site plan true north

[chris.80515]

is it possible to change true north for general plans only so that site plan only reads as true north and all other plans can be oriented in another direction?

[PeterJ]

Generally you work to Project North and rotate the site plan to true north. Someome just updated a tutorial on this if you care to look in the tutorial section.

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=2283

[dbaldacchino]

Go to a plan view and in it's Properties, under Graphics, change the orientation to True North. Then, go to Tools-->Project Position/Orientation-->Rotate True North and you'll be able to rotate the project relative to plan North. If this is the plan view you want rotated, you're done. Otherwise, set the orientation in the properties back to Plan North, go to the view you want oriented to True North and change the Orientation in the view's properties (under graphics).

The help documentation has not been updated for 8.1 and you won't be able to follow as they changed the menus :)

[SCShell]

Hey there,

Another approach is to simply rotate the plan view for drafting and sheet layout purposes. (Not actually modifying the True or Project North settings) Make the crop box visible on a plan view, then highlight the box and rotate it. This will rotate a plan view as needed.
Handy trick sometimes.
Good luck
Steve

[rbrodie]

Hi David,

As a Newbie, I am still having difficulty after your kind explanation above. Is is possible that you (or anyone?) could help me with my particular problem?

BACKGROUND HISTORY:

• I have imported an engineer’s 80-acre topo DWG into Revit with True North pointed up. (Worked out great!)

• On this 80-acre housing development topo with winding residential roads, there will be 38 Revit houses designed: all with differing Project North orientations.

• I realize the best way to probably do these 38 houses may be by simply creating completely separate Revit files and then importing each house file into the overall Revit 80-acre topo at some point.

• However, for now I am hoping to just understand how to create Project North views for at least ONE HOUSE within my True North-oriented 80-acre topo file.

MY PROBLEM:

• First off, I named the overall site view for the 80-acre development “80-ACRE SITE”. Then, in attempting to follow your instructions above, I set that site view’s “View Properties” graphic orientation to True North. (So far so good!)

• I then made a duplicate copy of that overall site view (used "duplicate with detailing" -- don't know if this matters), calling it “SITE FOR HOUSE-1” and made sure that this new house site view’s “View Properties” had True North initially selected as its orientation. (So far so good!)

• Then by using “Tools/Project Position”, I "rotated true north" within the “SITE FOR HOUSE-1” by inputting 10 degrees clockwise so that Project North for that very first house would then be pointing upward. (GREAT -- so far so good!)

• I then went back into “View Properties” for the “SITE FOR HOUSE-1” view and changed its graphics orientation to “Project North”. (GREAT -- again so far so good!)

• However after choosing OK in the "View Properties" menu, the entire “SITE FOR HOUSE-1”view suddenly re-rotated itself back to its old True North position, even though after it re-rotated itself, its “View Properties” orientation was still reading Project North.

• If that wasn’t enough to throw this Newbie over a cliff instilling great Newbie fear, the “80-ACRE SITE” view, without my even touching it, suddenly decided to go ahead and rotate itself into an unwanted Project North position, even though its graphics orientation listing within its “View Properties” menu was still reading True North.

Am I missing something really basic here? Or might this possibly be a glitch within 8.1 ?

Your help is so much appreciated.

Sincerely, Robert Brodie

[dbaldacchino]

Ok, first thing you have to do (sorry, forgot to tell you this!) is to rotate your siteplan so that true north matches plan north of your view. THEN you rotate your true north per my instructions and when you set your view to true north, your imported dwg siteplan will show correctly (that's not what ytou have in your case I assume). Try this out and if you still have problems, I'll try get some screenshots posted.

Are your houses going to be all the same or slight variations of each other? I assume the orientations are all going to be different, so in that case you'd have to do separate files (or I guess you could do one file with design options) and then link those to your main, assembled campus project file which would be the site plan. That way your buildings can be orthogonally placed on sheets instead of all rotated around.


Also, could you post a small example file? We can probably help you better that way. Let us know!

[iru69]

Bruce Gowan (beegee) just did a really nice how-to on this very subject on his blog which might be worth checking out:
http://revit-alize.blogspot.com/

[rbrodie]

I just went to Bruce Gowan's blog and it REALLY helped me follow all the necessary steps --- Thank you IRUSUN and Bruce!!!

However it appears that if MORE than ONE HOUSE is to be drawn for a project, then Bruce Gowan's instructions would not initially apply --- and that, instead, the Baldacchino approach of first "creating 38 separate house files to link into the 80-acre site plan file" would be the right way to go. After those 38 house files are created, then each house file would need to follow Bruce Gowan's great instructions.

If I may, as a very proud new Newbie, I thought I would take this opportunity to post a little jpeg flyover view of the 80-acre project, which also happens to be my very first Revit 3D model ever!

Thanks for everyone's help and concern out there!!!