Explore the intricacies of adding keynotes in Revit, specifically when working with elements that are not built in Revit but are simply CAD elements. Understand how to navigate potential issues such as missing host elements and overlapping notes using user keynotes and other strategies.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the challenge of adding keynotes to elements in Revit that are not actually built in Revit but are just CAD elements. It’s explained that user keynotes can help overcome this challenge, enabling you to tag elements, adjust their placement and even remove their leader.
- Another issue brought up is the problem of missing host elements due to not modeling the entire site within Revit. The solution given is to create a fake element keynote, adjust its leader and employ the same host in general areas. This allows you to adjust keynotes and place them throughout your site plan, even without all the correct host elements.
- A third key point is the potential for overlap between keynotes and elements or elevations. The recommended solution is to make adjustments either to how your keynote schedule is loaded on your sheets or to how your elevations are situated on each page.
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I'm going to go ahead and jump over to my A101 site plan sheet. And then from here, I'm going to add a couple of keynotes. And this is where it's going to get a little tricky.
And that's because when we add keynotes here, we need to have a Revit element to note toward. So the trash enclosure, for instance, which is our keynote S04, isn't actually built in Revit. It's just a CAD element.
And so this is where using that user keynote really comes into play. Because if I don't use the user keynote for here, you can see I'm actually going to be tagging something else to put the keynote on here. And so you could say we're kind of cheating a little bit.
But if I put my user keynote on here, say that parking space, and say trash/recycle enclosure, no big deal, I can actually take this and I can move it over to note this element here. Another thing that we could do is, like we have that drive aisle note that I was talking about previously, if I add a keynote here, and I were to go in and pick the site note for drive aisle, I also have the option to not have a leader on here. So I can remove the leader.
And then I can go in and just kind of set that note in place here. At the same time, I can copy that note knowing that it's hosted to this element. And then I can go in and I can change it to be for AC paving.
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Now, if I were really going for it, I could copy that note again. And you see what happened there? No host, because I went way too far away from that guy for it to work anymore.
We just have to repeat that process again, creating a fake element keynote. That's going to be the site for our enhanced paving here. And then I can just adjust the leader to work for that.
And so another example would be adding the note for the sidewalk. And you see I'm just using the same host in these kind of general areas. And that gives us the ability to adjust these keynotes and place them throughout our site plan, even knowing that we don't have all of the correct host elements because we didn't model the entire site within Revit.
And so when we go to other views, say our building elevations or let's go to our roof plan for this one now. If I wanted to add a couple of keynotes in here, this one's pretty straightforward. So I can use that user keynote and I can just add it to the project because I've got clearly the skylight here and this is clearly the roof screen.
And so it's easy for me to add both of those and have them show in the schedule pretty easily. The same thing applies to our building elevations. If there was something that we wanted to note on here, I could come in really simply and I can add a keynote, a user keynote for this.
And I could say, okay, well, this is going to be that storefront, right? Or this will be the skylight. And I can even use some of those material ones that we identified. So I can go into material and that could be like type one.
And I can note in here that this is the type two using that material category that I had. And if you wanted to, since this one is a little bit larger, we can make the box bigger, but I think it's fine like that. And so, in the same light, you know, I can tag the material for the metal panel.
And then that just kind of gives you an idea of some of the notes that you can add to your schedule. And so you can see we're starting to run into a bit of trouble here with where our elevations are placed. And so if you start doing that and seeing things starting to overlap, then that's when you need to make an adjustment to either how your keynote schedule is loaded on each of your sheets or how your elevations are located on each page.
Either one of those is going to be an acceptable correction to these types of overlaps.
