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Michael Wilson/5 min read

Creating Placeholder Sheets for Demo Views in Revit: A Step-by-Step Guide

Placeholder Sheet Use Cases

Demolition Plans

Hold space in sheet set for demo plans before they're drafted.

Future Phases

Reserve sheet numbers for phase 2/3 work.

Sheet Index Display

Placeholders appear in sheet index for accurate count.

Convert Later

Replace placeholder with real sheet when ready to draft.

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Optimizing View Setup with Scope Boxes for Consistency in Revit Demo Views. Watch this tutorial to learn the key concepts and techniques.

Now let's go ahead and create the sheets for our demo views. These sheets are already created, so when we go to create the sheets now we're going to be selecting our placeholder sheets. If I go to view, sheet, what I can do is I can pick the ones that I want to use from the list of placeholders that we already created.

So I've got my first floor demolition plan, my second floor demolition plan, and my roof demolition plan that I can choose from. It's also very important to pick the right title block to use here. So I've got the VDCI title block, and I've got the three sheets that I want to create.

I'm going to hit okay, and there we have it. The sheets are created. So the work we did upfront to create those few sheets really paid off just now.

Now we're going to get the views set up so that we can put them on sheets. So the first thing we want to do is determine which scale is appropriate. And sometimes you kind of have a good idea what you think is going to be best, and sometimes you're just guessing.

So what I'll do sometimes is take a look, and the rule of thumb is about eighth inch for overall, and if it looks too small, then we'll go to quarter inch. For this project, we're going to be using quarter inch because it's a pretty small building, and I want to make sure that my demo plans are all set to one-quarter inch equals a foot. I can change that by either being in the view and changing the properties here, or I can simply select the view in the project browser and change the view scale there.

The same result either way. The other thing we'll do is turn on our crop region and make sure the view is cropping, and then I'll go in and I'll crop it down closer to the plan to give me something like this. We've done this a few times on a couple of different projects now, and one thing you may notice is it's a little tedious to have to keep going through and adjusting these, and then it's really difficult to make sure that they're all exactly the same.

So, you know, maybe level one is cut pretty tight, level two is way out here, and when you put it on a sheet, nothing really lines up. One thing we can do to make sure everything looks pretty similar is create what's called a scope box. A scope box is an element that we can place around the building to define this area.

What's great about the scope box is I can assign this region, which is really just this view, to that scope box, and the crop region will shrink or grow to that location. From your View tab, you can go to Scope Box, and I can actually just draw it in, something like this. It's a rectangle, and what you'll see is it's actually a three-dimensional element.

This is my scope box here. We always want to make sure it goes down below a little bit as well, because when we do section and elevation views, it'll use the same extents and it doesn't need to be way too far above like that because it will again, like I said, mess up the section and elevation views. But with the scope box set, we can now go back to, say, my demo level one view, and in the properties, I can find scope box and then I can change it to scope box one, which is the one we just created.

And you'll notice that the crop view is now associated with that. So any changes I make to the scope box will be reflected in that crop view. If I went crazy with it, moved it like that, see it's how it's in the middle of the building, and when you look at my floor plan view, it's now associated with it.

One thing that can be a little disheartening is that it's hard to modify in this plan view because, well, you can't really see it. So I do a lot of work with scope boxes in the 3D view like you saw here. And then I'll even, if I have to, if I'm looking at it here and I go, oh it's just really not right, then what I'll do is I'll disassociate the view by changing scope box back to none, and then I'll come in and I can adjust the scope box and then I can reassociate the view as needed.

So I've made the adjustments, and then I can go back in and set the scope box to the view. So I'll do that for level one, level two, and the roof as well. And what's cool is I can just go right in to these views, level two and roof, and set the scope box and then we're ready to go.

And now we're just one step away from putting everything onto our sheets.