and adjust labels, and navigate potential software quirks for a professional, polished result.
Key Insights
- Annotations in Revit models require careful planning, including adjusting the annotation crop (the boundary beyond which text labels won't show), ensuring labels are correctly positioned, and creating and controlling leaders (lines that connect labels to their relevant parts of the model).
- Copying and adjusting labels is an efficient way to add multiple notes to a model. However, you need to be careful to adjust the leader and the text to ensure they correctly refer to the intended elements of the model.
- Using the dimension tool for annotations can provide additional detail to your model. For instance, you can click on a value and add a note below to specify the type of material, such as denoting a four-inch section as sand.
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Now it's time to add the annotations. And so what I'll do is I'll kind of bring this in a little bit. I feel like I'm a little too generous with some of the space that I've provided.
So I'm going to tighten this up a bit. And then we're going to go ahead and we're going to adjust this dashed line on the outside. So you can see when I hover on the crop region, you can see that there's this dashed line.
And what that is, is the annotation crop. And so any annotation elements like text will not show if they're outside of this boundary. We want to make sure we have enough space on the sides for us to add all the text and our leaders.
So what we can do is we can start on the right side here. And to do this, since the last detail, all we did was modify the text that was provided. This one, we're going to be creating it from scratch.
So from the Annotate tab, we'll go to Text. And then we'll make sure it's the right type, of course. And then I'll go ahead and add the text in.
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So the first one I'm going to add here is going to be brick veneer. Now that I have brick veneer in here, I want to just give it a good look and make sure it's in the right location. And to me, it's a little close.
So I'm going to move it over. And now I can add my leader. And so I have two options for leaders.
We stuck with the straight side leader, but there's also a curved option. And I don't really use this one too much because it kind of gets out of hand really quickly. But if you're able to control it, you can create a nice look with your leaders.
If you add one that you don't want, you can always remove it. And then you can add it back the way that you wanted it to be. So what I do is I'll add my first one like that.
And then I will copy it down. And the way I copy is I'll hold down the control key and press and drag. And it'll add a copy of the text I just created.
So then I can go in and I can add my next note, which is going to be 3-inch airspace. And then I'll just adjust my leader accordingly and just repeat that process until I've added all the leaders that I need on this side. So going through, holding down control and pressing, making sure it's pointing to the actual element I'm trying to call out.
And so this will be Exterior Sheathing. The next one's going to be Metal Flashing. And you can see I'm being very careful to make sure it's actually pointing to what I'm calling out.
Again, there is a bit of a quirk here. Sometimes it may not let you type over the top of it. So you just have to hit backspace and then you can go ahead and start typing.
Had that come up a few times. And then the last one on this side, actually, there's two more. This will be the Weep holes at 24 inches on center.
Okay. So Weep holes at 24 inches on center. And then I'll put a note down here to call out the Finished Grade.
So there's definitely more notes that we can add and definitely more graphics that we can add to this. But for the purposes of this class, I think we've covered our bases. So on this side, we'll add a few notes.
And I'll add another text box here. And so I'm going to call out some of the interior materials. So 5/8-inch.
And we'll just abbreviate a little bit, Gypboard. And the difference here is the leader is not going to go off to the left side. It's going to go off to the right.
And so I'll adjust this guy a little bit because we don't need a text box that long. And then I can point to the element I'm trying to annotate. Same process here.
I'll just copy it down. And add my text. If I don't want this to be on two lines, I can always go in and adjust the length of the text box.
So the next one will be 6-inch metal stud. And we'll stay consistent with our use of symbols. And we'll call out the Floor Finish here and the Structural Slab.
And the last one down here is going to be for the Vapor Barrier. So I can adjust this a little bit because it got a little weird there. And allow it to point up directly.
The last part of annotations that we can do is we can actually use a dimension to annotate something. So I can draw a line dimension, that keyboard shortcut we've become very familiar with, which is DI. And I can draw this four-inch dimension here.
And then I can use the dimension to annotate something. So I can go in and I can actually click on that value. And I can add a below value.
And I can just say sand, which is going to symbolize the fact that this is four inches of sand. And that gives us a detail that was made directly from the Revit model. So the last couple pieces here will be to add in the break lines.
And so that's a detail component as well. And so we'll add our break line that we've been using before at these few locations. And you can see it's got to get a little bigger because we're using inch-and-a-half instead of three-inch like our other one.
And then one more on this side here. And you can see once you get it in there the first time, it's pretty simple to just duplicate it throughout the view. And so if we turn off the crop region, it gives us a good idea of what this detail is going to look like.
And that's pretty good. The Grid line is maybe a little high, so I'll bring that down. And likewise on the bottom, it needs to come up a bit.
And now we've got our second detail drawn.
