Site Measures ,Presentation of Elevations and Snaps

Site Measures

After much pain, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. If there are site dimensions to be measured, get the guy who is going to be drafting to do the site measures.

2. If he thinks 2 hours might do, multiply this time by 3 and tell him you are fine with however it might take.  Never skimp on time for site measures.

3. Do NOT TRY TO FIT A WHOLE HOUSE ON ONE A4 SHEET!  Apologies for the caps, but this cannot be stressed enough.  Make it one room per A4 sheet.(Letter in USA).  The number of times I have been handed illegible microscopic scribbles......&****@@@!

4. Take photos. Lots of them, from as many different angles as you can. In my experience, there is always about 5 views I wish they had taken.

5. If you are doing a string of dimensions, do an overall one to check that they add up to the overall, which means taking a calculator to site. 

Presentation of Elevations

On a recent job, I thought, yippee, let's push the boat out and have shadows on and ambient shading and turn on realistic.  Fine if you have a colour printer, but not if they are printed out, as they come out quite dreary and dark looking.

A better alternative is to leave shadows off and just have ambient shadows.

As the building had board and batten cladding it seemed originally a good idea to have the rendered appearance to show the board and batten.  Turns out a much sharper result is obtained by using surface hatching.  Revit does not have a board and batten hatching, but you can download one of these patterns.

I found one, and a shout out here to Robert Cloward, who posts these for free. Thanks Robert.

Here is the contents of one, to view, just change the file extension to .txt and use the text editor to look at it and maybe vary it's contents: 

;%VERSION=3.0

;%UNITS=INCH

;;

;;

;;     Custom hatch pattern by Robert Cloward

;; December 2007

;;

;;

*B&B-12x1, Batt & Board 12 in board 1 in spaces

;%TYPE=MODEL

90, 0,0, 0,12

90, 1,0, 0,12

This turned out to have 1" wide boards about 12" apart.  Not what I wanted, so I turned the 1 to a 2 and the 12 to an 8.  Then resave the file as a .pat file.

Snaps

I have never taken much notice of these, consequently a lot of my drawings are not terribly accurate. In a bout of Revit frustration I opened up the snap dialog and the source of all my wrong doing became apparent.....ALL SNAPS ARE ON!  In an Autocad world many years ago, I had a routine that turned on a few snaps on and all was reasonably accurately done.  Then I worked at a place where a man had every snap turned on.  Yup, he was a lot faster, but not very accurate.

I see from the dialog box you can turn on a particular snap, say midpoint by typing SM in the middle of the command, so I am going to try setting mine to just endpoints and midpoints and dialling up any others as I go for a while.