Dimensioning Techniques for Building Wall Elevations in Revit

So the north side of the building on level one is going to be pretty easy because we’re actually going to use an exterior elevation that we place for this wall since there’s so much going on here and there are also horizontal and vertical dimensions that need to be located for the wall that we created here. We’re actually just going to be dimensioning these points along this wall here, this small section. And to do that, we'll start off by dimensioning from grid line 5 and going across, and so I use the keyboard shortcut DI, or, as we discussed earlier, we can use Create Similar by clicking one of these dimensions, and that’s a nice way to do it because then you can almost guarantee that you’re using the same dimension type throughout the entire model.

And so I'll start off with a grid line dimension to this wall here, and sometimes you have to hit TAB to get the line that you want, and that’s what it took for me that time. So I’ll go ahead and bring that across to here, and then I can go ahead and pick up the edge of the building on this side as well. And that gives me a dimension from grid line 5 to 6 and then to the corner of our building, so that corner is pretty well located. We need one more string that’s going to pick up the differences in our curtain wall here. So I'll go ahead and draw a dimension string to pick up the door, the unique panel, and then we can take this one all the way to the edge to show that we have one panel that has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight equal spaces here.

You can see we’ve created a graphic conflict here, so I’ll go ahead and pop that down, and then we just need to clean up some of these other dimensions so that we don’t have them overlapping each other. The last bit here, pretty simple, is I can just go ahead and now say that we have—I think I said eight panels. I’ll double-check, though.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight panels, so eight equal panels, and there we go. Now we’ve got it all set up.

It looks the way that we were hoping for here, and I think the next thing is, you know, I’m going to turn off my thin lines because we’ve been working with that, but there are definitely options. We’ve explored this a little bit, but there are options for how we can streamline this. One of the things I always like to do is update my dimension style and my units so that there’s a lot of these spaces taken out, so you can really see it when you have like two-foot dash zero inches, because there are a lot of spaces in here. We can also update this slash; it’s pretty aggressive, and you can see it really starts to get in the way. And then the line weights are maybe a little muted, so we can make these adjustments to really make these things bold. So like I was mentioning in the previous video how we use Create Similar to make sure we use the same dimension type, that's where this really pays off. If I were to go to Edit Type on this dimension type here, I can see that my line weight is set to one and my tick mark line weight is set to five. If I were to change this one to, say, three, that’s going to make it a much wider line weight, going from one to three. Then my tick mark I can make heavier by going to seven, and I’m going to hit okay here so we can see what that change does. You can see here this is our grid line, which is at a line weight of one, and then our tick mark clearly got larger, but now it’s larger to its detriment because it’s too big now. But we can change the arrow style again, doing the same thing by going to Edit Type, and our tick mark here—we’ve got a whole bunch of different options, but we want to stick with the diagonal, and I always go with this diagonal three sixty-fourths. We’ll hit okay so we can see kind of what that does, and that gives us a more subdued tick which cleans up our drawing quite a bit. The next thing that we’ll do here is again we’ll go to Edit Type, and you can see here we’ve got options for our text. There’s the text line offset, and what that’s going to do is determine how far above the line the text is going to sit. I usually drop that down by at least half to, let’s say, one thirty-second of an inch, and I’ll hit okay. It’s a small change, but it does drop them down a little bit. If you wanted it even closer to the line, you could change it to one-sixty-fourth, and we don’t have to get out of the dialog box to see the changes like I’ve been doing; you can always hit apply here, and then you can see it kind of moves things around a little bit. That looks good, so I think we’ll stick with that one-sixty-fourth option, and we’ll hit okay.

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The last thing I want to do is adjust the project units, so this is a keyboard shortcut. If you hit U and then space bar, it’s asking me to save, which is good; we always want to save. But I can adjust the units project-wide, so anytime it shows feet in inches, it’ll show them a certain way, and you can do that for any of these different units here. You can see there are a lot of different things going on, and we could customize exactly how we want these all to look. The length unit here, you can see that there’s suppress zero feet, so if it’s like an eight-inch dimension, it won’t say zero feet eight inches. If you wanted to click that, you definitely could do that, but what we’re looking at here is suppressed spaces, and then we might as well just go ahead and hit the suppress zero feet so that we’re crunching these things down as much as possible. I’ll hit okay, hit okay again, and you can see it squeezes everything back to a point where there’s not a ton of spaces in there for everything. Just as an example, like if I had a 10-inch dimension, it’s just going to show it as 10 inches instead of where if we had it before with our length and not suppressing the zero feet, it would show it as zero feet 10 inches. So, pretty unnecessary, so that’s why we go through and do that step there. Now we’ve added all of our dimensions to level one, and we’ve gone in and modified our text type, so your assignment here would be to make sure that you’ve got everything cleaned up so it’s like this two-foot dimension—you know, it’s not the best thing in the world, but it’s also not the worst, and so we could go ahead and move that around. There are a couple of things we could do here. Ideally, you would just kind of move it off to the side or to the bottom like that, so it still looks like a nice, clean dimension. But that’s something you’ll want to do just as you’re going through the project because there are going to be things that are changing in and out of here, so make sure that these smaller ones are cleaned up, because the drafting principles and making sure that we’re doing clean and tidy drawings is an important part of modeling in Revit and developing good modeling habits. So, that'll be something that you’ll want to do as we go through the project. Now that we’ve got all the exterior dimensions in, we’re going to go ahead and jump in and do the few interior ones that we have left. I think a lot of them we’re going to end up taking care of in our enlarged plans because the scale of this view at eighth inch just won’t work very well with trying to dimension all these walls within here. So what we need to do here is just locate our two stairwells. We’ve got our stairwell on this side and our stairwell on this side, and we just need to make sure that the walls are located from the grid lines. It’s essentially just going in and making sure you’re activated on the view but going in and hitting these points here and finding the one that you’re trying to locate. In our case here, the outside of the wall is not as critical as the inside, so I’m going to turn the thin lines off so I can actually hit the stud here. Noticing, when I turn the thin lines off, we do start to see the different lines. I’m going to use this grip—this is taking us back to bin 101 if you remember—and just using Tab many times to get to that point. Then I’ll do the same thing as I dimension the rest of it. I’m going to go down from this grid line, which is B here, and I’m going to grab the dimension to say this point. Then we’ll grab another one down to pick up this other inside face here, and this can be located really wherever you need it. I did not dimension this intentionally because doors that are adjacent to a wall will have a note that shows where we want those to be, and that'll do it for our east air, and we’ll just kind of repeat the same process for the west side. So you can just start from grid line B and work your way down. It’s the same thing. We’ll just grab these points here, and if you have a different standard or a different way that you like to dimension these things, I’m not going to be picky about that. That’s definitely something that you can explore and do on your own. Like here, I’ll dimension it from this side, just grabbing that grid on this one, and then making sure that I’ve got it located in a way that’s easy to read. That’s the goal here. Okay, now I’ve got these dimensions all located the way that I want them to be, and I’ll just do a quick scan to make sure we’ve got everything. Then we should be good on dimensions for level one, and then we can jump into level two and then ultimately the root.