Good day ladies and gentlemen! Last week we discussed the creation of levels, (datums) in our project, and how to set them up in an elevation view. Now, in order to give our project some more project definition, we’ll create some grid lines in our plan views.
Going back to our Level 1 floorplan from the Project Browser, you’ll see four elevation markers. We’ll want our grid within this area, but if we needed to, we can move these markers by selecting them, accessing the Move command from the Modify Panel, and simply drag them to where we need them.
1) Access the Grid command from the Datum Panel, in the Home Tab, and start your grid line by clicking anywhere within the perimeter defined by our elevation markers. From your start point, drag it down towards the bottom and click to complete the grid line.
Note that your grid line has one activated bubble, and similar to Levels, you can activate the grid bubble at both or one chosen end of the grid line by checking off the box at the end of the grid line, while you have the grid line selected.
2) Select the Grid command again, only this time, hover over your first grid line at the top, and use the temporary dimension to create a start point 32′ to the right of your first grid line. Similar to Levels, you can use the temporary dashed blue line to guide the alignment of the grid bubble locations.
We’ll now use the Grid command, combined with the Offset option to create our horizontal grid lines, A and B.
3) First select the Grid command from the Datum Panel, and start the grid line from right to left, closer to the top. We’ll change the grid number 3 to an A by double clicking within the grid bubble and typing in our input.
4) Now, select the Grid command again, only this time, enter 24′ into the Offset option underneath the ribbon. Select the Pick option in the Draw Panel, and hover over the Grid Line A, until you see a dashed line appear 24′ below it. When you see this dashed line, left click once.
Notice the new grid line has the exact same look as our Grid Line A, and it has been named B accordingly, because the last change we made was to A, a letter. If we changed this letter B, back to an 8 for example and then repeated the process, Revit intuitively concludes that our next grid line will need to be named 9. Try this out to get a feel for the convention.
One of the other things you can try is dragging your grid line 2 over further to the right. Notice your temporary dimensions automatically update. Select Grid Line 2 again, and double click in the temporary dimension’s value field. Change it back to 32′ and notice it update it’s location accordingly. With the Grid Line 2 still unselected, your temporary dimension disappears.
5) Select the Grid Line 2 again, and underneath the number 32′-0″, you’ll see a small dimension icon. Click on this and notice the temporary dimension becomes permanent, and stays after the Grid Line 2 is no longer selected. Drag the new permanent dimension to a nice location at the top of the grid, and repeat the process for Grids A and B.
Thanks for reading our second half of Starting a Project in Revit. Check back soon and we’ll discuss how to use our Grids and Levels to start creating walls for our project.
Travis
