This article provides an in-depth look at how to effectively set up and organize a keynote file to denote different materials in your design. It explains the importance of using keynotes as designators and demonstrates how to assign different keynotes to material attributes.
Key Insights
- Keynotes can be used as designators for different materials in your design, offering an alternative to using material tags, which may not always function as effectively.
- When setting up your keynote file, it's crucial to maintain a consistent parent hierarchy between the different sections created. Any minor typos can be indicators of potential errors that need to be corrected.
- The article emphasizes the importance of not repeating too much information in too many places. To avoid this, instead of copying the exact text for each material, you can use placeholders like 'per schedule' to prevent redundancy and make updating more manageable when changes occur.
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Before we dive into a lot of the other documentation, we really need to get our keynote set up. And so in here, we have all of our different materials that we have, and we can use our keynotes to be the designators for each one of these instead of trying to use a material tag. And the reason I don't use the material tag as much as you might think we could is because it just doesn't work as well as I would like it to.
We can assign the different keynotes to the material attributes. So you can see we've got like our glass spandrel here. And when I click on say, you know, Revit annotation information, there's a mark, and then there's a keynote.
And we can use both of these to help us to annotate this. And when we click on the three dots here to browse, you can see we've got in our keynote file that we're using, we've got elevation, floor plan, roof plan, and site. And so we're going to create a new category in here for material.
And so you can call it whatever you want, honestly, but we're going to call it materials. And then we're going to use the same designations throughout. We're going to get a big refresher here on organizing our keynote file, because it's going to require us to, you know, use the right number of tabs and making sure that we have the parent one associated and all that.
So I'm gonna hit cancel here to get out of that. And then we're going to pop over to our keynote file. And this is the file that you would have downloaded.
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So you've definitely got this ready to go from the file downloads. And this is what it looks like. These are the ones that we currently have right now.
And so what I'll do is I'll just jump down kind of leaving a space between the elevation keynotes and the one we're going to create. And so I'm going to call this one materials. And remember, we can give it any designator that we want.
If we were to use the material legend that we have here as a guide, then what I can do is I can go in and I can say, let's say, PC-1. And then I'll want to use the same text that I have here, because that's being consistent, which is nice. And then I can go in and I can go ahead and add that note into my keynote file.
If I hit control V to paste, the important thing here is that I have a tab here. And then when I go to the end of the line, I hit another tab. And this matches exactly what you see here, because that allows us to have that parent hierarchy between the different sections that we've created.
So notice it's materials that I put in here. If you just said material or material, exterior materials, or whatever you did, all that matters is that this right here matches exactly with what you see here. So I can go ahead and add the rest of these in here.
And then I'm going to go ahead and save it. And when you go back to your keynote file, we can reload that file. And it says reloaded successfully, which is a good thing.
If you get an error, that means it's going to tell you like one of these things is off. And then when I view it, you can see materials popped in here. And now I've got PC1.
Okay, so I did that just as a check to make sure that I've been doing it correctly. Now I'm going to go back to my keynote file. And I'm going to add the rest of these.
And then we can go ahead and start tagging them. And before I go ahead and add the rest of these, I forgot I broke the golden rule of architectural documentation. And I was going to have too much information in too many places and repeated in too many places.
So what we'll do here is instead of copying the exact text here, which is where we would want to modify it if it needed to change because it'll change on all the sheets because we used a legend, I'm just going to say per schedule so that we don't have to have too many of the same notes that need to be updated if for some reason something changed. So just calling it PC1, exterior plaster per schedule, that's going to be the way to go for all that. So I'm going to go ahead and add the rest of these and spare you watching me do that.
And then I'll show you what it looks like at the end here. So here are all the materials that I've added. And I've added a little bit of information.
And we can debate whether or not that is appropriate for either the material legend or if it's noted for the material keynote. Either way, I'm just showing you different ways that you can do it. It's up to you how you want to document your set.
But what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and hit save here. And I've left a little Easter egg of a mistake. And we're going to see kind of what that looks like in our Revit model so that we can correct it as needed.
So I'm going to go ahead and just go back into our keynote settings here and hit reload. And it says it reloaded successfully. But if I go to view, then we'll see that the concrete material here is not located within the materials section that we created.
And when we look back at our materials legend, that's because on the concrete material, I did not add the reference back to the parent category here, which is materials. And so if you were to make a, you know, a strange typo, like just say material here, like on this one, if I hit save and then reload again, you can see that it says there's no parent value for material because I didn't add that. So it gives you a really good indicator when you make minor typos like that.
And it's easy to fix. So you can hit save here, reload, and view it. And now everything looks the way that we want.
And that puts us in a position now where we can go back through both our enlarged plans and our overall plans and go in and add the keynotes to the plan as needed.
