Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Construction Administration & '08 Dependent Views

As you may know Revit '08 has a new feature called dependent views (See Steve's most recent blog post). I'd been planning to make this post for a couple of weeks, but Steve (as usual) has spurred me to action (though he probably doesn't realize he has that affect on me). The most obvious, and apparently intended use of dependent views is for us poor saps that design and build projects that don't fit on standard sheet sizes (where are those 80" plasma screens in the construction trailers....?) where we need to split plans across multiple sheets. Needless to say you can actually split any type of view accross sheets.
However, quite conviently dependent views gives us the ability to do something we couldn't do before, place a single view on multiple sheets. Where I see this as being particularly helpful is in Construction Administration. Often times we need to issue a revised drawing on a smaller page size, for instance a modified detail. There's no need to re-issue a whole sheet, we just need to issue the detail as a sketch on 11x17 or 8.5x11. With dependent views you can create a child view of the detail and place the child on a sketch sheet, leaving your original detail on its original sheet. This preserves your original callouts for the detail, and means that you don't have to duplicate the detail to have it in two places.
The reason I've focused on details though is that there is one slight catch with dependent & parent views, you can't change the scale of one from the other. All primary and dependent views must share the same scale (which follows with expect Revit behavior). You could not then re-issue a scaled version of a plan or section, unless you placed it on a larger sheet, and scaled the print out of the sheet (you'd have to create a custom viewport title family where you could manually set "Scale"). However, if there were a smaller portion of a revised plan that you wished to issue you could create a dependent view, crop it and place it on a sketch sheet.

I hope this gives you some ideas of things you can do with dependent views, besides boring old matchline. :)

-R

3 comments:

bfre said...

Robert,
Did I hear err read you right when you said that you can split views on multiple sheets? We've got a project with 2 matchlines and 4 quads that is driving us crazy. We just upgraded the project to 2008 from 9.1. Right now we are using callouts from an overall plan to reference to the different quads. This has resulted in an very large browser. Hopefully there is a better way of doing this.
Brian

Unknown said...

Hi Robert.

I am having the same problem you mentioned earlier- I need another version of a plan, section, detail, etc. to issue on a smaller sheet. I like your solution of a dependant view, but how do you keep that dependant view from dropping a new tag on your plans (noting the new sheet number)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.
-Amado

Unknown said...

Hi Robert.

I had the same problem also- needing to issue the same view on a different sheet size- during construction administration. The problem I am having is when I create a dependant view as suggested, I get call out tags on my plans showing the new sheet number.

Is there a way to avoid these new tags?

Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you.
-Amado