How to Create Grids and Customize Grid Heads in Revit for Existing Phase Modeling

Now before we start doing anything on this video, and really any time you're modeling on the existing phase, what you really want to do is make sure you are in the correct view. Now none of this is end-of-the-world stuff, you can always go back and adjust it, but it's just so much easier if you make sure that you're working in the correct phase and on the correct view, because then you don't have to go back and make some changes or worry about losing or missing information. So you always want to check which view you're working in, and in our case we want to be in this Existing Level One.

So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create our grids. And so if I look at my background here, you can see I actually have grids that I can work from, and that's awesome because it saves us a step. If I go to my 'Architecture' tab, 'Grid, ' I can create grids, and you can see these ones have kind of a hexagonal bubble, and we can use that as well.

But it's a pretty simple process, we could either draw them manually like I am here, or we can use the 'Pick Lines, ' and I can go through and I can pick the lines, and I have a feeling I'm going to know which one you guys are going to prefer to do, because that 'Pick Lines' is pretty rapid and it's really hard to make a mistake when you're doing that. The one thing I would caution is the 'Pick Lines' tool is active until you hit escape a couple times, so if you are going through and using it, you do want to be cautious of where you're clicking because you might just click many extra grids that you don't need in your project. I'll continue on with grids A, B, and C here, but as you remember from some of our previous lessons, when I click on to create grid line A, it's going to be five because the last one we created was four, so I want to go ahead before I continue on and change this one to A, and then I can just use a 'Create Similar' to create the next ones and using that 'Pick Lines' option again.

Now I have grids one through four and A, B, and C, but they're set up with the 'Circle, ' and we want to go ahead and use that hexagonal type. If I wanted to do that, I can select my grid, and you can see this one is called ¼″ Bubble, and it's a matter of changing this symbol from Grid Head—Circle to the one that you want to use. You can see we have loaded into our project Grid Head—Circle and Grid Head—No Bubble, and so we'll want to load in one that works for our purposes here, and to do that we can load in from our dataset that was provided.

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We go to 'Insert, ' 'Load Family, ' and it is just a family that we have. You can go to the BIM 301 and then Revit families, and then we have Grid Head—Hexagon. You can always create these too.

I can open this up, and we'll take a look at it, and essentially it's just a family that we create by drawing the geometry that you want, and so it's nothing special. It's really just taking one of the ones that was already created, in our case the circle, and then drawing the line work to create the shape we want. If you have a different standard or you want to use something else, you can definitely create that for your projects.

So I'll close out of that, and so now we just have to adjust this type, and so if I were to select one of them, I want to do 'Edit Type, ' and then because we're creating a new one, we want to duplicate because we don't want to override the one that's already in our project. We can call it ¼″ Hexagon because it's going to be the same size, and then we'll just rename it Hexagon. Now you can see it says Grid Head—Circle here because we loaded in the hexagon.

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We just have to change it to Grid Head—Hexagon and hit OK, and you'll notice that the first one has been revised, and I just have to change the rest of the types, and so what I'll do here is instead of trying to select all those, I'll just pick one, and I can do right-click, 'Select All Instances, ' and I'll just say in entire project, and it'll pick all of the other grids, and then I can change the type to ¼″ Hexagon, and now we have them all set up. I do see that I am a little bit out of alignment here with this one, so I will adjust that because I do want them to all line up nicely, and they do now, and it looks good. So there's our grids.

Next video we're going to take a look at the levels.