Create a more efficient title sheet by modifying the title block and adding useful parameters. This article explores a step-by-step method to add project information parameters, set visibility parameters, and arrange data neatly in the title block.
Key Insights
- Customize the title block to display project-specific information, eliminating the need for repetitive data entry. This can include the project name, address, and other relevant details, which can be entered as parameters.
- Establish visibility parameters to control the display of added elements in the title block. By doing so, you can choose when specific details appear on the title block, avoiding clutter or overlap with floor plans.
- The final arrangement of the title block should be clean and organized. Consider the space for longer elements like the sheet name and revision description, and ensure all details are accurately placed for a clear, professional presentation.
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For the title sheet, what we're going to do is we're actually going to modify the title block to add some parameters in here, and this is a cool trick that you can do to any title block to help prevent repeating unnecessary information. And so what I could do is I could edit my title block by selecting it and saying edit family, and then I can go in and I can add information to the title block family that I want to have translate to maybe a project title or a different lines that I want on the sheet. There's a whole list of things that you could do here, and we're going to take a look at a couple of them.
So what I want to do is I want to create kind of a box for myself here, and I'm going to draw a couple of lines. So I'm going to draw a line here, and we'll say about seven inches down, that looks about right, and then I'll bring it all the way across, but we're going to turn it back, and we'll do the same thing maybe about seven inches across. And the reason we do that is this channel here is going to be just some project information, and then we'll put a couple renderings in this area, and then we'll have like a big project title there.
So I'm going to take this line and bring it across, and these are line elements that are going to be specific to our title block, but we're able to create what's called a visibility parameter that allows me to turn it on or off whenever I want it to show up. And so I could do this with a parameter, or I could do it with text, and I think the best way to do it is with a parameter. We can use this label parameter, and then I can go in and I can say, okay, well how big do I want it to be? And quarter inch is probably fine, but we'd like to maybe make it a little bigger.
And so I'll select right here, and that pops up my edit label box, and then I can pick the label I want to use, and in this case we're going to go with project name and hit okay. And so project name is now going to be across here, and I'm moving this to be a little larger because I know it's going to take up more space than what you're seeing there. And then I can add another one, and I just like to use that copy trick that I showed you earlier here, and then I'll edit the label, and then I'll put project address on here as well.
And so with project name and project address, then we can go ahead and we can add that information. And so if you notice, we have project name here, and we have project name here. And so this parameter has already been established in our project as BIM 301.
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And so then we're going to have this one come in, and it'll just say BIM 301 across the top as well, or whatever we decided to change it to. And that's the cool part about it. Now obviously we don't want all of this to show up on every sheet because, you know, we do have our floor plans are pretty much sitting right here in the middle.
And so if I did that, then we'd end up seeing this information. We'd have lines all over the place, and that's not good. And so what we're going to do is we're going to get specific.
And if I select all of these elements here, you can see that the parameter that shows up in our instance parameter is visible, and then there's a box here. And this box allows me to associate it with a family parameter. When I click on it, you can see there aren't any right now, but I can add one using this guy right here.
And by adding a parameter, I can call it something as simple as title sheet because this information is very specific to our title sheet. And then I can make it an instance parameter, which is actually very, very important because if I don't make it an instance parameter, then it's something that I have to create a type for my title block to control. We don't want to do that.
Okay. And we're just going to, this is kind of a dotting the I's and crossing the T's thing here, but we'll, we'll make it under the visibility parameters because we want to be able to find it. If you just leave everything under other than all your parameters are just all over the place and that's not good practice.
So everything looks good here. Go ahead and double check your results. Make sure this is what you have, and then we'll hit.
Okay. And okay. Again, you can see how this now says equal.
And here's another trick that I do, because I only want this to show up on one sheet. So what I'll do is I'll go into my family types here, and this is our type that we're using. It's the VTCI title block with the E one 30 × 42.
But I want this to be off by default because I only want to turn it on for my title sheet. If I leave it off by default, it won't be on when we create new sheets. And then I can turn it on for just that one sheet that I want it to be on.
We'll hit. Okay. And then we'll do load into project.
And it's asking us if we want to override the existing version and the parameter values. And we can use this bottom one because we want the parameter values to be matching to what we have in our, in our family that we just created and nothing should happen here. You see that? But if I were to select the title block, you can see that I have visibility parameter here for title sheet.
And when I select it, everything starts to show up here. So I can then go in and enter the address and I'll just put VTCI's address. Oh, that wouldn't get you there.
All right, there we go. And so now we've got the project title, which is our BIM 301. And we've got the project address.
Now we can add our sheet index, which we created a while back, but we can put it on the sheet now. And so this can go in here. And what I'll do is I'll just kind of nudge it up into the corner here so that it sits on our grid.
And then I always extend out the sheet name and the revision description because those tend to be the longest. Current revision is always going to be just one letter. So it's a pretty small one.
We can give the space back to some of these other things and just kind of moving that in there and it looks pretty good. Now we've got our sheet index and it looks like I'm a little off. You guys probably suffer from the same condition here.
You got to have it just right, which is perfectly fine, of course. And so I'll go in and get that right on there, somewhere within that thick line. And now we've got our sheet index on here.
We've got our title block with the cool parameters set up. Now we just need to get this thing ready to go and print the PDF.
