Creating an Exterior Material Legend in Revit: A Step-by-Step Guide

To create our material legend, what we're going to do is just like with our symbols legend, we'll start off by going to the view tab, legends, and we'll pick a legend here. And just like before, we give it a name. We're going to call this one exterior material legend, set the scale, I'm going to pick eighth inch, and hit OK.

And we get that magical white space that we can do whatever we want with. So I'll go ahead and start with the detail line and just use the keyboard shortcut DL to get that started. And I'm going to make this one 41 feet.

And then we'll add the text. And just like before, we're going to use that 316 aerial. We're using the same text for everything.

And I'll just add the title here, knowing I'm going to have to move it around in a little bit. But what we're going to do here is we'll go ahead and adjust this where we want. And then the goal is we're going to have a series of patterns on one side, like a column of patterns, and then the text that describes it on the other side.

So the first thing I'll do here is I'm going to use filled regions to create all of the different materials here. And that's a little bit of an effort here to get that going. But it shouldn't be too bad.

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We'll go ahead and go to the annotate tab and region. And then if we look at the ones that we have available, you can see here that the ones we're looking for may not be in here. We're going to go ahead and we will go ahead and edit the type, duplicate to make a new one.

And the best way to do this is to use the same designations that we're planning on using for that material. So this one's going to be for our plaster finish, the different type of color and finish that we're going to note here. We're going to have like a gray one and a brown one and like some concrete and things like that.

We want to use those designations. So I'll say PC-1 for Portland Cement Plaster. And one designating it as one of the multiple types we might use.

So I'll hit OK. And then now I can go through and set the pattern I want to use. And also if there's like a background color or something I want to do there, because we can do a foreground fill pattern and a background fill pattern to represent these things.

So for this one, since it's going to be plaster, we typically use a sand pattern for that. So I'll go ahead and grab the sand. There's both sand and sand dense.

Sand dense could work, but it's very dense on like a large field of area, especially if you're using like elevations that are in the eighth inch or lower scales. It's just going to be too much and too busy. We'll go ahead and use that one.

If you're not happy with the color, you can kind of reduce that down, but I think we'll be fine here. And then we'll hit OK. What's going to be important is we'll want to have our material designation match this.

So that's something we'll keep in mind as we continue on here. So I'll hit OK, and then I'll draw my region. And I want to use obviously the same size for all of these.

So this one is going to be four feet by 12 feet. So I'll set that 12 foot dimension here, and then the four foot one there. And this is just the border that goes around it.

Using thin lines, it's going to be fine here. And that will be our first material. And so what I'll do is I'll kind of position this somewhere that is going to look good for our purposes, and then I can add the text in here.

And this is going to be a note text, so it'll be the 332nd instead of a title text, which is going to be that 316th. And I just randomly placed the box because we know we're going to move it again this time. And I'll give it the name that I want.

We're going to call it PC-1 because that's the designation that we're going to give it. So the tag that we have on our plan is going to match that exactly. We'll say PC-1, and then we'll go ahead and say plaster, smooth finish, and then the color.

So what is it? It's plaster. What are some key factors? We want it to be smooth. And then the color, we can say color dark brown.

So that's our color for the plaster. And I'll kind of just position this so it's somewhat in the middle here. And you can do the same thing.

You can move it around however you see fit. Then now that I've got it set up the way that I want here, I'll grab both of these and I'll just copy it down. And this distance that I copy here is going to represent the distance that I'm going to have for all of these.

If you wanted to set it like an exact number, you could definitely do that. It's not super critical, but like if you really had to, you could say maybe I want them three feet apart, or maybe we'll do four feet since that's how tall Symbol is. And oddly, I got really close to that.

So you could take it like I've done here, you know, draw the line that's going to represent the space between them, and then copy it down so that you know that they're always going to be four feet apart. That's totally up to you on how you want to do that. We can't use the same pattern for two different materials.

So I'm going to take this one, I'm going to edit type, and I'm going to duplicate. And this one will be PC-2. And it's essentially the same exact thing as what we used before, but this time we're going to put a background fill pattern on.

And so I'll go ahead and have it be a solid fill. We don't want it to be black on black because that will just be black. You won't see anything.

So what we can do is we can go ahead and change this color to that light gray in here. And what it'll do is it'll give us a light gray background with a foreground pattern of black on here. So I'll just hit OK.

And you can see now we have our next material. And we have to go through and make these modifications. So it's the same thing, plaster smooth finish in the color instead of dark brown, we're going to use a dark gray here.

And we'll just repeat that process until we get all of our materials in. And what's great here is I now have my spacing set the way that I want. So I can just copy that one down.

I can modify my notes here. So this one's going to be concrete. So I'll just see C-O-N-C for the designation.

And then we'll just call it cast in place concrete. If you wanted more designations, like with form liner or something along those lines, you could definitely do that. This project, we're going to keep it pretty simple though.

So just as cast is what the term would be, but we'll just say cast in place concrete. Here, I can go ahead and see if we have a concrete pattern, which doesn't look like it. So got to make one again, just like before.

So I'll select the field region that we're modifying, edit type, and then I will duplicate and we'll call this one concrete because this might get used for other things too. And then we'll set the pattern to, you guessed it, concrete. And then we're going to go ahead and take off the solid fill because we don't want to have the fill behind it.

That'll be too busy. And we'll hit okay. And now we have concrete.

And the next one we're going to do is going to be our metal panel.