Creating Arch stamp in titleblocks- Help!

[collaborativedesigner787231]

I'm trying to create an Arch stamp that you can load into the titleblock so you can turn them on and off as needed. I just can't believe that to do something so simple you have to have a knowledge of space time continuum. Here is the partial steps as described by Autodesk: (partial because I can't get beyond the steps I am frustrated with.) My questions are in red. I am using Revit 2012..If anyone can help me, I would be most appreciative!

Controlling visibility of architectural stamp in title block

Issue

You want to create a title block family that contains an architectural stamp, or other type of professional stamp, whose visibility can be turned on or off in each sheet.

Solution

You can create a title block family that contains a nested stamp family with a Yes/No instance parameter, which can be used to control the visibility of the nested family independently in each sheet.
To create an architectural stamp that can be turned on or off in each sheet, follow these steps:
Create an annotation family for the architectural stamp:


Open a new generic annotation template.
Draw the architectural stamp geometry.
Save the annotation family as an external RFA file.

Add the architectural stamp to an existing title block in your project:


Open the sheet in which the desired title block is located. ( In an actual project? or the actual titlesheet file?? I assumed from an actual project)
Select the title block element, and click Edit Family on the Options bar.
In the Family Editor, load the external RFA family file that you created for the architectural stamp.
On the Family tab of the Design bar, click Symbol and place the architectural stamp. Where's the family tab? and then where's "symbol"? I can't find any of this..

[donalcommane]

A possible easier solution is to create these stamps on separate layers within your title block, this would allow for them to frozen unfrozen at ease.
We incorporate our title blocks as xrefs allowing for global changes across a project and have our scale bars (I don't like them but management insists they be on each drawing) as layers.

[Mike Sealander]

Open up the Revit Family (like our titleblock family is called SATitleDSize.rfa). When they said Family Tab, they meant the Home Tab. The Symbol button is about four buttons over from the left.
The quality control on the help stuff could probably be better. I think this is why they made it a wiki.

[MikeJarosz]

Be careful!!!!!!! Not every state allows electronic seals and/or signatures. I know Virginia and Ontario (Canada) do, and New Jersey does not. New Jersey requires the seal to be embossed on every sheet and hand signed. Embossing will not show on a copy. For the Continental Airlines terminal project at Newark Airport, we sat around embossing 1000+ sheets for every set needed. PITA

Oh, BTW. The embossing device is sort of like a short stapler, so where the stamp can go is limited. You have to design your border around that thing. And, New Jersey likes to remind you that the seal belongs to them, not you......

Hopefully, all the States will get around to allowing electronic seals.

[patricks]

A possible easier solution is to create these stamps on separate layers within your title block, this would allow for them to frozen unfrozen at ease.
We incorporate our title blocks as xrefs allowing for global changes across a project and have our scale bars (I don't like them but management insists they be on each drawing) as layers.

This is Revit, not CAD :) we don't have layers and can't freeze/unfreeze in here :lol:


New Jersey requires the seal to be embossed on every sheet and hand signed. Embossing will not show on a copy. For the Continental Airlines terminal project at Newark Airport, we sat around embossing 1000+ sheets for every set needed. PITA



Well that's interesting. We did a re-roof project for the FedEx facility in Newark a few years back and I don't remember us having to emboss anything. We just ink-stamped the NJ stamp on the drawings. That was before we were doing electronic seals, though.


Open up the Revit Family (like our titleblock family is called SATitleDSize.rfa). When they said Family Tab, they meant the Home Tab. The Symbol button is about four buttons over from the left.
The quality control on the help stuff could probably be better. I think this is why they made it a wiki.

The help directions posted by the OP were from the pre-2010 ribbon interface. Design Bar is what used to be on the left side of the screen with all the various tools contained within.

OP you can either click on a title block in a project and hit Edit Family, or navigate to and open a title block family directly. Then under the Home tab you'll see Symbol in the Detail section of the ribbon.

What we normally do is get the boss to stamp and sign/date a blank piece of paper, which gets scanned and converted to a JPEG image, and placed at the correct dimensions in a title block and loaded into a project. The JPEG is used for that project only. The title block family is not saved. After the project is printed to PDF, the stamp is then removed from the title block, title block re-loaded, and again the title block family not saved.

[cdatechguy]

Our stamp is a symbol family....with the signature being a visibility parameter...I load it into the titleblock then load it into the project...

But since I have to send out my model to consultants I only load it in at printing, then I go back to the titleblock, remove the stamp family and then reload the titleblock into the project.

[collaborativedesigner787231]

Open up the Revit Family (like our titleblock family is called SATitleDSize.rfa). When they said Family Tab, they meant the Home Tab. The Symbol button is about four buttons over from the left.
The quality control on the help stuff could probably be better. I think this is why they made it a wiki.


Thank you! This made it much clearer for me..I guess when I'm trying to follow directions, I follow it to the letter. Revit is very term specific, it would help if the people writing it be a little more cautious for us newbies. I was looking for a "family tab" and it was driving me crazy!

Btw, you can put electronic seals in California..There may be some cities that won't allow it, that's why I wanted a yes/no parameter on the seal- this way I can turn it off and use an actual stamp. Now from the advice of several veterans here, because of subconsultants, I will have to reconsider this. :roll: A BIG THANK YOU!!!

[nancy.mcclure]

There's lots of uses for visibility controls for elements in titleblocks, such as Not For Construction stamps, and sometimes city jurisdictions require their own format review blocks be added, as well. Here's a more visual guide to adding the visibility control (from Revit 2009, I think, but the process is the same, even if the toolbars have changed): http://www.apertedesign.com/?p=53

hope that helps

[collaborativedesigner787231]

There's lots of uses for visibility controls for elements in titleblocks, such as Not For Construction stamps, and sometimes city jurisdictions require their own format review blocks be added, as well. Here's a more visual guide to adding the visibility control (from Revit 2009, I think, but the process is the same, even if the toolbars have changed): http://www.apertedesign.com/?p=53

hope that helps


Ahhhh! Thank you!!

[MikeJarosz]

I went back and checked the New Jersey license requirements. I didn't want to be wrong in front of the whole of AUGI! Online I found this bulletin from the NJ State Division of Codes and Standards:

http://www.state.nj.us/dca/divisions/codes/publications/pdf_bulletins/b_96-2.pdf

It sets forth the requirements of drawing borders. On page 2, #5 requires "The signature and raised professional seal of the architect in responsible charge (a rubber stamp of a seal is not acceptable)"

Maybe the examiner overlooked the rubber seal on your drawings. Building departments are notorious for not following the rules. Or, since then, they may have changed their requirement. The embosser is not very popular with local architects. Trenton should be considering electronic stamps.

[MikeJarosz]

I decided to check my own state: New York. To my suprise I found a NY State document that seems to allow electronic seals.

http://officeofprofessions.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/421/kw/seals/related/1

"Options on applying the seal [are]:

...an electronic reproduction of the seal incorporated into a computer-generated drawing"

I don't know anyone doing this. At SOM we used to have "stamping parties" where a bunch of us sat around with rubber stamps making a mess of ourselves.

Any New Yawkers out there doin it?

[SkiSouth]

Mike, just ran into the same thing in Florida. Raised seal required (embossed). Use to be that you could "seal and sign" the pages, but the cover, with the index had to be embossed. Now every sheet on all sets sent to permit must be embossed.

[MikeJarosz]

I hope it was a two car garage, not a 3000 sheet airport!

[patricks]

Yeah I asked around the office and the FedEx Newark reroof job did in fact have embossed seals on the sheets.

What a major pain. Can you imagine a project with many hundreds of sheet, the area with the seal would be twice as thick as the rest of the set!

[david_peterson]

Also on the issue of stamps, make sure you are looking at the correct disciplines. ie Architectural Drawing many times have different requirements for seals that engineering drawings. Example, I can use e-stamps in Florida on Engineering drawing, while the Architectural drawings require an embossed stamp on every sheet along with an ink sig.
Some states also require additional wording under the stamp. Usually something to the effect of "I'm licensed, and I certify that I was paying attention to the person that designed it". They may also required you to have a Corp ID number to go along with it.
So before you send it out, make sure you have all the correct information for that particular drawing.
Enjoy

[patricks]

heh no such requirements like that here in MS. :) However on the jobs we have done in Arkansas we had to put an additional "company" stamp on our drawings along with my boss's AR architectural professional stamp.

[Dean Camlin]

The regulations regarding electronic stamps & signatures here in Maryland appear to be silent, so I suppose they are acceptable until it is tested in court. However, the only way I know whether a document has received my personal review and approval is through my original stamp & signature. A copy, whether digital or Xerox, may have been altered or reused by someone without my knowledge. I understand the practical tedium of having to stamp or emboss every sheet of a large set (I once was required to stamp & sign every page of the project manual of a HUD-funded project), but once you allow your stamp & signature to be converted to electronic form, that genie is out of the bottle: you can no longer be sure that you have personally approved that drawing.

[MikeJarosz]

I contacted the NY State Architecture Board in Albany. I received an official response that electronic seals are permissable, except that local authorities have the option to require stamped drawings. So, if you are remodeling the Baseball Hall of Fame in glamorous Cooperstown NY, you might have to dig out your rubber stamp if the town building inspector demands it.

The NY Seal has a complicated image that defies drawing. The Architecture Board said that they do not provide any image file. So I went surfing and came up with a source. The Florida State Education Department has a clip art site for all 50 state seals. Presumably they are reliable. I found a number of NY State Seals that had been altered by some wiseguy. Before using a public source, try your registration board first. Virginia has a really nice one, It has editable text. Just insert your name and number and go! Some states have simple graphics: a couple of circles and some text. You can make a Revit familty in 5 minutes.

This points to the NY state seal, but the homesite has all 50:
http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/57900/57952/57952_ny_seal.htm (http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/57900/57952/57952_ny_seal.htm)
http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/57900/57952/57952_ny_seal_sm.gif

[david_peterson]

I Just go get the stamp I need, stamp a blank sheet of paper, scan it, pull it into photo shop, crop it and save it as a jpeg. Done. If you don't want the stamp to go with the drawings or the model, simply remove it. I do the same thing for Acad drawings.
Of course if you want to get real fancy, get one of the raster to vector convertors and change it to line work. But to me that seems like a lot of work. Easier to just create a jpeg IMHO.

[patricks]

I Just go get the stamp I need, stamp a blank sheet of paper, scan it, pull it into photo shop, crop it and save it as a jpeg. Done. If you don't want the stamp to go with the drawings or the model, simply remove it. I do the same thing for Acad drawings.
Of course if you want to get real fancy, get one of the raster to vector convertors and change it to line work. But to me that seems like a lot of work. Easier to just create a jpeg IMHO.

Exactly how I do it. My boss signs and dates it, I scan it in and bring it into the title block family, load without saving, print, then remove the stamp from the family and again load without saving.

That clip art site does have State Seals, but here in MS the state seal is not used for architectural stamps. My boss's seal has his name, number, and city in the center, with "Registered Architect, State of MS" around the outside border. No graphics.

[MikeJarosz]

I have used scanned seals, but there is a noticeable drop off in quality from a native Revit object. I did note in my post that some state seals are so simple they could be drawn directly into a Revit family.

Very often when I have a scanned object I load it into Photoshop. Just increasing contrast sometimes helps tremendously. I do this especially for client trademarks and logos for the titleblock.

[david_peterson]

I haven't tried this in revit yet, but last week I needed to create some images for a marketing piece. I created the a PDF, brought into photoshop, saved as jpeg and brought into my acad title block. Looked really bad. So I just used the PDF instead. Looked great.
Again, I'm not sure if that works in revit, but just another option for cad title blocks.

[patricks]

You can't bring PDF's directly into Revit. Oh how I wish we could.

However I have not had a problem scanning signed/dated stamps. I scan them on our Xerox machine at 300 DPI to PDF, bring into Photoshop, crop, and convert to grayscale and save as JPEG (DO NOT change the image size or resolution in Photoshop, this is very important), and then bring the JPEG into the Revit title block. The trick now is to make the JPEG (comes in large in Revit due to 72 DPI conversion) match the size of the original image while it was in Photoshop. This means taking the image pixel dimensions, dividing by 300, and entering that number into Revit for the raster image size. All image data is retained, and the image is now showing on your title block at 300 DPI instead of 72 DPI.

Plotting the sheets back to PDF or on our Oce at 300 DPI makes for a very clear stamp image, i.e. it almost looks wet stamped on the page.

I still cannot understand why Revit always converts raster image sizes to 72 DPI by dividing the image pixel count by 72 to arrive at the dimensions it thinks the image *should* be. That's an old Macintosh standard and makes no sense whatsoever. If it maintained the image's original DPI setting we could eliminate a couple of steps from the process.

I would post an example but I'm wary of possible legal implications.

[patricks]

Here's an example with a little smudging to prevent anyone else from using it. This is how it looks in the PDF print of the document set.

Again, this is a wet ink stamp on a blank sheet of paper, signed/dated, and then scanned as described above.

[cwride]

In Revit we sign electronically (using Adobe Acrobat Pro) over the top of a .tiff stamp imported into a generic annotation family.

Our firm employs well over a hundred engineers of differing disciplines as well as several architects. We draft and model using all of the following: AutoCAD, all three flavors of Revit, Inventor, Plant 3D, P&ID, and Civil 3D (all from Autodesk) as well as ArchiCAD, Pro-E, and Microstation.

Managing PE and architectural stamps for so many engineers and architects for drawings produced by such a wide array of software packages has proven challenging. Here's our workflow:

1 - New licensed engineer/architect comes on-board.
2 - Stamp is created in AutoCAD using lines and hatches - no text (fonts print differently - sometimes vastly different - from computer to computer and from printer to printer... even to PDF).
3 - The AutoCAD stamp is then exported to a .tiff file.
4 - The .tiff file is inserted as an image into a generic annotation Revit family, cropped and sized appropriately.
5 - Stamps are loaded into projects (not into title block families - there are simply too many engineers and architects to keep all of their stamps in the title block family) on an as-needed basis.
6 - Revit generic annotation stamps are placed on the face of the drawing as required and PDFs are made.
7 - PDF drawings are opened and signed electronically using electronic signatures within Adobe Acrobat Pro.
8 - PDFs are printed as needed (our deliverable is in PDF format - company policy).

AutoCAD stamps are used wherever possible (to maintain visual fidelity), and .tiff stamps are used everywhere else. This workflow seems to work for us.

[MikeJarosz]

Interesting that everyone uses their stamp in your firm. At SOM, nobody except a partner puts their seal the drawings. I saw an employment ad for HOK requiring registration. It mentioned that the successful candidate would be required to stamp the drawings. OMG what about liability?

Me? The only timeI have ever used my seal was on Christmas Cards. (They were FLlW designs, of course) But, I have always worked for large firms.

[cwride]

No partners at my firm. In fact, the design engineering department is just one small department within a much larger firm doing work for the government. That probably explains it, eh?

[MikeJarosz]

What about liability?
Does the firm cover them?

[cwride]

Licensed engineers have responsible charge and are liable. However, the company maintains a liability insurance that helps cover the engineers' work. Now, because the government is both our employer and our customer, it's highly unlikely that the government would sue themselves. Weird relationship.

[patricks]

holy smokes how can a single firm work in ACAD, Revit, ArchiCAD, and MicroStation??

I may look into this digital signature stuff with Acrobat.

[MikeJarosz]

Haven't you seen those employment ads that require Acad, Revit, Microstation, 3DS, Navis, Ecotect, Grasshopper, Access, Excel, Word, Outlook, Newforma, Buzzsaw, Photoshop, 2 languages (required) three or more (desirable), M.Arch, no more than 5 years experience? I have seen ads like this and more.

In my experience, nobody alive can meet these requirements. However, the way this is written, your application can be rejected because you don't happen to know, say Grasshopper. This is a convenient cover when you've been rejected because you are too old, too young, too expensive, or whatever illegal employment practice they want to cover.

I'm not saying that's the case here. Many large engineering firms, when they get a really big job, Hoover Dam say, hire a whole team, open a new office, buy all new computers and leave the CAD decision up to the client or the team leader. A very large airport I worked on required Microstation because that's what the airport agency had. (Transportation is Microstation's biggest market). Get three or four airports and you will have multiple CAD systems.