How to manage section anotations in multiple plan views

[vivioktora736161]

Hi

i've been working on highrise building drawings now
i create many section views and now i'm having trouble
because in each plan views (40+ of them) the section head and section tail are not aligned and looked messy
i tried to tidy them up one plan view at a time and it was time consuming

do you guys have the same experience? i am badly need advice :(

[irneb]

Unfortunately no ... Revit (as standard) does not have a way to align multiple section lines in one go, not to mention across several plan views. You need to do this one at a time manually. As soon as you've manually adjusted a section line it loses its association with the section's crop extents. This is especially true if you adjust any section in any view other than the one where you originally drew it. IMO it's a "stupid" idea from Revit, and causes lots of extra useless work - especially as there's no "reset" option like you get with Grid-Lines.

If the building is rectangular (or mostly straight sides) you may want to start looking at using scope boxes and then not adjust any section lines (just remember never to manually adjust any section line ... EVER ... live with the auto placements or live with the manual adjustments). Using the scope box you can then adjust all sections set to it in one go. The problem is that when the building starts becoming complicated (like curved sides) the amount of scope boxes increase drastically. Of course, this only works if your sections all have the same crop sizes when they're parallel to one another. Which may not be the case for things like podium levels or if the building has terraced levels - again necessitating several individual scope boxes.

An alternative is to recreate the section lines as referencing existing sections. Then hiding all those normal section lines in all views. This way you should be able to adjust all these "fake" section lines once, then copy-paste them to other views. However, if adding / moving sections this does become cumbersome. And IMO it's not that much less work - due to the need of hiding the lines manually (unable to filter hide them), though you can select multiple lines per view in order to hide.

Other similar questions:
http://www.revitforum.org/architecture-general-revit-questions/11559-align-section-heads-among-plans.html

[damon.sidel]

I agree that this is something that I wish there were more helpful commands and methods.

That said, I always like to think about the alternatives. It is true that in ACAD or other 2d drafting software one could create a sections drawing that links/xrefs into all plans. That is definitely a nice feature. However, that is only helpful for building sections and full-height wall sections. There will be plenty of sections that are only on one or a subset of plans.

There are plenty of tasks in all CAD programs, Revit included, that just take time. I think it is an important mental calculation to factor in managing the individual 2d drawings/views that are taken from the model.

That's my two cents. Doesn't solve any problems, but perhaps this view can help you set your expectations in a way that makes this and certain other tasks an acceptable part of the process.