Monday, February 28, 2005

Overlaying Views on Sheets

One of the misunderstood concepts available to us in Revit. When you overlay views in Revit, as long as they are the same scale, they will "snap" into place in alignment. This allows you to set up a framing plan view that just shows framing, manipulate the display settings and then place it on a sheet on top of a floor plan.

It is so simple that folks discard the notion prematurely. The best part is you don't confound yourself trying to make a floor plan view "be all, end all". Views are just a "look" at the model. Folks get caught up in the notion that they "need" to put all the pieces and parts in one view.

So what's wrong with having a specific view set up for a very specific view of the project? NOTHING I say!! Try it, you'll like it!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Steve for your overlay advice. I now use this to produce shadow diagrams of the "before" and "after" for the projects I am working on.

http://revit-wonders.blogspot.com/

Thanks!

Paul

Unknown said...

Hi, Steve.
I realize this blog is very old but ran into a problem and hope that you have some advice.

I have been using this tip for several years to overlay my lighting layouts with a plan view so plan information shows up on the sheets without fighting with view range.

With this new project, I duplicated my floor plan view and used the "Apply Dependent Views..." to recreate views set up in my floor plans.

When I brought these overlay views into the sheets, they would not snap to my reflected ceiling plans.

Have you ever seen this behavior?

Steve said...

If the views are not oriented in the same way that could affect it. For example the crop boundary could be rotated so it shows the model with different orientation that the other view you are hoping to overlay. The scale must be the same too.

For example Elevation views don't snap into alignment laterally unless they are looking the same direction. They only snap into alignment vertically.

I have also seen Revit fail to display some graphics we expect to see when the Active Workset also happens to be closed of off in the view. It seems that Revit uses the active workset to generate some graphics and if it is off then we lose that too.

Other than that stuff... I'd need more clues.