Creating a site plan

00:04

After completing this lesson, you will be able to understand site plans, set view properties, and override visibility/graphics.

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The objective domains covered are: 4.1b, view properties and 4.1c, visibility/graphic overrides.

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A site plan can be used to show the true orientation of a structure relative to true north.

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When working with projects, generally you will work in the building orientated to the project north.

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The shared coordinates will be acquired from the Revit site file that contains the topography, the survey data, and other relevant civil structures.

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Go ahead and open up the model 028-Creating a site plan.

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The model opens up in a structural plan 00-Ground Floor.

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Our first task to create a site plane is to duplicate the ground floor plan.

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In the Project Browser, right mouse click over ground floor and then select Duplicate View, Duplicate.

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You'll now notice that we have a copy of the ground floor plan. Let's go ahead and rename this copy.

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So once again, right mouse click over 00-Ground Floor Copy 1 and select Rename.

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Here, we'll name this 00-Site plan.

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Ok, so our view is now copied.

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To ensure that we capture all of the vertical extents of the building structure,

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we will edit the view range to look all the way up and all the way down, and not cut the plane.

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To do this, in the Properties palette, select Edit View Range.

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In the View Range dialog box, we'll set the Primary Range, top to unlimited.

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We'll set our cut plane to something higher than the building structure.

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So in this case if we use perhaps 10,000 feet, that will be perfect.

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And for the bottom range again, we'll set this Unlimited.

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Now of course here, we'll have to match this with our view depth and that would also be set to Unlimited.

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Go ahead and select "OK".

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So you can now see that we're seeing the foot extents of the building, both up and down.

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Next, we use visibility/graphics to remove the unnecessary structured elements that are displaying in our current plan.

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To do this, select the View ribbon, and then select Visibility/Graphics.

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In the Visibility Graphic dialog box, note that model categories is the active tab.

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Here, we'll select all of the elements in this active tab.

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We'll uncheck all of the elements.

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And here we just want to display floors.

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Now if we expand the subcategories of floors, you'll notice also we're shown the things such as hidden lines, interior edges, slab edges, and so on.

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What I really want here is the boundary of the floor, so we can remove all of the subcategories here.

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Now also, we only want to see grids from the Annotation Categories tab.

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So let's select Annotation Categories.

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Once again here, we can select all of the categories in this tab,

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uncheck all of the categories, locate grids and ensure that just the grids are displaying.

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We can then go ahead and select "OK".

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You can see here we have a much cleaner structural plan.

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Next, we orientate the site plan, so we go to our true north position.

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By default, all of the plans in Revit are set to project north for the orientation.

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In the Properties palette here, you'll notice we have Orientation and we also have Project North set.

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However, the exception is for a site plan.

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So I'm now going to set the orientation from Project North to True North, and you'll now see the plane rotates.

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Also notice because of our crop region, we have some elements that are now out of the view.

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On the View control toolbar, select Show Crop Region.

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And we'll use the crop boundary control grips here to set the crop boundary so we can see the full view.

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Once we've done this, we can then hide the crop region.

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We now need to place down a symbol to document True North position.

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To do this, select the Annotate ribbon, and here we're going to go ahead and use a symbol.

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However, you may remember in a previous step, we used visibility/graphics to remove all of the annotation categories other than grids.

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What's going to now happen is this.

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When I select Symbol, you'll see in the Properties palette, in the Type Selector, we have our True North symbol,

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but note I can't see this on the cursor.

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If I go ahead and place this down, I would also get a warning.

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So the warning is stating that none of the elements that we've just created are visible in this view.

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A quick way of finding this element and then selecting it visible is to use reveal hidden elements.

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So on the View control tool bar, select Reveal Hidden Elements, you'll now notice you can see our North Arrow.

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Select the North Arrow on the ribbon, select Unhide category.

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And now we can simply Toggle the Reveal Hidden Elements Mode off.

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And there's our North Arrow displayed.

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Finally, we'll place down some spot coordinates to document corners of our building slab.

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Once again on the Annotate ribbon, you'll note we have spot coordinates.

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We can then zoom up to the corner of a building slab and we can place down our element coordinate.

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Now again here, you'll notice that this is switched off, so we can go back to Reveal Hidden Elements, select our spot coordinate,

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on High Category, Toggle Reveal Hidden Elements Mode.

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Then, we can go ahead and continue to place down some spot coordinates.

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Ok, so there's your site plan created.