Scope Boxes?

[John.schmidt.212444]

Can anyone explain what scope boxes are meant to do? How do you use them?

[wmullett]

Search your HELP with scope as your search word - Scope boxes are clearly explained with examples. REVIT's HELP is very good if you learn to use it.

[ededios]

Do a search in this forum, theres a few good threads about Scope Boxes.
Here's a few, Propagate Extents (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=88055&highlight=scope+box), Scope Box vs Annotation Crop (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=62939&highlight=scope+box), Scope Boxes (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=47449&highlight=scope+box) this one has a good link to another good explanation. Hope it helps.

[tcatana]

Sometimes it is easier to answer their questions - that is why I come here.

This is directly out of the help file. It answers your basic question.

When you add datum elements (grids, levels, and reference lines) to a project, they can display in more views than desired. For example, when you add grid lines to a plan view, the grid lines display in all plan views of the model. However, you may want the grid lines to display in only certain views. This is exactly what a scope box is for: to specify the views in which the datum elements will display.

Scope boxes control the visibility of datum elements in views whose cutting plane intersects the scope box. Scope boxes are particularly useful to control the visibility of datums that are not parallel or orthogonal to a view.

[hand471037]

Let's say you're doing a project where the first floor is a concrete parking garage with storefront retail, and the upper levels are all apartments / condos framed from wood or metal.

So, you're first floor's grid, ref. planes, and other datums are going to be pretty different from the rest of the building. It's not going to cleanly line up with the upper floors, and you'll have a lot of gridlines like '3.1', '3.5', and 3.7' between gridline 3 and 4 that are really just for garage columns and not much else.

You're not going to want all those extra grid lines from the parking garage getting in the way of the third floor plan, and vise versa. Your elevations and sections will also be a mess.

So by making a Scope Box for each main part of the building, and then setting what grids belong to which, you can easily control what shows up in which plan / section / elevation.

Another place we just used this where it was really helpful was in designing a house. We had to model the existing house design (which wasn't built, but the foundation was) and then come up with a design of our own (that's better) for the same site. We needed to show both together in views and schedules that compared the two designs for Zoning.

We could have done it with Links, but that's a little cumbersome for such a small project.

So we setup two phases, one for the 'existing' house, and one for our design. So it was as if the first house had been built, and was getting demo'ed for our house to be built on the same foundation. This worked great for the views and model elements, but all the levels and grids from the 'existing' house were showing up in the later phased new design. Hence, Scope Boxes, one for each, quickly made it easy to control those elements too!

[Dimitri Harvalias]

John,

The simplest definition of scope boxes I have come up with is that they are 3 dimensional crop boundaries used to control the extents of level datums and grids. They can control these element sin plan and section/elevation views.
They can be assigned as an instance parameter to grids and levels to globally control their extents in all views.
If assigned to a view they will control the grids and levels in the view as well as the crop region of the view.

The previous posts are good examples of how they might be used. It's all about an easy and quick way to consistently manage graphic display.

[sthedens]

You can also use them as dependent view crop extents for your floor plans: Area A, B, C, etc. By using them you can ensure that all discipline view extents match.

[tcatana]

You can also use them as dependent view crop extents for your floor plans: Area A, B, C, etc. By using them you can ensure that all discipline view extents match.

Do you have a sample image you can show that represents this?