Discover the detailed process of dimensioning in Revit, starting with the exterior dimensions on a first floor plan. Learn how to work with dimension strings, use the edit witness line, create consistent styles, and add notes to dimensions for clear communication.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the method of creating consistent dimensioning in Revit. It highlights the importance of being intentional with dimensioning, and working systematically from one area to another.
- The author emphasizes the use of 'edit witness line' for adding more dimensions to a string. This technique allows for accurate dimensions connecting multiple elements in the model.
- Adding notes to dimensions is another useful method explained in the article. This allows for better communication within the team, and maintaining a consistent style throughout the project.
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The first thing we're going to want to do here is dive in and work on our dimensions. And so you can see there's a handful of different dimension notes that I've put on here so that we can go ahead and start dimensioning this and creating a consistent style of dimensioning that we want to use throughout the project. We're going to take a look at a few of these areas first.
And I think let's just start in the bottom left and kind of work our way across. We've got this string along grid line one, and then all the way down here along grid line D that we're going to tackle. So I'm going to jump back over to my Revit model here.
And I'm going to go into my first floor plan. And so there's a couple ways we can do that. I think once you have sheets, you're going to want to make sure you're working on the view that's on the sheet.
So you can jump over to the sheet, expand it, and you can see that it's level one floor plan. What you'll notice is if you're working with like a large group of people, there might be multiple level ones that people have created for like working purposes, or just to create a quick diagram to show somebody something. And that may not be the one that's on the sheet.
So you know, I can tell it's on a sheet here, because it's got a little dot filled in, whereas this one does not. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's the one on the sheet that we want to be working on, because somebody could have created a sheet temporarily, or created another sheet that has a level one floor plan for a different purpose. And so knowing that the sheet that I'm trying to modify is A201, and it's going to be this plan on that sheet, I think it's important to navigate it to it this way to avoid having to redo anything.
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So I'm going to double click here where it says level one floor plan. It's going to take me to the plan that's on a sheet. And you can see when we compare what we have here versus what we had on our markup, there is a lot of work to do.
We're going to go ahead and dive in and get at it. So the first thing that I see that I will call some of our low hanging fruit are going to be like our grid line, and kind of our overall dimension. So you know, if we, if we were to zoom in here a little bit, you can see I've got grid line to face of the building dimensions here.
And then also trying to identify, you know, where some of these things are here. So it's like, how does this door get placed and that edge of that curtain wall, and just generally where these mullions are dimensioned across here, this one's a little bit unique. We're dimensioning them on here.
But here, it's like these are all equal panels across the edge. We just need to locate each side of the window, and then identify how many panels we want to be equal on there. So that's kind of a standard that we're going to establish for for this project.
And you see, I kind of gave a note here. So that's something we want to do on all of that. So I'll go back to the Revit model.
And we'll go ahead and start here. And so I'll take my dimension string. And so as you guys know, I'm a huge fan of the create similar phenomenon.
So it's CS on your keyboard. So I just pick the dimension hit CS. And then I can go in and I can add that dimension.
So from here to our endpoint. And where this ends up hitting ultimately is something will change. But you notice I just went from the edge to the face of the wall here, which looks like it's a little bit off.
So I can kind of make that edit here. I'm using the align tool, of course. And then since I want to have more dimensions on this string, because that's what our that's what our markup shows here, I can go back into the Revit model with the dimension selected and hit edit witness line.
And then I'll dimension along this line to say, the curtain wall here. And then I can start picking up my different mullion dimensions and make my way down this wall. And you can you can see here, I'm not just going nuts here and just picking whatever line I'm actually being very intentional to hit the center lines here.
And this is going to be an endpoint because this is where those walls are going to change. And so I'll go ahead and pick that point there. And then this will be a different dimension here.
This is the one where we're dimensioning the the entire length of this wall and just saying that we're going to have x amount of panels. So I'll just go ahead and grab the edge point here. And you might have to hit TAB a few times, but you'll get to it.
And so you can see I've got 44 feet. And then we'll refer back to that markup. And it says the dimension, which I didn't know what it was when I did this markup.
But I do know that it has eight equal panels. We can count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. And so I didn't lead you astray there, which is awesome. But we can go ahead and click on the dimension.
And this is one of the things I told you many, many times over the past few courses never to do. But this something we want to do here because we're going to add notes to the dimension. But when you click on the dimension value, you can click on it again.
And it pops up this dialog box. And then we can go to the below. And then I can just say eight equal panels.
And whether you spell out equal or just say EQ is up to you. Sometimes it might make more sense to do that because you've got more space. But ultimately, what you'll want to do is just be consistent.
And so this is our first dimension string that we've added here. And then I'll take a look and just double check to make sure which one we're going to do next. And when you look at the dimension strings, you can see we can kind of work our way around.
We have our gridline dimensions and then our curtain wall dimensions that we can add in. And we'll just work our way down to this side here. And I want you to note that when I put this next dimension here, which is the gridline to the face of the wall, again, hitting tab a bunch of times to get to it, I'm going to have these be pretty consistent.
And as you're bringing it across, you can see they'll kind of lock into each other. Because the spacing between dimension lines is preset. And so I should be able to have this look the same all the way around the building.
And so, you know, I eyeballed this a little bit, but you can see there's almost like a 45 degree angle from, you know, where this dimension is to where the next one is there. And you can kind of see that line. And so we're respecting the same distance from the plan for all of these dimensions so that we do have a consistent look all the way around the building.
And just going to go ahead and keep adding those dimensions here. So using that align dimension to the face of this curtain wall now, and trying to get those to be the same. And then we'll have the same thing we just did, where it was the overall.
And that one's going to be our equal dimension. And you can see they want to line up. And so we should always be making sure that we're doing that.
And so in this case, we have 69 feet with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 equal panels. We'll just do the same thing. 12 equal panels.
And now we have the dimensions on this side done. Just need to get the last little bit here, which will be the dimension for the grid line to the edge of the wall. And there we have it.
So that's that that corner that I was talking about. So then I can go in to my markup. And I can say, okay, I've got this dimension.
I've got all of these points dimension. I missed this one. So I need to make sure I grab that, the curtain wall, and then these two grid line dimensions.
And then I can go in and start looking at some of these in here. So before we forget, let's hop back and add in this grid line dimension. Because again, that'll be easy to forget.
We don't want to do that. And so this one will align with our grid dimensions, not the overall. And you can see that here.
If this bothers you a little bit, remember, we can always grab that dot and kind of slide this guy out to clean it up. We're not covering up anything. And that looks pretty good.
And then we'll just go ahead and finish off the dimensioning that we have in here, which is going to be a dimension from the face of wall to the grid line again. And this one's a little tighter in here. As you can see, we don't have as much space to work with for that particular wall.
And then we're going to want a dimension that locates this wall here, which would be from the grid line to that face. And we can use the edit witness line to pick that up. And you can see here, we've got a few things that we have to navigate around.
So I might move this out a little bit so that I can see. And then the whole thing is just kind of scrunched together so we can start pulling these dimensions apart so that it's a little easier to read. So in this case, since we are at BIM 303, which is like your fourth or fifth Revit course that you've taken, I'm not going to walk you through every single one of these dimension exercises.
The intent here was to do a video that kind of gets you started. And then you can use this markup as a guide for which ones you want to use. And so it's up to you how you want to go about doing that.
But this video was intended to get you going on the exterior dimensions for level one. And then the next video, we're going to go ahead and jump in and take a look at doing the interior dimensions.
