Explore the process of adding and modifying dimensions in architectural plans to maximize their utility and clarity. This article delves into the intricacies of adjusting and positioning dimensions, managing the units setting in Revit, and cleaning up the dimensioning for improved readability.
Key Insights
- The positioning and spacing of dimensions can be adjusted to improve clarity and consistency across the plan. Moving dimensions closer to the building and maintaining the same distance between multiple dimensions can help achieve a more organized appearance.
- In Revit, the units setting can be modified to enhance readability. For example, it's possible to suppress zero feet in measurements and remove spaces between feet and inches. This can significantly reduce the size of the dimension labels and simplify the overall look.
- Minor tweaks can greatly improve the layout and readability of your dimensions. Adjusting the dimension's height above the line, moving the dimension text outside of the witness lines in smaller dimensions, and organizing dimensions in a way that avoids conflicts can result in cleaner, clearer dimensioning.
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Let's take a look at adding some more dimensions. So in this video we're going to look at adding the dimensions and also making some modifications to our dimensions so that they look correct on the plan. First thing we want to do is just evaluate what we have already and see if there's some things we can do to make the best use of it.
So a good example of that would be if we look at our dimensions across the top of the building. We already have the overall and the breakdown that shows the different walls and we won't need to add any more dimensions to this location because they're already there. What I do want to show you here though is that if I were to move this dimension down what I could do is I can actually move it back up into place and because of the way this is set up there's almost a lock that'll click it in so that they're all in the same location.
If I were to draw just randomly another dimension string down below here it'll be the same distance from all the other ones so that we can keep kind of an even level of our different dimensions as we go through. In the case of these guys here I'm just going to move them down closer to the building because there's no reason for them to be that far off and I'll do the same thing as we go around. So on this side what I'd like to do is I want to add in one more dimension that's going to represent the center line that's kind of the basis for a lot of the different things in the project but I'm going to work my way back from the 20 foot dimension here.
You'll notice that it says 10 foot and 10 foot. If I wanted to I could set that to be exactly equal by clicking on the dimension first and then selecting the EQ. Now it's going to show the EQ option.
The next thing I can do is since this is about where I want this dimension string to sit is I can move these until they lock in to that same spacing that we're looking for and you may see how this is conflicting a little bit but we're going to make a setting change that'll help us adjust that. Next we're going to look at how we can adjust the extents of an existing dimension. If I were to select the dimension that we drew to help place this window I can make a change to this by selecting it clicking edit witness lines and then now I'm back into the dimension tool like it was the same way that we drew it the original way and what's great is I can go in and I can add to this which will allow me to dimension from the center line to the door width from the door to the window the window width and then ultimately to the outside face of our wall which gives me this full dimension string here.
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One thing you might be noticing is that instead of it just saying five inches there it says zero feet five inches and that's a function of the units setting that we have within Revit. If I were to go to my manage tab we have project units and with project units what I could do is I could adjust the way that units are displayed globally throughout the project or I could edit the project units specifically for this dimension string. In our case what I want to do is I want to adjust the units across the whole project so I'll go to manage project units and then you can see here these are all of the different formats that we have for the different units within the project.
So length is what we're dealing with and so I'll click on where it says length here and I can adjust the options within the length format. The first thing I'll do is I'll suppress zero feet so that means when you have five inch dimension or a three inch dimension it'll just say five inches instead of zero feet five inches. The next thing that I want to do is I want to suppress the spaces so you can see how it's 20 feet space dash space zero inches.
Well I'm going to take that out so it'll tighten things up a bit hit okay and okay again and you can see it kind of reduces the size of these. The next thing that I want to do here is I'm going to adjust the dimensions height above the line so you can see it looks like the dimensions are floating up a bit and that's an easy fix so I'll just select one of my dimension strings since they're all the same type. I'll click edit type and what we're looking for here is our text offset setting and you can see it's set to 1 16th of an inch and so I'll usually cut that down to 1 32nd so that it's still above the line but it's not hovering so high and when I hit okay you can see it drops everything down a bit and now the dimensions are a little bit tightened up.
The last little trick here I'll show you is that when you have a small dimension like here five inches you don't have to leave it within the two witness lines you can go in and grab this dot here for the text and I can move it outside of the line so that it fits a little bit better. So you can see this one foot 11 is just right on the edge there and so that would be a judgment call that you would have to make but essentially you could pull that one out as well and you can see when we make those few changes it cleans up our dimensioning quite a bit.
