Revit Best Practices (RBP) - Line Patterns & Line Weights

[Kevin Janik]

This is the second in a series of Revit Best Practices (RBP) threads that will be posted, one per week, for input by all Revit Users. See the thread Revit Best Practices (RBP) - General. The goal of each thread is to identify Revit Best Practices for the topic, in this case, Line Patterns & Line Weights. At the end of each week, someone will be asked to formulate a Word Document in a standard format, summarizing the general direction of the thread, and come up with a single Best Practice for that topic with prehaps some possible alternates which will be posted in the last thread for that topic.

Please use the following guidelines listed below for posting and see Revit Best Practices (RBP) - General. for additional information on the overall Revit Best Practices concept of AUGI Revit Forum threads. The success and value of this is based on the input of many people, especially seasoned Revit users.

Revit Best Practices (RBP) Guidelines for Posting:

• Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday will be for brain storming and discussion of best practice ideas. Thursday and Friday will be for focusing on one or a couple options for final Revit best practices.
• Do some research on AUGI and other locations to see what others are doing and post that information in this thread and link to if available on line.
• Be specific and note if this is a Revit office standard (ROS), a Revit personal preference or information you have gleaned from AUGI or another location. If an office standard, note how long have you been using it and are there any problems with it.
• Note tips and benefits of the best practice from the point of view of how Revit works efficiently as well as a team of people .

To start things off, here is a list items to discuss related to the topic and some input based Office Standards and Best Practices of some offices. Please do not post for Line Styles, which will be looked at in another thread due to the may issues related to them.



Line Pattern & Line Weight Dos and Don'ts

• Fill patterns seem to be connected with Pen 1 in the Line Weights so reserving Pen 1 for Fill and Material Patterns so you can adjust it to good display of these patterns at varying scales. (Aaron Rumple - AUGI)
• Do not import AutoCad fills into you Revit project so that all the linetypes from AutoCAD end up embedded in your Revit project. Instead link all AutoCAD files.


Line Pattern Naming Conventions

Options

• Add Initials of the Firm Name at a prefix "AAAA -" to all Line Patterns used as Office Standard.
• Revise all Office Standard Line Patterns to graphically match Office Standard AutoCAD Linetypes to make easier transition from AutoCAD.
• Rename all Office Standard Line Patterns to Name of those in AutoCAD with or without Firm Name prefix to make easier transition from AutoCAD.
• Delete all Line Patterns not used as Office Standard to stop usage by staff.

Line Weight Conventions

Options

• Use Revit pens out of the box with no changes.
• Use Revit pens out of the box with no changes only adding pen widths for View Scales not present.
• Create pen width view sheets for each Office Standard used scale and carefully adjust View Scale pen widths for model and detail lines in each to match perfectly. (Right now they do not.)
• Create pen width view sheets for each Office Standard used scale and carefully adjust View Scale pen widths for model and detail lines in each to match perfectly and set a range of pens to match Office Standard AutoCAD pen widths for easier transition from AutoCAD.


This topic will last only one week with the previous topic also running through next week. If you have input on the next topic, please post it at the thread Revit Best Practices (RBP) - General. to keep this thread from getting cluttered and off focus.

Thanks!

[Kevin Janik]

I am sure what was stated above is not everything people might have to say. I tried to do a bit of research to begin things but I know I am not that smart!

Any takers?

Kevin

[Kevin Janik]

Boy, this is going to be easy! I will just pick what I want the Best Practice to be for Line Patterns & Line Weights!!!! Do you really want me to do that?

Do we need some input!!!! I am sure people have some good ideas.

BTW we just created a Sheet that has Model and Detail Lines of each pen width for analyzing the pen widths. It might have value for others. We had problems between Model and Detail Lines not plotting the same.

Kevin

[Kevin Janik]

I am getting tired of seeing only myself posting on this thread only! I was hoping to start another Best Practice thread this Monday but the input on this one is a bit lack luster so I am waiting!

People say this Best Practices group of thread is worth it but we need your input to make it valuable. I think we came up with some good ideas that people can agree with in the View Naming thread. I hope this can be the same.

If you have been watching and waiting, please jump in!

Kevin

[Andre Baros]

I don't have a lot to offer on this topic but think the best practices concept is worth supporting...

1. If you need to import from cad, do so in a family so that you can clean up (and purge) line styles and weights to match your Revit standards before you bring it into a file.
2. Set up your office templates with the line weights which work for you and never look back. These can match your old cad standards or be an opportunity to adjust your standards. We simply modified the Revit defaults (names) to avoid having to also adjust all the family templates. Use the Revit defaults as much as possible.

[sroy]

I also hope that these best practices continue on in the future. We have only one copy of Revit 2009 and two of us are in charge of starting to look at Revit and start to setup standard templates. Outside of playing around with a few tutorials the biggest thing that we want to understand is how to setup our templates and customize Revit to match some of our curent company standards.

We realize that we don't want to match how we did things in the past and would like to use more of the OOTB settings. There are some things that we do want to change.

I haven't seen much for documentation specific to implementation of Revit. This is our first hurdle prior to even thinking about any projects. I think it is really easy to jump in and start doing things in Revit, but there is a lot to think about. What we don't want to do is attempt to start too early on a project and not give any thought to many of the items. If we do this, upper management could quickly put a halt to all of this as they will not see the benefit.

I will plan on adding any information that I can in these best practices in the future.

[rjcrowther]

Mate....don't be discouraged.

For starters I think a week is too short.
Second, you have presented some great information as a starter and it would take me quite a while to digest it and in some cases briefly trial your points to see the effect.....I do have to do paid work unfortuneately.
Third, I have no standards to speak of as most of mine are in my head since I am the one and only in my firm.

As a demononstration of my line weight 'standard': it is labelled in printed pen weight and runs in order of weight. So:
1 = 0.09Pen
2 = 0.13Pen
3 = 0.15 Pen
and so on untill I get to sixteen (mm here and not inches)

My fill pattern 'standard' has been to download fill patterns from RevitCity and place them in a folder called Revit Fill Patterns.

Thats it!

So, as you can see my standards are in my head or else I wouldn't know where anything is or how it interacts.

For my part, any surplus time I have is being spent learning programming as I have grand visions of accessing the API and making myself some small utilities which I see as a more proactive response then whinging about things Revit does not have (I am a first class whinger so I need to divert my attention).

So my point now is just because I am not contributing (if you look at my standards you will see they are rather underdeveloped and would be quite amazed if they approached anything like 'Best Practice') does not mean I am not paying attention or are not enormously interested to see how this thread develops....just as I am enourmously interested in the conversation that took place in the previous Best Practice Thread.....and will be in the subsequent Best Practice Thread.

Take all of that as a vote of confidence in what you are doing and like I said, don't be discouraged.

Thanks,
Rob

PS. before I introduced my standard I was rather unhappy with the fill pattern line weight. I did notice after a while the fill pattern line weight was more to my liking and didn't know why it changed - at the time I though it may be due to a different version of Revit having a different fill line weight parameter. Now I know (after reading your start up post) it was me with my world class standard that effected the change.

[Kevin Janik]

Thanks for the posts! I have been on vacation for a couple days and am just getting my head back into things.

I will try to think more about what people posted this evening when my brain has a chance to rest.

What do others think?

Kevin

[cjneedham]

From a Revit Standards management perspective, I've found it useful to create a single project file that contains ONLY lineweights (I elect to change them from the OOTB settings); another that contains ONLY line patterns. Both of these 'feed' into another that contains line patterns, which use (as part of their definition) both the line patterns and line weights.

This might sound like overkill, and it probably is for small to medium firms, but for isolation's sake, it's great. I use Transfer Project Standards to overwrite from 'ground level' upwards, until I reach the template and/or projects that I want to edit.

I implement Revit into multiple companies, so I need a good collection that allows me to be flexible according to each client's needs. To an extent this may fly in the face of 'standards', but it's a good way to be sure that your 'set' of standards really does satisfy multiple businesses.

[Kevin Janik]

From a Revit Standards management perspective, I've found it useful to create a single project file that contains ONLY lineweights (I elect to change them from the OOTB settings); another that contains ONLY line patterns. Both of these 'feed' into another that contains line patterns, which use (as part of their definition) both the line patterns and line weights.

This might sound like overkill, and it probably is for small to medium firms, but for isolation's sake, it's great. I use Transfer Project Standards to overwrite from 'ground level' upwards, until I reach the template and/or projects that I want to edit.

I implement Revit into multiple companies, so I need a good collection that allows me to be flexible according to each client's needs. To an extent this may fly in the face of 'standards', but it's a good way to be sure that your 'set' of standards really does satisfy multiple businesses.

Thanks for the post! Looks like you change the out of box pen widths like we are doing.

I am a bit confused regarding the end of your first paragraph. When you transfer them to a new project what happens? "(as part of their definition)" is what I do not completely get. What is the purpose of having them separate and how do Line Styles play into this?

Thanks for some help in clarifying this in advance!

Kevin