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

[smartj]

This is a very old thread, but we are in the process of creating a template for Revit 2016. You know, that wonderful period when you have not yet repeated all the mistakes you made the last time you created a template. It's deer season, almost T'giving and Xmas Shopping Season so nothing productive is likely to be done until next year. All that to say, while looking at scale specific pen tables it seems to me that it matters more what detail level one is using than what scale. I haven't found any reference or acknowledgement of this. We're structural, so we haven't really figured out what "medium" does, but coarse draws "one-line" diagrams and fine draws "two-line" diagrams. A steel beam, for instance, is shown in plan as a single line at 1/8"=1'-0" [1:96] and as two lines at 1/2"=1'-0" [1:24]. I don't want the two lines to be 4X the single line, or even 2X, if you jump by the square root of two rule.

Which brings up another subject, does anyone follow the square root of two rule? For those youngster out there, you do know that pens, once upon a time, used to refer to actual, physical pens. Technical fountain pens from K&E Koh-i-Noor or Staedtler Mars. You bought a set. Your 000000 (0.13mm) worked that first day and never worked again. So you had 0000 (0.18mm), 000 (0.25mm), 0 (0.35mm), 1 (0.50mm), 2 1/2 (0.70mm), 3 1/2 (1mm) and maybe 6 (1.4mm). You never used 000000 because it only worked that first day and you never used 6 because by the time I started the title block was preprinted. And besides, you could only draw about 12 inches (300mm) before you had to refill the damn thing. But I digress.

Anyway, if you look at the pen widths, you'll notice that each one is 1.414 (or there abouts) larger than the one before. If you drew a dot, each dot would have twice as much area as the one before. I never understood why this was important, but it was, because the old guys, who when I was starting out had started using technical fountain pens that you dipped in an ink well and could adjust the line weight with a little set screw on the top.

Now I realize that this is sort of like telling you, you should drive your hybrid a certain way because the buggy whip maker said so, but it does give you good separation between pen widths, better than if you go linearly and without jumping as fast as you would if you went straight line geometric. Linear would be 0.02, 0.04, 0.06..., 0.12, 0.14. With linear, 0.02, 0.04, 0.06 might look okay, but you can't tell a difference between 1.2 and 1.4. Geometric, 0.02, 0.04, 0.08, 0.16, 0.32 gets you too big, too fast. Using the square root tones that down a bit.

Anyway. I've droned on long enough. I'm sorry I missed this thread when it was new, but I was off doing something else.

[sam.stuckey]

Hi everyone,

I'm a long time Revit user who just took a job at a firm that is making the transition from CAD to Revit. Yes, I too was shocked that there are still professional architecture firms that have not been using BIM, but here we are. One of the silver linings to making the switch in 2017 is that we've been able to draw on a decade of Revit best practice experience in creating our office standards. By far, the most difficult task so far has been figuring out line weights. I'm familiar with the relationship between line weights, object styles, line styles, and so on, but I've never actually worked at a firm that took the time to adjust the OOTB Revit line weights.

1) Do people here generally find that adjusting the OOTB line weights is valuable? Or Necessary?
2) Does anyone have an example they're willing to share of line weights they think are better than the OOTB set.

I'd really like to help our firm put their own stamp on our drawings (no pun intended), but it seems like coming up with 8-15 custom line weights at 10 different scales is an extraordinarily time consuming activity. I don't want to go down that path unless it is clear that life is actually better with the custom line weights. Any insight into this process would be very helpful. I'd also really, really appreciate if someone could share a set of line weights that I could use as a jumping off point.

Thanks AUGIs.