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Michael Wilson/5 min read

Creating Clear and Graphic Site and Campus Plans in Revit

Site Plan Best Practices

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Before we get into the camera views and adding the view template to those views, there's one thing that I want to touch on really quickly here, and that is the graphics of our site plan and...

Before we get into the camera views and adding the view template to those views, there's one thing that I want to touch on really quickly here, and that is the graphics of our site plan and our campus plan. And so we kind of skipped over that when we went through our floor plan and our section views, but there are just a couple of things that I wanted to take a look at that will make this view a little clearer. And so one of the things that is nice to see is that we can kind of tell where the building is going to be at level two so that we're not like putting, you know, a giant tree here knowing that there's going to be an overhang at this point.

And so what we could do is we could adjust our site plan graphics so that we can clearly see where the second floor overhang is sitting. And the best way to do that is going to be to turn on our underlay in our properties here. And so if I were to turn on the level two underlay, you can see it's going to show me the boundary of level two above.

And I have two options here. I can do the line work tool, which is going to be from our modify tab. And it's this kind of odd looking button.

And I honestly just use the keyboard shortcut most of the time, which is LW. And then I can set this to overhead. And then I can use my line work tool to select these lines overhead so that we can identify where those are.

And with this method, we're actually using the model elements above. So you know that they're going to be representative of what is actually above. And so if I go ahead now and then go back to turn off my underlay, I can see that my level two walls are above and I'm even able to select those walls above.

Another thing we can do to kind of just streamline our site plan graphics a little bit is we can actually put a masking region over the floor plan. And when you do something like this, it's really important to consider the impact of creating kind of a manual type of documentation. And the reason I say it like that, because all of this is pretty much manual, but we are controlling it or allowing the computer to control some of it.

But if we do something like create a masking region that follows the outline of the building here, and then the building decides to change somewhere along the line, then it's up to us as the designers here to go back in and make those updates. And so that's kind of the disclaimer here is when you do this, you still have to be responsible for going in because Revit is not going to update this filled region. And so you'll have to make sure that you go in and get this updated.

And so what I do here is I'll take this line and I'll select it and copy it to the clipboard using CTRL+C and finish the sketch. And so now you can see we've got our masking region covering the whole thing, but this line is really wimpy. And even when you use your heaviest line, it's still not going to be good enough.

So then I'll go on top of that with a filled region. And this is the reason we used the copy because then I can do Paste Aligned to Current View and it gives me the option. And then I can use my offset tool, which is keyboard shortcut OF and then I can offset it to make the thickness of the line I want.

And so we'll go with two feet here and then I can offset that entire thing in. And this will allow me to use a solid black filled region type to create a really thick border around the building for my site plan. And this is definitely not a requirement for plans.

It's just another way to create a more graphic look on your floor plans. And what's great is on your site plans. And what's great about this is I can, I can select both the filled region and the masking region here with grabbing the detail items and I can copy this to clipboard and I can paste it onto my campus plan.

So I'm not having to create this twice, you know, and get the same look on both plans here. We'll take a look at these on our drawing sheets to make sure everything looks good. And I can already see that on my campus plan that the crop region is not turned on.

So I want to make sure I turn that on and then bring it down to fit within our sheet here. And so there's our campus plan. And then I'll take a look at our site plan.

And then the only thing I'll do here is I want to go ahead and hide my makeshift topo surface here. And so I use keyboard shortcut E H, which is hide element in view. And then now I've got the site plan that I want within here.

And so a couple of finishing touches, you know, you could add the North arrow. I think we added that to the campus plan already, but it's always good to have those types of things on here and it looks pretty good. Now we can move on to our last couple of steps here, which are going to be to create the view template for our, our 3D views, and then making sure we get the proper revisions on each of the sheets and getting it ready for PDF prints.