Custom section - head and tail

[DO-PRE]

Hi all, Its my first post. My office has just started the transition into Revit. I have been working on (well, more like figuring out how to) getting our standard symbols into revit. I didnt have a problem with the north arrow or the title block but the sections, call outs and elevation symbols are tough.

Can someone suggest a good tutorial for this. Ive gone through many posts but I cant piece it all together yet. Any help would be great. Thanks!

Dan

[Andre Carvalho]

Well, have you tried Revit's own tutorial? This may be a good starting point.

To help you with the custom section head and tail, if you want to customize it you can got to your project browser and navigate to (+)Families, (+)Annotation Symbols, you will see that there are Section Head and Section Tail families loaded in your project. You can the right click these and edit these families, creating your own tails and heads. Save them with another name and load it in your project. By the way, following this method, you can edit and Save As any annotation symbol or family in Revit.

I would suggest also, after creating your custom annotations families (or any other family), to create a good template file to start your projects with your custom families pre-loaded on it (the ones you are sure you will use on every project, to avoid loading unecessary faimiles...)

I hope it helps.

Andre Carvalho

[DO-PRE]

Thanks Andre, its starting to make sense. having to load the head and tail in separately into a file and not being able to save the complete symbol in the library thru me off. Like you suggested, having a rvt template file with all my familys and having it act a central repository is the plan forward. thanks again

[ajayholland]

Dan,

Also consider this an opportunity to re-think your office standards. Simplification can be a real time saver. The closer you are to 'out of the box’ Revit, the easier it will be.

~AJH

[DO-PRE]

Simplification is a good point but some co-workers have been skeptical about implementing revit at this point and I'am trying to make things as "normal" for them as possible, I would hate to say you cant do that in Revit.

The biggest problem I am having is not being able to have the text follow the orientation of the section symbol. I am at a point where Im placing this one at the end of the list, there is bigger fish...........

But if anyone has any thoughts on orienting text in the section symbol I would be glad to try it. Ive read previous threads and it seems like there has been no luck.

[Andre Carvalho]

But if anyone has any thoughts on orienting text in the section symbol I would be glad to try it. Ive read previous threads and it seems like there has been no luck.

If you go to your project browser, families, annotation symbols, Section Head Filled and edit it you can rotate your text there as you want. When you load it back to the project, your section heads will show the text rotated, if that is what you want...

See the rough example at the attached image.

Andre Carvalho

[DO-PRE]

I was hoping the text would orient automatically with the section head. Any chance of doing that?

[Andre Carvalho]

Ok, I understand now what you want. However, even if you can have the head and its lines to rotate with the section mark, the text for some reason you can't... I think it is hard coded by the factory.

If you don't want to create one section head for each section mark orientation (what I wouldn't suggest you to do because you can't have it to work if you have section marks at angles different than 0, 90, 180, 270), you will have to live with that for a while. The best thing to do is to follow A. Holland suggestion and re-think your office standards.

Andre Carvalho

[DO-PRE]

Great, thanks fo rall the suggestions

[ajayholland]

Thanks Do-Pre for providing a perfect example. This is the “Catch-22” of technology conversion.

Rotation of the text in sections heads and callouts was a limitation in AutoCAD. We did not rotate them when hand drafting.

The improvement that Revit offers is to automatically rotate the references to make them readable. Now you find yourself spending extra effort to make things “normal” for some skeptical co-workers, in imitation of a previous limitation. You have my sympathy.

~AJH