Establishing exterior walls is the first step in building design, but adding grids can ensure precision and consistency throughout your project. This tutorial walks you through the process and best practices of adding grids to your architecture plans using Revit.
Key Insights
- The grid lines in a building plan should be relative to the exterior face of the walls. This ensures that no matter the width of the wall, the relationship between the exterior face and the grid line remains consistent.
- The placement of the grid line "bubble" can have significant implications for the design process. Drawing grid lines from top to bottom keeps the bubble at the top and prevents the need to adjust it in every plan view. It's a minor step that can save a lot of time downstream in the project.
- Grid lines need to be thoughtfully placed, not haphazardly. Using tools like temporary dimensions or drawing dimensions can help locate grids accurately. Revit also offers tools to calculate equal distances or midpoints, eliminating the need for manual calculations.
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Now that we have our exterior walls established, we're going to go ahead and add some grids in here. And to do that, what we're going to do is we're going to use the exterior face of this wall as the basis for the location of our grid lines. And by doing that, the grids will stay relative to the exterior face no matter what, because we set our location line for the wall's exterior face.
If we pick a much wider wall type, it's not going to matter. And that relationship from exterior face to grid line is going to stay the same. To start grid lines, I'm going to go to the grid option here in the architecture tab.
And I'm going to start with my grids that go across the top. And these are going to be grid A, B, and C. Here's another one of those small kind of trivial things, but it does have a pretty big impact as you go through the project. If I were to draw a grid line from the top to the bottom, you'll see that the bubble is down at the bottom.
If I do it the other way, you can see that the bubble is at the top. Now, it's not that big of a deal in one plan because I can actually just go in and change the bubble to be where I want it. But if I were to go to level two, you can see that it's not where I want it to be.
If I go to the roof plan, it's not where it wants to be. If I go to the ceiling plan, it's not where it wants to be. If I don't manage that as we're going through, then what happens is I will have to actually go through and make that change on every single view.
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And that just doesn't sound like a lot of fun. If we just manage how we place our grids to make sure that the bubble is on the top and the right side of the plan, then we won't have to deal with managing which side of the plan the bubbles are on as we go through. So it's a small, minor step, but it's actually something that can save us a lot of time down the road.
I'm going to undo the drawing of those two grid lines. And we're going to go and start adding the ones we're actually going to keep for our project. So I'm going to go back to that grid tool.
And just like we discussed, if I start from the bottom and work my way up, I can place the grid. And so that's just clicking and clicking again. And these can be at different angles.
And so if you're drawing it and you're having a hard time keeping it straight, if you hold down the shift key, you'll notice that it's only going to allow me to draw it at vertical and horizontal grids. It's almost like a makeshift ortho for Revit. So before I draw grid line two, or B in this case, I want to change grid line one to A. So it's just like the level lines.
If I pick the grid line, I can then go in and I can select the number and I'll change it to A in this case. And then you'll notice as I go through and I draw the next ones, B and grid line C, that it'll automatically follow the sequence. So it does kind of an N plus one thing for us there.
Now, we're not just going to have these haphazardly placed like I've done here. We actually want them to be in an appropriate location. We have a couple of options.
So I could use a temporary dimension, which oddly is down here, but we could use a temporary dimension to locate these, or we could draw a dimension and locate them that way. Since we know that we have 40 feet going across, we can do a little math if we want, or we can just say no thanks to math and let the computer do the work, which I am a fan of. We could go ahead and add these two dimensions.
And if you remember, the trick here is going to be to go from the grid. And then if you notice, it's always going to want to grab that center line. We want to use tab to pick up that outside face.
Now from here, we're just going to use that same concept of moving the grid line over. And since this is the object I want to move, that's what I'm going to select. I want this to be one foot six.
If I were to pick the wall and change this to one foot six, I'd be adjusting this 40 foot dimension. And we don't want to do that. We want to move the grid line.
So I want to pick the grid line and change this to one foot six or 1.5 feet. And I'll do the same thing for grid line C. And then we just have to address grid line B. And since this is going to be down the center of the building, what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a dimension that goes from grid line C to grid line B to grid line A. And you can see they're not quite equal, but Revit's got a tool that's going to do that for me. If I were to pick on my dimension line, I could use the EQ toggle, which will then move it over so that it's equal distance between grid line C and grid line A. And so we were able to find that midpoint without having to do any math because we let the computer do it for us.
Now, because I'm putting these dimensions across the top, I'm going to go ahead and move my 40 foot dimension just simply by grabbing it. If I've selected it and you can see when I go over the top, it gives me that move symbol and I'll just drag it up to the top and set it into place.
