Explore the process of annotating sheet views in Revit in this detailed article, part of the BIM 322 course content. Learn how to use the tag by category and tag all features, enhance the readability of your drawings, and increase efficiency in the field.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the use of the "annotate" tab in Revit to annotate sheet views created in the BIM 322 course, specifically focusing on air terminals and ducts.
- Two methods are highlighted for annotation - "tag by category" for ducts and "tag all" for air terminals. This distinction helps to avoid unnecessary clutter in the drawing and maintain readability.
- Adjusting the placement and organization of tags is essential for the final output to be clear and concise. The author recommends using Revit's guidelines and snaps to align tags consistently and ensuring they are easy to read in the field.
Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 322 course. What we're going to be going ahead and doing in this video is starting to annotate out the sheet views that we went ahead and created in the previous video. And how we're going to go ahead and do this is please make sure that you're in the annotate tab up on the top in the ribbon bar.
And we're going to be using both tag by category and tag all. Now we're going to be using tag all for the actual air terminals, air diffusers, whatever you would like to call these that are at the end of the ducts that actually supply and return air from the individual spaces. And the reason why we're going to use tag all here is because I do want to call out every single actual air terminal.
What we're going to be using tag by category for is the actual ducts themselves. We don't actually need to tag every single piece of duct. That would be a lot of annotations that would really kind of make our drawing hard to read and clutter everything up.
We're just going to go ahead and tag specific ones by using tag by category. Once we've got all the tags in there we'll go ahead and readjust and make everything look nice and clean and readable so that the guys in the field can get this information quickly and effectively and efficiently. So the first thing I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to go to tag all here.
I want to go ahead and have air terminal tags with the CFM call out. It's already been loaded into the project for you. And also what I'm going to go ahead and do is I want to activate the leader here because we are going to need to drag these around and move them later on.
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I'm going to go ahead and hit apply. Hit OK. And as you can see all of our tags for these specific areas or all of our tags for these air terminals have been added in and applied to the specific air terminals.
What I want to go ahead and do now is I'm going to go ahead and start tagging some of the ducts. I could technically go through and start adjusting some of these but I want to wait until all of my annotations are in so I can get a feeling for how everything is going to work together. So what I want to do now is I want to go to tag by category in the annotate tab here.
Click to activate that. I'm going to go ahead and leave my leader on in this options bar. A half inch is fine.
We can always go back and adjust it later. And I'm just going to go ahead and start with this area here. And all I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to start tagging some of the smaller areas or some of the other ones and then adjust just that small area and then let you do the rest on your own.
So I'm just going to go through. I'm going to go ahead and pick here. Again, I'm just going around tagging the longer runs.
If I have something that's fairly large that the text could actually fit into I don't necessarily need to have the leader on. So I'm just going to go up to the options bar up here. Uncheck leader.
I'm going to go ahead and pick here. And again, that's just so that I can actually have that tag in the duck and not take up any space outside or around the duck. Don't worry if some of them are overlapping now.
We're going to go ahead and be going back and actually adjusting these as we go. So just work your way around. Keep tagging.
Once you've got all the ones that have the space that you can actually put the text inside of the duct, go ahead and reactivate your leader. And I'm going to go ahead and continue tagging the ones that are not, that I cannot fit the actual text into the duct itself. Again, I'm just kind of going around.
I'm going to kind of just stay to this side right here for right now. And I think I have got most of them here. A couple down here.
What I'm going to go ahead and do now is I'm going to pause the video and finish tagging the rest of this first floor mechanical plan. Then I'll restart the video, show you what I've done, and then we'll start adjusting things and move forward from there. So I've gone ahead and actually finished tagging the rest of the ducks in the building in this first floor mechanical plan.
And what I want to go ahead and do now is talk about how do we start to organize these so they actually come out in a clear and concise way that is easy to read in the field and the guys in the field can actually get the information out of this drawing quickly and effectively. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and start up in this area here. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in.
And again, as you can see, I have tags that are just kind of laying over each other. And I don't really want that because it makes it hard to read. So all I have to do is I'm going to go ahead and click on one of the tags.
And as you can see, I get this little drag arrow down here at the bottom. It looks like a move tool. I can go ahead and drag these guys out.
Drag this one up here. And then I can grab the shape handle right here. And that's going to allow me to adjust the leg of that leader.
Bring this over here. And the nice thing is is that Revit understands the link between these different annotation elements that you want them to line up and look good and be consistent. So what it does is it creates some guidelines for you and some snaps so you can snap directly to specific objects.
I'm going to place that one there. It doesn't actually do it for the actual leader lines or the leader legs, but that's okay. Go ahead and keep moving these guys around.
I'm not too worried if things are overlapping walls of the architectural model. Again, the architectural model is in halftone so that I want this information is actually going to pop out when it prints. One thing that we can do here is that I want to go ahead and actually stack these like so.
What I can do is that I can stack both of these tags on top of each other, making it look like I have just one tag. But actually what's happening is that I still have two tags there. They're just right on top of each other, and it's perfectly fine.
One thing I do have going on here is I don't really like how this leader line going down to this air terminal is actually crossing another air terminal. It could potentially lead to some kind of confusion in the field. What I'm going to do is right now in the options bar, it's actually an attached end leader.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this down here and change it to free end. I'm going to go ahead and choose free end. It's going to adjust that leader, and I need to do some manual adjusting here.
I'm going to go ahead and drag this piece. There's really not a snap per se to where I can snap actually on the geometry itself, but I can go ahead and move it into a location that is pointing directly to the geometry. I'm going to go ahead and drag this little leader leg straight up.
Let's make it like that. I'm going to drag this one back so it looks like it's just one leader line with two different arrowheads coming off of it. I'm going to go ahead and adjust some of these other tags.
What I'm actually going to do here is I'm going to drag this 8-inch round duct tag into here. I'm going to drag this guy and place it over that one also. There is really no rhyme or reason to exactly how you need to place your tags, but what you want to do is you want to be consistent throughout the entire project, and you also want to go ahead and make things very clear and very easy to read.
Everyone does this slightly differently on how exactly they want things to look. I'm just going to keep moving around and adjusting tags as I go. I can go ahead and stack those two together.
Pull this guy out here. Again, I want to kind of give it a little leg. I need to drag it out just a tad more.
What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and pause the video, finish adjusting these different tags, and please, in your own model, go ahead and go through and finish adjusting the tags for yourself, and then we'll be back in a second. I've got all my tags now organized and ready to go. If you guys go ahead and zoom out, as you can see, things look a lot cleaner, a lot nicer.
Oh, oops, I purposely left out some tags that I actually meant to put in. As you can see in this space here, I don't have the tags delineating what size duct this is or these ends tapping out of it. They're very easy to go in and add.
All I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to tag by category up here, and I'm going to go ahead and then just go through the same exact process. Tag those there. I'm just going to go ahead and double check and make sure everything got tagged.
A couple that were left out here and a couple up here. Not very hard to go back and actually add the tags in. It's very simple.
It's just the same process. All I'm going to do now is I'm just going to just reorganize based on the new tags that I have real quickly. I'm going to hit escape twice to exit out of my tagging, and then just go ahead and choose the ones that I want to organize and adjust.
Again, it's a very, very simple process, very easy to do, and it makes it a lot easier to annotate drawings in Revit being able to tag items like this and that Revit knows all the specific characteristics of each individual item. If you missed any tags, go ahead, add those in, and then just adjust them as you need to, and I will see you in the next video.