Organizing and Placing Mechanical Details on Sheets in Revit

Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 322 course. In the previous video, we went ahead and actually brought in some Revit information from other drawings, and so what we're going to go ahead and do now is start placing these on sheets and getting the correct callouts in the correct locations. So what I want to go ahead and do first is I want to go ahead and let’s create a new sheet for all of our mechanical details.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and go to my sheets area in my project browser, I'm going to select it, do a right-click, new sheet, use the same title block we've been using this entire course, the BIM 321. I'm going to hit OK, and there we are. This is not going to be an electrical sheet, so I'm going to go ahead and come over here, click into the title block once, click on the specific parameter that I want to edit, and I'm going to name this one M1.2 because we have M1.0 and M1.1, so M1.2. The sheet name will be Mechanical Details. All I did was, I still had the title block selected and clicked on the specific parameter that I wanted to edit.

I'm going to go ahead and zoom extents, and there we go. Now I want to go ahead and bring over the details that I need. So I'm going to bring over the AHU mounting detail and place it here.

I'm going to bring over the air distribution connection detail and place it here, and again I'm going to use the view titles that have snaps so I can line them up nicely. There's that. I'm going to bring over the branch duct takeoff detail and place it here.

Now, I'm not bringing these in any specific order. The office that you work for or when you start doing your own work may actually ask you to order these in a specific way, but for this course, I'm not ordering them in any specific way. I'm going to bring over the roof mounted duct detail, typical FC unit mounting detail—this one's quite a bit larger, but we can go ahead and reorganize this here in a minute—and the manual volume damper location detail.

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So it looks like I may have a little bit of reorganizing to do, but it's always good to get all this information here first and then see what kind of reorganization is needed. I'm going to go ahead, pause the video, and then I'm going to go ahead and reorganize and come back. I'll see you then.

I've gone ahead and actually organized my details and I hope you have also. You don't need to exactly follow my format, but how I just generally did it was I stacked the larger details here on the right and then the smaller details here on the left.

Great. Now, there's one thing that happens though when we organize these details in this fashion: see how my numbers here are all messed up? So I have six, seven, one, two, five, three, four.

I need to go ahead and go back and rename those. Now I know I have seven drawings total. If I select this guy and I go into this parameter here and try to rename it to be like one, it doesn't allow me.

It says detail number is already in use. Use a unique number. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to hit cancel.

There are two different trains of thought. I'm going to go ahead and change the number seven detail or the number one detail to number eight. We find that number one detail, which is right here. I'm going to change this to number eight and pick.

And then I'm going to go back here and change this back to number one. There we go. Now I need to find the number two detail, this guy here, and let's change that to number nine.

I want to go ahead and change this to number two. Find the number three detail. Let's change that to number ten.

Let's change this to number three. Again, to do this, all I'm doing is selecting the actual detail itself, going in and editing the parameter in the detail bubble. Change that to eleven.

I'm going to change this guy to four. I'm going to go here, leave that as is—five.

Change this one to six. And change this one to seven. And there we go.

Zoom extents, Control+S, and save the file. Perfect. Now that we've got these organized on a sheet, what I need to go ahead and do now is actually go ahead and place some of the detail callouts.

Now as you can see, we have some of the ones here, and some of these don't necessarily need detail callouts—they just need to be in this location. Items like this would be the typical manual volume damper location detail. This is just kind of a generic detail that goes for everything, and so you just figure out where you would have the actual manual volume dampers.

The air distribution connection detail is more of a general detail to talk about specifically the actual connection to each individual air diffuser, so it's just a generic detail, but we can go ahead and put something in for it. The roof mounted duct detail, the branch duct takeoff detail, and the duct through roof detail—this branch duct takeoff detail, we’ll go ahead and put one in there too.

So what we want to go ahead and do is, I'm going to zoom extents. I want to go ahead and go to my mechanical floor sheet view for the first floor, and the ceiling plan, so I have this information here. Now what we're going to do is I'm going to go ahead, and we have a lot of information here already, and I only need to put a couple of these in. So what I'm going to do is go up to the view tab, I'm going to go to section.

Now, and go ahead and synchronize central if you need to. I'm going to go to section, but instead of using building section, I'm going to go ahead and use detail. When I activate that section command, I go over to the type selector, pull this down, and I'm going to select detail here.

Okay, and so what now is going to happen is I want to go ahead and reference another view. So I'm going to click on this to check it, and I'm going to choose which view I want to reference. As you can see here, it's giving me all the views, and I'm going to choose—let's see—let's start with the branch takeoff detail. I'm going to select here.

And so I'm going to reference that view. I'm going to come into here and go ahead and draw in where I want this detail to happen. I'm going to go down here, pick once, drag, and pick again.

And what that's going to do is place a detail callout. Now what's happening is, because it already has the information and the drawing is already on a specific sheet, it's just going to give me that specific information there. So I'm going to click and pull this callout down so that it's coming over it, and I'm going to drag this out.

Now, I do see this says "sim" right here. I actually want this to say "typical." So what I'm going to do is go ahead and select it.

I'm going to go to Edit Type, and for the reference label—since this is a type parameter—I need to go ahead and actually duplicate this. So let's go ahead and go to Duplicate. I'm going to change it from Detail-Tip.

Hit OK. And I'm going to change the reference label from Sim to Tip, for Typical. Hit OK.

And there we are. As you can see, it places that information how we want it to be. We've now linked this callout directly to that drawing on the actual detail sheet.

I want to go ahead and do another one. So I'm going to go up to Section here. I'm going to specify Reference Other View.

Pick here. Let's go ahead and choose the air distribution connection detail. I'm going to go ahead and actually pick Detail there.

Then I'm just going to go ahead, click here, and drag away. Now, one thing I kind of want to do is rotate this, and that's very easy to do. I'm just going to go here to Rotate.

I'm going to rotate it by 180 degrees. And there we are. I'm going to go ahead and pull this here.

We may have to play with this a little bit to get it correct. Now, this will be a typical, so we may want to move this to another location. That's what I'm going to go ahead and do.

So, I'm going to bring it over here. I'm going to do a rotate again—R-O for Rotate.

I'm going to go 90. And the nice thing about this is, it keeps the text readable. So, I'm going to bring this over here.

Drag it out just a little bit. And there we are. Perfect.

Zoom extents. Control+S, save the file. I want to go up to my second floor view and do the same kind of thing.

So, SheetView2-Mech. I'm going to come here. I want to go ahead now and do the same thing.

Section, Detail, Reference Other View. I'm going to give the same callout for the branch duct takeoff detail. I'm going to go ahead and select the branch duct that I want to use.

I'm just going to go ahead and use the same one. So, I'm going to pick and drag. I want to go ahead and rotate this guy—R-O.

Go 180 degrees. There we are. I'm going to go ahead and bring this down here.

And there we are. I'm going to go ahead and move this note just a little bit so it's not in the way of that text.

Zoom extents. Control+S, save the file. And what I'd like you to go ahead and do is go ahead and add some more detail and references if you need to.

And we're going to go ahead and finish up with the mechanical here. This is already on the sheets, and we're going to go ahead and move on to the plumbing.

Then we'll go ahead and create some title sheets. I'll see you soon.