Understanding Crop Regions and Placing Views on Sheets in Revit

Establishing Crop Regions and Arranging Views for Drawing Sheets in Revit

Learn how to efficiently establish crop regions and place views on sheets using elevation tags. Gain insights into activating and deactivating views, adjusting dimensions and positions, and preparing your designs for printing.

Key Insights

  • Setting up the crop region correctly is crucial before placing views on sheets. The crop region establishes the boundary for what will appear on a drawing sheet. Maintaining the visibility of elevation tags within the crop region is important.
  • Activating and deactivating views can enhance the workflow. Activation allows you to make necessary adjustments to dimensions, move elevation tags, and adjust the crop as needed. Deactivating the view then enables you to see how the changes would appear in the final layout.
  • Understanding the role of view titles and viewports can improve the visual presentation of your designs. You can move view titles according to your preference and adjust the viewport to suit your design. Turning off the crop region provides a clear view of what the design will look like when printed.

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Now that we're ready to put views on sheets, the first thing we want to do is understand some of the things that we have to do before we go through that process. And one of the first things that we want to make sure we do correctly is establish the crop region on each one of our views. And that is done by first turning on the crop, which is the button right next to the sunglasses there, and making sure that we can see what that boundary is.

This is the default boundary because you can see our elevation tags are way out here. But essentially, this is going to be the boundary of what is going to allow us to show on a drawing sheet. If I take this and drag it halfway across my floor plan, notice how the dimensions are still going to show, but the model elements have all disappeared.

So what I want to do is these elevation tags are going to become part of our project once we put the elevations on sheets. So I want to move these closer. So I'll select the whole thing and then I'll move it so that it's right up against my dimensions.

And I want to do that on all four sides. So I'm simply just taking a crossing here and grabbing those elevations. And what's important is when you click on the elevation tag itself, that this line right here stays within the crop region.

If this line gets cropped out, the entire tag will go away. And we don't want that. When I bring in the crop region now, I just want to make sure I put it right on the edge of the elevation tag so that when we do put this on a sheet that we can still see our elevation tag.

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And so we'll want to do the same thing on our roof plan. When I go into the roof plan, you can see the elevation tags are now part of the roof. And we don't necessarily want those on here, but we want to make sure that our crop region is set properly.

If you notice as I move it in closer to the building, those elevation tags go away. And that's fine to not have those show on a roof plan because they will be clearly shown on our floor plan. Now that sets up our floor plan and our roof plan to be placed onto our drawing sheet.

If I were to go in to say my A101 floor plan sheet, you can see it's all ready to go here. To put level one on that sheet, all I have to do is select level one, press, drag, and then drop. And now I can left click again to place it in the location that I want to put it in.

And this is really a judgment call. We want to make sure we move it into a location that fits nicely and is easy to read, which is what I'm seeing here. So this tag looks like it's a little close.

And so I can adjust the crop and kind of move the tag around as I see fit. And the process we went through there is it's really important to fully understand this because it saves you from having to jump back and forth between views and sheets. And it's essentially the ability to activate and deactivate views.

And so what I did is I went in, I double clicked on the view that activated the view. And so now I can go in, make adjustments, squeeze dimensions tighter, move elevation tags, which is the example we just did there, adjust the crop however I want. And then when I'm done, I can double click into the sheet and that takes me out of the view or deactivates the view.

And what's great is all those changes that I'm making here, it's no different than if I were in the level one floor plan view. So the next thing that we'll look at is this view title. And so, you know, if it's your preference to have it run across the bottom like that, you can, but there's also the option to be able to move it around.

And so when you click on the view port, which is this major portion here, you can kind of drag the whole thing around like that. And then you can also use the directional pad on your keyboard to move it around so I can kind of nudge back and forth like this. Well, what I could do here is I can actually grab the view title, which is this piece by itself.

And then I can drag it around to a location that I see fit, which in our case, I'll put it say somewhere around here. And then this looks weird, right? I can't have that running all the way across. That would not be acceptable.

If I click on the view port, this portion here, notice how I have dots that I can work with. And so I can drag that across and put it in a location where I want it. Now, this is almost exactly what we'll see when we print.

The one thing that won't print is gonna be our crop region. And to turn that off, what I could do is I could select and double click in to activate my view and I can turn off my crop region. And now I can really see what this view is gonna look like when I print.

We can do the same thing with our roof plan. This view looks like it's ready to go. I can turn off the crop region now because we don't need it, but I'll go to my roof plan sheet, select the roof plan view, and I can drag it into place, do the same thing with the view title, pick the view title over and kind of move it over into a similar location here and then adjust the extents of the tab.

And now I've got my roof plan and my floor plan ready to go. And I want you to notice here that when you look at the sheets now, the ones that have views associated with them have this plus sign, which means you can see what views have been placed on those sheets. In the next video, we're gonna take a look at adjusting our elevations and putting those on sheets as well.

photo of Michael Wilson

Michael Wilson

Revit Instructor

Bachelor of Architecture, Registered Architect

Mike is recognized by Autodesk as one of North America’s leading Revit Certified Instructors. He has significant experience integrating Revit, 3ds Max, and Rhino and uses Revit Architecture on medium and large-scale bio and nano-tech projects. Mike has been an integral member of the VDCI team for over 15 years, offering his hard-charging, “get it done right” approach and close attention to detail. In his spare time, Mike enjoys spending time outdoors with his wife, children, and dog.

  • Autodesk Certified Instructor (ACI GOLD – 1 of 20 Awarded Globally)
  • Autodesk Certified AutoCAD Professional
  • Autodesk Certified Revit Professional
  • Revit
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