Learn how to draw, adjust, and dimension walls using various tools and features in Revit. The article walks you through the process and provides tips on how to ensure your dimensions are accurate and your wall types are correct.
Key Insights
- The article outlines the process of drawing walls using different shapes such as lines, rectangles, polygons, circles, and arcs. The use of the rectangle tool is recommended for simplicity, but the line tool can also be used if preferred.
- Dimensions in Revit are adjusted using temporary dimensions, which allow you to easily change the length and width of the building. The aligned dimension tool is used to draw dimensions from wall plane to wall plane, and the tab key is used to alter selection options.
- When adjusting dimensions, it's important to note that you're changing the location of the wall, not its length. Always ensure that the dimensions turn blue, indicating that they're active and can be adjusted. The exterior wall must be created with the correct wall type and dimensions.
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Now that we've got all of the housekeeping out of the way, let's go ahead and draw some walls. So everything that we mentioned previously, we're going to want to maintain, but we're going to want to set the location line to Finish Face: Exterior. Because we have the options available to us, we can draw with line, rectangle, polygons—whether inscribed or circumscribed—and we can do circles, arcs, and all kinds of different things here.
In our case, it's pretty simple. We're just going to stick with the rectangle; you could definitely draw with lines if you wanted to, but why would you when you have the rectangle option? So I'll just pick two points here.
So I'm going to kind of start in this location here with a left-click. You can see I'm not even really close to the dimensions, but I'll just kind of guess about right there. It doesn't really matter what those dimensions say, because those are actually to the centerline of the wall anyway.
So I'll have to adjust it after the fact, no matter what. I'll go ahead and click to place, and that's going to be my overall building outline. When I zoom in a bit so we can see what we're doing, I'm going to go ahead and pick one of the walls.
You can see that my Finish Face: Exterior is this dot here and here. What we have is this toggle, which will always be on the exterior face of the wall, so that we don't have to guess which side is inside or outside, because this is a generic wall that doesn't have a material applied to it. The next thing we need to do is make sure that we get these dimensions correct.
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To do that, we can do a couple of different things. First, we could use what are called the temporary dimensions—these guys here—to adjust the length and width of this building. Or we can do what I prefer, which is to draw the dimensions anyway, because we're going to end up doing it later on down the road anyhow.
To draw these dimensions, the first thing we want to do is go to our Annotate tab. When we draw dimensions in Revit, what we're looking for is the aligned dimension. These are dimensions that we draw from plane of wall to plane of wall.
Think of it as drawing from this face to this face here. If I were to use my aligned dimension, I want to make sure that I hit that face of the wall. By default, Revit is going to try to find those centerlines no matter what we do here, unless we were to change the default.
You can change it to wall faces, but the next thing you'll be doing is changing it to wall centerlines, wall core, or whatever it may be, so I don't mess with that.
What I do is use the Tab key—which is probably going to be one of your favorite keys on the keyboard, except for Escape, because that's everybody's favorite. You hit that one a ton of times here. With Tab, if I hover over the wall, I can hit the key and it'll change my selection options.
See how it's kind of bouncing around there? Since I want this to be on the outside face, I'll hover over the outside face and hit Tab, and then click to start it. I'll do the same thing as I come across: find that outside face, hit Tab, left-click again, and now I have my dimension.
To place this dimension, I could move the mouse up; now there's no chance that you can dimension to something that doesn't exist. There's nothing out here, so I'll just click in the white space and it terminates the dimension.
I'm going to go ahead and do the exact same thing for the other dimension. I'm going to hover, hit Tab, grab that face of the wall, bring it down, hit Tab again, and then move it across and place it. Because this building is so small, we're going to run out of space really quickly here.
We'll have to change the scale from 1/8-inch to 1/4-inch, because we won't be able to see any of our dimensions or walls or anything we're creating. It will become a really cluttered mess really fast. We want to make sure we're using 1/4-inch for now.
Now that we have the dimensions in place, we can adjust these values to match what shows on our plan. We're close here—we have 26, and we have 27.6 on this one.
To make that adjustment, everybody's first instinct is to try to change this dimension, but then you end up with this dialog box, and there's really no way to change the dimensions from there.
To adjust the dimension values, you've got to think about what they were using as reference points. We used this wall and this wall. If I want to make this side 25 feet, then I need to pick either this wall or this wall to adjust the length of this one here. If you notice, when I pick those walls, this dimension turns blue, which means it allows me to change the value.
If I pick that blue value, I can type in 25 and hit Enter to adjust the dimension to 25 feet. I can do the same thing here to make this exactly 20 feet. If I pick this horizontal wall, you can see that the value changes to 20 feet 6 inches, turning from black to blue, and it gives me the ability to change it.
Another common mistake a lot of people make is that they'll want to pick this wall because it seems to make sense that you're changing this length, but in reality, you're changing the location of this wall. We'll change that to 20 and hit Enter.
Now we have all of our exterior walls created with the right wall type and with the right dimensions.
