Dimensioning Techniques for Building Wall Elevations in Revit

So the north side of the building on level one is going to be pretty easy because we're actually going to use an exterior elevation that we place for this wall since there's so much going on here and it's also horizontal and vertical dimensions that need to be located for the wall that we created here. We're actually just going to be dimensioning these points along this wall here, this small section. And to do that we'll start off with dimensioning from grid line 5 and going across and so I use keyboard shortcut DI or you know like we were talking about earlier we can use create similar by picking on one of these dimensions and that's a nice way to do it because then you can almost guarantee that you're using the same dimension type throughout the whole model.

And so I'll start off with a grid line dimension to this wall here and sometimes you got to hit TAB to get the the line that you want and that's what it took for me that time and so I'll go ahead and bring that one across to here and then I can go ahead and pick up the edge of the building on this side as well. And that takes me to a dimension from grid line 5 to 6 and then to the corner of our building so that corner is pretty well located. And then we need one more string that's going to pick up the differences in our our curtain wall here so I'll go ahead and draw a dimension string to pick up the door, the unique panel, and then we can take this one all the way to the edge to show that we have one panel that's got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight equal spaces here.

You can see we've created a graphic conflict here so I'll go ahead and pop that down and then we just need to clean up some of these other dimensions so that we don't have them overlapping each other. The last bit here, pretty simple, is I can just go ahead and now say that we have I think I said eight panels. I'll double check though.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight panels so eight equal panels and there we go. Now we've got it all set up.

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It looks the way that we were hoping for here and I think the next thing is you know I'm going to turn off my thin lines because we've been working with that but there's definitely options and we've explored this a little bit but there's options for how we can streamline this and one of the things that I always like to do is update my dimension style and my units so that there's a lot of these spaces taken out so you can kind of really see it when you have like two foot dash zero inches because there's a lot of spaces in here and we can also update you know this slash is pretty aggressive you can see it really does start to get in the way and then the line weights are maybe a little muted so we can make these adjustments to really make these things bold and so like I was mentioning in the previous video how we use create similar to make sure we use the same dimension type that's where this really pays off so if I were to go to edit type on this dimension type here I can see that my line weight is set to one and my tick mark line weight is set to five so if I were to change this one to say three that's going to make it a much wider line weight going from one to three and then my tick mark I can make it heavier by going to seven and I'm going to hit okay here so we can see what that change does and you can see here this is our grid line which is at a line weight of one and then our tick mark clearly got larger but now it's larger to its detriment because it's too big now but we can change the arrow style again doing the same thing by going to edit type and our tick mark here we got a whole bunch of different options but we want to stick with the diagonal and I always go with this diagonal three sixty-fourths and we'll hit okay so we can see kind of what that does and that gives us a more subdued tick which cleans up our drawing quite a bit and then the next thing that we'll do here is again we'll go to edit type and you can see here we've got options for our text and so there's the text line offset and what that's going to do is going to determine how far above the line the text is going to sit and I usually drop that down in half at least to let's say one thirty second of an inch and I'll hit okay and so it's a small change but it does drop them down a little bit if you wanted it even closer to the line you could change it to one sixty-fourth and we don't have to get out of the dialog box to see the changes like I have been you can always hit apply here and then you can see it kind of moves things around a little bit that looks good so I think we'll stick with that one sixty-fourth option and we'll hit okay and so the last thing I want to do is I want to the project units and so this is a keyboard shortcut if you hit u and then space bar it's asking me to save which is good we always want to save but I can adjust the units project wide so anytime it shows feet in inches it'll show it a certain way and you can do that for any of these different units here so you can see there's a lot of different things going on and so we could customize exactly how we want these all to look so the length unit here you can see that there's suppress zero feet so if it's like an eight inch dimension it won't say zero feet eight inches so if you wanted to click that you definitely could do that but what we're looking at here is suppressed spaces and then we might as well just go ahead and hit the suppress zero feet so that we're crunching these things down as much as possible so I'll hit okay hit okay again and you can see it squeezes everything back to a point where there's not a ton of spaces in there for everything and so just as an example like if I had a 10 inch dimension it's just going to show it as 10 inches instead of where if we had it before with our length and not suppressing the zero feet it would show it as zero feet 10 inches so pretty unnecessary so that's why we go through and do that that step there so now we've added all of our dimensions to level one and we've gone in and modified our text type so your assignment here would be to make sure that you've got everything cleaned up so it's like this two foot dimension you know it's not the best thing in the world but it's also not the worst and so we could go ahead and move that around there's a couple things we could do here ideally you would just kind of move it off to the side or to the bottom like that so it still looks like a nice clean dimension but that's something you'll want to do is just as you're going through the project because there's going to be things that are changing in and out of here is to make sure that these kind of these smaller ones are cleaned up because the drafting principles and making sure that we're doing clean and tidy drawings is an important part to modeling in Revit and developing good modeling habits so that'll be something that you'll want to do as we go through the project now that we've got all the exterior dimensions in we're going to go ahead and jump in and do the few interior ones that we have left i think a lot of them we're going to end up taking care of in our enlarged plans because the the scale of this view at eighth inch is just not gonna work very well with trying to dimension all these walls within here and so what we need to do here is just locate our two stairwells so we've got our stairwell on this side and our stairwell on this side and we just need to make sure that the walls are located from the grid lines and so it's essentially just going in and making sure you're activated on the view but going in and hitting these points here and finding the one that that you're trying to locate and so in our case here the outside of the wall is not as critical as the inside so i'm going to turn the thin lines off so i can actually hit the stud here noticing you know when i turn the thin lines off that we do start to see the different lines and so i'm going to use this grip this is taking us back to bin 101 if you remember and just using tab a bunch of times to kind of get to that point and then i'll do the same thing as i dimension the rest of it so i'm going to go down from this grid line which is b here and i'm going to grab the dimension to say this point and then we'll grab another one down to pick up this other inside face here and this can be located really wherever you need it i did not dimension this intentionally because doors that are adjacent to a wall will have a note that shows where we want those to be and that'll do it for our east air and we'll just kind of repeat the same process for for the west side so you can just start from grid line b and work your way down so it's the same thing we'll just grab grab these points here and if you have a different standard or different way that you like to dimension these things i'm not going to be picky about that that's definitely something that that you can you can explore and do the on your own like here i'll dimension it from this side i'm just grabbing that that grid on this one and then making sure that i've got it located in a way that's easy to read that's the goal here okay now i've got these dimensions all located the way that i want them to be and i'll just do a quick scan real quick to make sure we got everything and then we should be good on dimensions for level one and then we can jump in to level two and then ultimately the root