Thursday, October 07, 2010

Rotated Views??

Had a user come to me with an off problem last week that had me stumped until I got into the file....

The user said they had some enlarged floor plans that were slightly rotated, needless to say this didn't look very good on the sheets. My first reaction was:

  1. draw a detail line, which will snap to Revit's orthagonal snaps
  2. Create an angular dimension an element in the view to measure the angle.
  3. Rotate the view based on the angle.
Well, that did not work....

So then, what was going on? The view was a floorplan, not a callout, so it was not a relationship to something like that. I checked true north versus project north, that was ok. I created my own floor plan view, and rotated it, and followed my own instructions, and they worked. That meant there was something controlling this view (and four others). I stared at the view properties, and then it hit me, hiding at the very bottom "Assigned Scope Box"!

Now I'm glad that someone on the team was smart enough to use a scope box to control view extents, and attempt to rotate the view 90 degrees. The problem is, when they rotated the scope box, they obviously snapped to something, rather then typing in the desired rotation angle! Worse, you cannot snap to, or otherwise determine the rotation of a scope box. The only solution in this case was to create a new scope box and re-assign the views to the new box.

I'm actually a little disappointed in myself that it took me as long as it did to find the scope box issue, but at least I did finally narrow it down. A good lesson in how to control views, but also a good lesson in troubleshooting, don't rule anything else, and look carefully at properties in Revit, the answer is usually there!