Monday, July 30, 2018

Revit Starting View and Titleblock Re-purposing

A nice technique I am seeing more and more is the use of a Sheet View with a custom titleblock for Revit's preset Starting View. This post will discuss what, how and why...


First, in case you don't know, Revit let's you select a specific view to open with every time Revit is
started - see image above. The default is the last view active when you last saved... however this can be a large complex 3D view set to realistic with shadows on and cause the project to open much slower. Thus, setting the Starting View to a simple drafting view or sheet view can save a lot of time... and the person not working on the roofing details will be happy they do not need to see your views all the time:)

With this starting view in mind, we can also add some helpful project-related information to the view, letting the project team know about deadlines and such. This can even include check boxes for design options, phasing and which disciplines are included. As you can see in this example, it also includes an image of the project.

If the starting view is a sheet view, you can use a custom titleblock to include some live information such as project name and project number.


When I say "live" that means, when the project number or project date are modified in the starting view, it is changing that BIM's Project Information values.


Thus, any other location using that information, such as the actual titleblock, will have the same information displayed as shown below. Again, changing the project number in the starting view automatically added the project number to all sheets, and vice versa.


Our starting view used to be more complicated but that information proved to not be useful to staff and was never being edited so I decided to simplify...

BTW, the image is the first project we used Enscape on, and it still has the "trial version" watermark in the lower left corner! A few images from this project where in the Enscape gallery for a while...

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