Explore effective strategies for managing architectural drawings and graphics in Revit, with a focus on hiding elevations at certain scales, managing wall tags, and ensuring wall types correspond with partition schedules. Learn how to print a PDF package of your drawings, ensuring clarity and avoiding clutter in your final submission.
Key Insights
- Revit users can manage architectural graphics by hiding elevation tags at scales coarser than specific settings. This reduces clutter and focuses the viewer's attention on relevant details.
- Ensure consistency in your drawings by properly showing wall tags and wall types that correspond back to the partition schedule. This enhances clarity and comprehension of the architectural plan.
- The export to PDF option in Revit enables users to print a PDF package of their drawings. This is helpful for presenting a complete set of drawings, revisions, and additional details in a neat and easily accessible format.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
So by far, our main offender on graphics has been our A201 sheet, which showed these elevation tags. What we can do is—with our elevations—you have the option to be able to hide them at scales coarser than. So you can see this one’s “Hide at scales coarser than 1 inch = 400 feet, ” and if I were to bring that down to what I call reality, I can go ahead and say hide them at scales coarser than 3/16", because then I’ve still got them showing here in my 1/4" plan, but they won’t show up on our 1/8" plan. If I select these elevations, then I can have it do that. I can go in and pick these elevations and set that setting—“Hide at scales coarser than”—and I just like to use that 3/16" because it’s between 1/4" and 1/8", and I know that it’ll still show here. If I do that for all eight of our elevation views like this, then we can pop over to our A201 plan, and you can see that those are no longer showing up in that view.
That’s an awesome thing to have—it really does help us out, because it reduces clutter and removes things that you can’t even see anyway. So the next thing that I wanted to do before we printed is make sure that we were properly showing our wall tags and wall types in the plan so they correspond back to our partition schedule. So our rated or non-rated full-height partition—which is the walls that we have, like this one here and the ones around the restrooms—these ones are going to be Wall Type A. When I go into my Edit Type, you can see that we have this option for Type Mark, and if I set that to “A” and hit OK, the Type Mark is going to be A.
Another thing you can do, which is pretty helpful, is rename this partition to have it be “A” and then an underscore so that you can see in the type name that it’s going to be Wall Type A, corresponding with the Type Mark. Then, if I go to my Annotate tab and do Tag by Category, when I tag my wall, you can see that it’s now going to be Wall Type A. I’m going to use the smaller wall tag—the 1/4" one—because it just looks better. Now that we’ve got all these things corresponding, we can go ahead and do the same thing. So Wall Type B would be my one-hour rated one. I can do the same thing where I place this one, adding the tag first this time, and then make this a “B.” It’s a type parameter, so it’s going to change all the elements, right?
But what I can do now is make that same modification and rename the type to be Wall Type B in here. What’s great is now, at the top of my list, I’ve got A, B, and it’s easy to find these things. OK, I hit Escape instead of actually doing it here, but now I’ve got B. We’ll do the same thing for Wall Types C and D. We’ve got our shaft wall, which is the wall around our elevator. If I pick that wall and do the same thing—Edit Type, rename Wall Type C—you can see the Type Mark became C because it was already there. Then the same thing for the plumbing wall: I can do Tag by Category, pick the plumbing wall, change it to “D, ” and rename it. Now we’ve got Walls A through D set up here.
I’ll just move that tag down a little bit because, again, it’s not where I want it to be. Then for these, I like to put the tick mark. If I select this guy, I can go to Edit Type, and then the leader arrowhead we can put on here is the “Heavy End 1/8", ” and that just puts a little dashed end on here. I’ll clean this up a bit, and then I’m going to go through and add some tags. So again, I go to Annotate > Tag by Category, and since everything’s already set up, it’s pretty straightforward. I can just add the tags for the walls that we have not yet noted—both on Level 1 and Level 2—kind of like you see here. Avoiding things like this, right? Because then you can’t see the “B.”
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Then I’ll pop over to A202 and add the same tags here. So again, Tag by Category—it would be tempting to do this with “Tag All, ” but I think it would be pretty messy. You might think you’re saving time by doing something like that, but ultimately you’re probably going to end up spending just as much, if not more, time trying to keep it clean and tidy because you’ll have a whole bunch of wall tags everywhere.
Just a couple more here—I’ll go ahead and tag a few around the stair, leading by example for that stair—and then I’ll put one here for the lobby. OK, so those are the changes or revisions that I wanted to make right before we print. Now when we go to print, we’re going to use the Export to PDF option. Unless you have Bluebeam or another PDF printing software, this will allow us to print a PDF package for our midterm.
So my file name is going to be “BIM 303 – [Your First and Last Name] – Midterm.” We want to go ahead and select the sheets that we want to print. If I click this Edit right here, I can pop into all of our sheets, and you can filter this a little bit to only include the sheets, since right now it’s showing all the views. We definitely don’t want that—we just want the sheets. So I can go ahead and check all of these here and uncheck the 3D views, because those are not the ones we want to print.
Then you can see it’s saying “Edit Print Order.” For some reason, these were not printing in order, so we can go ahead and make that revision and change the print order. But the print order looks good, so we can go ahead and select to print those sheets. Then we can pick our saving location—in this case, I’ll save it in my working folder. Then we’ll pick our sheet size—this is going to be the Arch E1. We do not want to select “Fit to Page”—we want to make sure we say “Zoom” so that it zooms to 100%, make sure it’s centered, and everything else looks pretty good here.
The last thing I always want to do is make sure we have that “Hide on Ref View Tags” checked. Once we’re good to go, we can hit Export. I don’t need to save these because we only changed a couple of things, and it’s pretty straightforward. OK, so mine has printed, and I’m going to go ahead and navigate to that folder location where I saved it. I’ll just open it up to double-check that it looks good here. Now I can see that I’ve got my sheets, the revisions that we discussed all look to be correct—because we double-checked them—and the nice thing about that export is that it gives me a full packaged PDF.
Now we’ve got a set of drawings that is 14 sheets, and we’re going to be adding to that and creating much more as we progress through the class. This will be what we submit for midterm, and then when we start back up in the next lesson, we’re going to be taking a look at some other things.
