Project North

[irons468331]

I do residential design. Typically, the building will be parallel to one of the property lines which is at an angle to the points of the compass. I want to rotate the site without losing the accurate bearing and distances in the "property lines" table so that I can have the floor plan orthogonal to the screen and the printed sheet without loosing the proper orientation of the model. I have spent hours experimenting with the "rotate project north" and "rotate true north" commands (including following the instructions on the Revit help website) without luck. Those commands seem do different things every time I use them, but never what I am trying to achieve. Does anyone know how this is supposed to work or what I might be doing wrong?

[Steve_Stafford]

Describe what information is available to you. For example, do you have a CAD survey you can import? Are you sketching property lines or using the table to enter specific bearing and distance values?

Revit expects us to begin by creating a model using Project North, make it easy to put on paper first. That's because we often don't have a reliable survey at first. Once we get a survey we can import it and use it to acquire coordinates which will also define True North. If that process is consistent with yours then the process looks like this.


Create your initial design using Project North orientation (meaning we aren't positive about orientation yet)
Receive the Survey file
Open the Site Plan view
Change the Orientation parameter to True North
Import the survey file using Positioning: Auto - Center to Center (see image 01)
Rotate the survey so it is parallel to the boundary you choose (rotating the "world" under the building)
Move the survey so it places the building in the correct location (moving the "world" under the building)
Manage ribbon > Project Location panel > Coordinates > Acquire Coordinates - select the survey file (see image 02)


As soon as you acquire coordinates you should find that Revit reorients the view so that True North is up. If you examine your other plan views you'll see they still show Project North (based on the Orientation parameter for each view). In the screen captures please pretend my garage isn't sitting half on my property and half on the neighbors :)

[PijPiwo]

Also, take a look at this tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mit2vFFIOL4
It is basically what Steve has said though.

[MikeJarosz]

It helps to have a simple metaphor in mind before you try to figure out Steve's post.

Imagine a coffee cup on a tablecloth. The coffee cup will stand in for our building and the tablecloth will play mother earth. In Acad, you move the coffee cup around on the tablecloth to suit your design. In Revit, you do the exact opposite. The coffee cup stays put and you move the tablecloth around. Therefore you can place your house nice and square facing whatever side of the sheet it fits best (project north) and then move the map around it.

The advantage is that you can start drawing the building before you have a survey. That is not common in residential design, but in commercial work it is. I have a project right now that looked at five different sites before deciding. For each site we used Google Earth in place of an accurate survey with good results.

BTW, AUGI readers: I couldn't get to everything at AU. I hear that Autodesk has a new product (I think I overheard the name "Entourage") that replaces the aging subscription app that enables the Google tie-in. Anyone got the details?

[irons468331]

Thanks for the help. A couple of follow-up questions: 1: What if I am using the Property Line Table to enter meets & bounds from the property description instead of importing a survey? 2: It looks like you don't use either the Rotate Project North or Rotate True North command in this procedure. Is that correct, and if so, what are those commands for?

[Steve_Stafford]

I made this video (http://youtu.be/REqR8z0Cbuc) for a post on my blog. It demonstrates resolving the orientation using bearing and distance data instead. It uses Rotate True North.

When you have a survey and use Acquire Coordinates that tool defines the True North orientation so using Rotate True North isn't necessary. If the survey WCS (AutoCAD world coordinate system) is not using North as UP then Acquire Coordinates won't work properly because the survey isn't drawn in a conventional way.

Rotate Project North was created more recently in response to users who create their model oriented to True North at the beginning and then decide they need a Project North orientation. This tool is more complicated because it is automating selecting all the model elements and rotating the building as well as fixing views and annotation. The further along a project is toward completion the greater the chance that using Rotate Project North won't be completely successful. It is important to carefully review the entire model and documentation after using it.

In contrast Rotate True North doesn't really change the model, just it's notion of which way is up and Revit rotates any view that is assigned True North accordingly. Revit wants us to start with Project North, pick an easy orientation to draw the project "on paper". It is meant to be used to define the real world orientation at some point later when we decide what that should be.

I tell people that Revit has "doors" that allow access to different things, tools to do things. Sometimes there is a front and a back door. Sometimes there are front, side, basement, back, and even secret doors (at least sneaky perhaps). Each of the tools for positioning and coordinates are just different doors leading to the same place, hopefully. Just have to pick the closest or the best door for the circumstance.

[bclarch]

BTW, AUGI readers: I couldn't get to everything at AU. I hear that Autodesk has a new product (I think I overheard the name "Entourage") that replaces the aging subscription app that enables the Google tie-in. Anyone got the details?

Mike, could this be what you are looking for? http://apps.exchange.autodesk.com/RVT/en/Detail/Index?id=appstore.exchange.autodesk.com%3acadtoearth%3aen

[MikeJarosz]

Thanks! I'll take a look at it. The problem with the subscription app is that it only works with an older version of google maps. You have to reinstall the older google to get the app to work. PITA.