Learn how to properly dimension and organize an architectural building model in this comprehensive guide. Discover various techniques for adding clear dimensions, maintaining consistency, and managing on-screen graphics to ensure a neat, professional finish.
Key Insights
- The systematic addition of accurate dimensions on the exterior of the building model is crucial for clarity and precision. This includes defining typical curtain wall dimensions on every wall, and ensuring known points are clearly indicated.
- Managing graphic elements effectively is equally important to avoid overcrowding with dimension lines and to maintain readability. Careful placement and occasional clean-ups can help provide a cleaner look and prevent confusion.
- Understanding how to adjust dimensions in relation to other elements such as grid lines or keynotes is necessary to avoid overlaps and create a tidy, professional output. This might involve using tools such as 'edit witness lines' and strategically moving dimension strings for better visualization.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
We'll go ahead and continue working our way around the exterior of the building here. You can see I added a note that we wanted to have typical curtain wall dimensions on every wall, typical on level one. We're going to need to go through and add these in now.
And so we’ll pop back to the Revit model, and you can see we've kind of got a string set up here for this already. So I will go ahead and add some dimensions, making our way across. This gets a little tricky here, because we are going to end up with a lot of stuff in kind of a tight little area.
We'll just have to manage our graphics as we go through. And so I'm going to do a dimension since this is a known point here, since we've got it off the grid line. And so these ones aren't equal, so it's a little harder to navigate that.
But we can just go through and add the dimensions back to known points like we have here. And so if you were to put that, say, out at this point here, you can see it's relatively clear, but we do want to make sure that we are kind of cleaning things up as we go, because it is hard to start to read and see what's really going on. You know, it's kind of like having this overlapping section tail.
It's just a simple swap that way. So I'll go in and just kind of clean this up. You know, this 1'-8" dimension before wasn't an issue, but now it is.
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And so a lot of these, it's just hard to read. You know, the 6'-7" dimension is not a bad one, but the 3'-3" and 5'-8" are just too much information on one tiny line. And so I'll go in and clean that up, and then I can add the grid line dimension here that will locate us to this point.
And I can add that as part of that string and do the same thing where we pop it over to the side. And that takes care of this curtain wall, but we do need to do a similar dimension like we did here. That picks up this point, which will take a few tabs to get to, but it's not too hard to grab.
And then we'll do the same thing where we just bring it across here. And this kind of duplicates these a little bit, but we are picking up that mullion point, which I neglected to grab over here before. But no big deal, because we can easily get that.
And so these, you know, again, you want to just go in, and you can kind of start to see how you could easily create a cleaner look by moving these around. If you recall what we did before when we needed to add a witness line, we can just go in and say edit witness lines. You know, we're not having to redo this.
I can just go in and add that line. Same goes for if you wanted to remove it—like if you grabbed something by accident—you could easily add it or remove it. Just a neat trick that helps keep things moving on your dimensions here.
And like I said before, it gets a little tight in here because there are a lot of dimension lines. Then we'll go ahead and do the same thing where we've got one large wall that we're going to dimension. It's going to be the same thing we did with these because it's all going to be equal panels.
So I'll just run a dimension, and for this one we have to go with an aligned dimension here so that we can go from point—this guy here. We can go from, say, because we want the dimension—keeping in mind—we want the dimension to be aligned along this edge. We need to find that perpendicular point.
And so there are a few tabs that we need to hit. You can see I get that point here, and then I can bring it across and find that same point.
It should be a little easier since we've already established where we want the dimension to go. Then we can pull that out to a point where it makes sense. This one is 16 equal panels.
We'll go ahead and add in the note 16 equal panels. Then we can jump over to the next side of the building, where we've got a few dimensions already, and we've got our grid line dimensions.
We've got our overall dimensions, but we haven't really located these corners yet from a grid line. So that's what I'll do first: I will go ahead and locate this corner to this point here. Then our next dimension will be pretty much the same thing we did on this side.
But we're going to do that over here, where we're going to take our dimension going down. This one will take from essentially this door jamb down to the corner because these are all equally spaced. This one's a little tricky because it is at an angled intersection here.
When I do the dimension, I want to make sure I grab the right point—you can see there's all kinds of different things going on here. When I hit it for the first time, you can see I've clicked that corner, but I don't have a dimension preview yet. When I go up to the door and click that center of mullion, I should get an aligned dimension the way I'd like it to be set up.
Then I'll go ahead and lock in the dimension—looks like I might be off just a little bit. You can see how it's not fully aligned there, so I'm going to go ahead and do that again.
So that I can get this to line up because the goal would be to have this same setup that we have here. What I could do is actually start from the grid line and go to that point. We have the same point here.
Then I can work my way up. To avoid duplicating a dimension like we have shown here, I could go ahead and use my Edit Witness Lines tool to remove that 13-foot dimension, and then I get the dimension I'm looking for with the 45-foot-4 number that takes us across so I can have the equal panels. As you can see here, these might be a little too close to the plan because we are kind of blowing up our elevations in here.
When you look at the sheet, you can kind of see it's like, okay, do I have room to move this over? Or do I need to start sliding these? Or is it kind of a combination of the two? And when you look at the sheet, you can see that if the keynotes make their way down to here and I move the grids, we're probably going to be overlapping each other. I want to make sure that we don't have that. So it needs to be a combination of the two because the sheet doesn't want to be messy.
At the same time, you know, we don't want to have a big cluttered mess of information. If you know your keynotes aren't going to go super far down, like maybe they won't on our sheet, then you can slide the grids over a little bit and just manage that either way. So what I'll do is I'll do this from the sheet so I can get a better idea.
So I can kind of pull the grids out just a smidge there. Then I can move my dimensions back to get more room for these tags so that they can sit within the dimension strings because that tends to look pretty nice. Just that little move cleared everything up, and it looks pretty good.
If you were so inclined, you could definitely continue working in this view if you wanted to; there's nothing wrong with that. This is exactly the same plan that you've been working on the entire time. So the next set that I'll do here is I'll go ahead and list this as the nine equal panels that we were talking about.
So nine equal panels—and spelling does count here, right? Then I can continue dimensioning the rest of the wall here. I'll go from the grid line to the door to kind of pick up this door dimension. And I forgot one more to the grid there.
We'll just do Edit Witness Lines and grab that. This one's a little tight, right? We'll kind of slide that one around. Then we'll finish off the curtain wall on this side, which is just one more dimension here from this edge to the corner.
And making sure you can kind of see how they want to snap into each other. We can count the panels: 1,2, 3,4, 5. Then just modify that one to five equal panels.
We're almost there on the east side of the building. The last bit is going to be locating this edge of the building from grid A. I can place that dimension on the string just like you see there. Now we've got our dimensions for the west side, south side, and east side of the building.
Then we'll go ahead and jump in and do the north side next.
