Thursday, July 11, 2013

Five Minutes Working with Rotated Views

A common question from people with experience using AutoCAD is, "Does Revit have a UCS too?". There isn't a literal equal tool in Revit, no UCS button. In Revit we manipulate views to make it easier to work with different orientations. This means making some extra views. We can move back and forth between any number of views, as often as necessary. If we don't need them anymore, we can just delete them (thus the notion of a "working view").

There are several ways to manage working with different view orientation:
  1. Turn on and rotate the Workplane, turn on Workplane visibility, Revit will snap architectural elements to the workplane (not effective for MEP elements)
  2. Rotate the crop region of a view (rotation is in the opposite direction to the orientation you need)
  3. Scope Boxes - associate views to a scope box that is rotated by the angle required. The scope box controls the crop region (see 1)
  4. A Callout View can be placed and rotated to generate a view that is oriented to a desired direction


How about a video?



There is another way to rotate a view but it is related to the orientation of the view to the sheet it is place on. Imagine a portrait orientation of a view on a landscape oriented sheet. I've seen this used for overall elevations of tall buildings. It is a property of a View or it's Viewport called: Rotation on Sheet.


Post was inspired by my response to a thread at AUGI.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot for this meaningful information. It's a very basic concept but hell it's difficult to interpret and gather this info together in all resources available!! And when you see everyone recommends to use "Project North" to rotate views it all gets more confusing, as if the overall project was always orthogonal.

Unknown said...

Rotating the viewport seems to work great (except the backward angle seems like broken code somewhere in there)... but I am unable to rotate a Reflected Ceiling Plan Viewport (the rotate button is grayed out). The RCP obviously needs to match the orientation of the rest of the building on the pages. Thanks for any advice!
JP

Steve said...

Yes it is a bit confusing to get used to rotating the opposite direction you think should be required. The boundary is what is rotating but the result is altering the orientation of the building with the appearance of the crop boundary still being rectangular. as if it didn't really change.

You don't mention which version you are using. Using 2015 and changing the shape of the crop boundary so you can see what happens after rotating it might help make sense. The crop region doesn't rotate but the direction of the rotation you use helps Revit determine how to reposition the building in the view.

I find rotating the crop boundary in an RCP view works fine, using 2015.

Anonymous said...

Thank you Steve. I had 2 buildings with different orientation on site plan. You just made my week!
Alberto

Anonymous said...

Hi, have you ever had problems with the rotation of a ceiling grid, due to the rotation of a crop region? The ceiling grid orientation is correct in the un-rotated building layout, but once model is linked and showing in the view on sheet, the ceiling grid mimics the vertical orientation of the view.
Can't seem to find any issues on this. Thank you.
Sylvia

Steve said...

I had some issues years ago but don't recall running into it recently, but then I'm not sure how recent that was either. I suggest you post in one of the user forums and see what sort of response you get there too. Maybe a support request too.

Pinoy CAD+ said...

Is it possible to apply the rotated scope box to the elevation? Section must be parallel to one side of the associated scope box

Steve said...

Pinoy CAD+ - Yes, if you rotate the view into alignment with the Scope Box first.