Revitize a CAD Titleblock

K. In this video, we're going to be Revitizing a CAD title block. So first, let's take a look and review a couple of properties of how Revit thinks about title blocks. So here we are. We're in Proj x.

We have the Rev X title block which is also in the template. And so first thing to know about Revit title blocks is that the information on a title block is going to be a mix of dumb text and labels that actually read a parameter. So for example, m one zero one, this is text that is it's in the family, it's in the title block family and it's reading the parameter sheet number. Here we go, sheet number. So if I were to change this to something else, it would change there as well.

Same for author. Right? So I can type in, you know, who checked by, who checked this and it will update it there. So these are parameters and these is this is just dumb text. Now also, there are some other parameters that are driven by not sheet specific parameters, but by project information parameters.

So things like client name, address, project name, project status, that sort of thing, they're controlled in manage project information and then here. So for example, if I change this to project project alpha, it would update that there. So that's what that's reading. Another thing to note in particular with this title block, but also you might run across this with other title blocks, Is that if I if I select this title block, you can see that there are two types. There's also different size, but there's two types.

And so if I click the standard type, change it over to the standard, you can see more lines. And so all that is is in the family. These lines exist in both types, but there's a visibility parameter that controls some of these lines and it toggles them off based on which type it is. In this particular family, the name of the parameter is called busy lines. Right? And so standard, it's checked. Minimalist, it's unchecked. And so that's just something to watch out for. And just to know that you can get kind of creative if you want a few different options for the for your title blocks. Okay.

So now that we've understood a little bit about how Revit thinks about title blocks, let's let's get going. And I just gonna note, we're gonna pull in an arc e one, so a 30 by 42 title block. I'm gonna use our arc d title block because I wanna show you how to create a title block regardless of what size. So even if you need a different size. So the easiest way to to revitize this title block is to reuse is to recycle an existing title block and we're gonna recycle this ArcD title block to make an ArcE one title block.

So select the title block, say edit family. Very first thing you wanna do is do a save as that you don't write over that existing title block. So I'm gonna go to projects, families, and I'm gonna call this title block example arc e one and that would be 30 by 42. Shoot. Goodness.

I hit a thing. Title block example, Arc e one thirty by 42. There we go. Alright. First thing to do is to for our new title block, don't want those those those two different options. We don't want the visibility parameters. So I'm gonna come in here well, let me let me show. So this line for example, the visibility is controlled by the parameter busy line. So that's what's going on there. So I'm gonna go to the family types button and I don't need this parameter so I'm going to delete it.

It's saying it's being used and that's fine. And then we've got these two different types. I don't need both of them, I just need one. So I'm gonna delete one of them. This And one I'm gonna rename and I'm gonna make sure that's renamed properly. So ArcE130By42 and that's all that I need to say there. Okay. But I've still got some lines that they're they're turned off. So I'm going to select everything. I'm going to filter for just the lines.

And I'm gonna click this until it's checked. So now all my lines are set to visible. Okay. We're ready to pull in the DWG title block. So just come to insert tab, import CAD, and go find where your CAD title block is, and pull it in.

Okay. So this title block has come in here and it would it would be convenient to our future selves if when we loaded this new title block, it came in in a location that is creates the least amount of work for us. And for us that's going to be if we move the lower right hand corner to match where the old title blocks lower right hand corner is. Since we're so close here, Revit might not let us easily maybe it will. Yeah.

See, oops, it's pinned. I need to unpin it first. So select that. See it's pinned, I just click it to unpin it. Move command, gonna move it there, and it's a little low so I'm gonna use the align command to get those lined up so that the that's exactly aligned.

Okay. So all this means is that when I when I'm done here and I push this into my project, it should come in it it just gonna it just gonna look like it grew in this direction which will be easier for me. So then what I like to do is I like to select all the elements of my old title block and just move them over to the right. And then I can start sort of using these elements to trace over this CAD title block. Something to note is that you might have a question, well how do I tell Revit what size the title block is?

Revit just looks at what the size of the essentially the outer border is. So this is my ArcD title block, and if I put a dimension line on that, you can see it's saying it's three foot by two two foot, that's Art D. And this one it should be three foot six by two foot six. Now if you're using CAD title blocks, the outer border of it may or may not be exactly the size of the title block size that you want to use. So you need to check this and if it's not, if it's off by a little bit, then you need to make sure you need to adjust the outside border so that it is exactly the size that you want.

So let's say if this was off by a little bit, even a little bit, an eighth of an inch, some other random dimension is more likely, keep these two border lines where they are and adjust this line and or this line to make it exactly the size for this title block that you need because this is how Revit understands what size title block you're using. This one happens to be perfectly right, so I'm going to leave it the way it is. Okay. So now that we've got the size correct, we've got the location correct, we can start tracing over. And so I can just use the align tool for a lot of this to start aligning the lines.

That's already aligned. There we go. Now we just do the inside one. Align. Align. Don't bother locking anything. That's not necessary. For some reason this happened, I forget why. Use the trim command to trim those together. Okay. I'll just bring this over a little a little bit closer. Okay. And so remember we talked about the text, some of these being parameters and some of these being dumb text. So checked by, this is just text. And you can see like if you wanted this to be a different size, the text size font, this is where you would control that.

This is what Revit calls a label. So tag label and if I were to edit the type here, same, it's just the controls for the font, the size, the spacing, all that sort of thing. But to control what parameter it's pointing at, I click edit next to label. Edit label, it's looking for the parameter which is an embedded Revit parameter called check by. That's what I want for this one, so I'm gonna leave it alone.

I'll click on this one, label it's reading sheet number. Look at this one, it's reading the sheet name. So you can now understand how Revit is looking at these, and you can just kind of reuse the correct ones. This is why we quote unquote trace over because it saves us the work from having to create labels and point them in the right direction. We can just do this.

Date drawn by project number. Right? But then of course we wanna check and make sure that the font size is correct or close because sometimes if you're pulling in CAD, they might be using some different font styles, they might not line up well with how Revit renders text. So getting close in my opinion is is good enough in terms of the font and also in terms of the the size. So this is looking pretty good.

Again, you can get as fussy as you want. I'm not gonna make you sit through watching me get fussy, but again if you wanted this to be a different size, you can just, you know, pick choose different of the options. And if none of the options are what you want, you can come in here and say edit type, duplicate, create a different type, and then change the text size or the font to be whatever you need. Okay. So we've got those.

Now we pull over the dumb text, check by, drawn by date, project number, sheet. Now this one this one this is clearly a very different font size. So I'm gonna look for what the correct one nope. Yeah. That's close enough for me. Horizontal align center. Yep. That looks good. Okay. I'm gonna put that there.

Date, I'll put that there. Sheet name, obviously that's also clearly different. But I think that having this text be so big, I think this is half yeah. It's half inch. I don't think that's I don't think that's a good idea because we have sheet names that are much longer than would fit well in this area. So I'm actually gonna make an executive decision and make it not that yeah. Three eights. I think three eights will work a lot better there. Okay. Project name.

Pull this one over. Let's render it center. And then notice if I left this here like this, and we had a long name, it would run over. So I wanna wanna make sure to get that inside the bounds of the box that I'm gonna have in there so it doesn't run out. And then if we notice vertical align is set to top, that means that if this needs two lines to fit the text, it's going to go like that, which which would be bad obviously.

So if I change the vertical align to bottom and I go like this, it's gonna go up which is less objectionable. That's what I'm gonna go with. Now here's a good one. This title block wants owner. And this old title block didn't have owner. So that's alright. We're just gonna copy this and I'm gonna hold down control and click and drag. So I've got a duplicate that's pointing at project name. And I just come to edit label and I take out project name, and Revit doesn't use the word owner, it uses the word client name. That's the that's the name of the parameter that drives that.

So I've got that there. We'll come back to that in a second. Okay. So now I've got this. This can just be text. Some architects like to get fancy and these are all parameters that they custom add in. We're just going to add text, and I'm not gonna make you sit through watching me, you know, type in all this stuff. So I'm just gonna say, consultant, address, phone, etcetera. You get the gist there. Then we'll we'll go with the the image, so you can also import images.

Get as high resolution resolution as you can of what you need. You've got your own logo. So that's just as simple as insert, import image, and this was the image just it just came out with this title block. Obviously, you'd use whichever image you had. It will typically come in at some weird size, easy enough to scale down until it does what you want it to do. Get it nice and aligned. Okay. So that's easy. You could put text in there, won't make you sit through that. I don't need to see that or that or any of that stuff.

Don't use those. Okay. So the last thing is the revision schedule. Revit has a smart revision schedule, which if you double click into it you can see what it's doing, you can modify things for this title block. This is exactly what we need, so I'm just gonna drag it over.

I'm just gonna drag it over and then align the columns to match. K. And then I don't don't bother filling in the grid lines here because as this populates, Revit will Revit will fill it in. Or if you need, you can add it. So I'll just I'll just typically just put the outline around it.

That's kind of my preferred way of doing it. Okay. So we've got all of the text and labels and everything done to our satisfaction. We just have a few more of these little lines to do, and again align tool is your friend. Get this done.

Something like that. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna get too crazy with being exact here because your time is valuable and you don't need to watch me click a bunch of lines. Just get this in here so you can get the gist. Let's call that. Like that.

Oh, and scale, I meant to mention, I don't like I'll get that performed. I don't like adding scale here. Revit wants to handle that in the view title generally, so I don't like adding scale. So if I see this in a CAD title block, I just ignore it. Okay. We've got one more line here. This one. Create line. Put her there. And here's the category of line title blocks. It gives you a few others. You can you can create more line types if you want, manage additional settings, line styles. So these are your options. You could create new ones. I recommend just keeping it basic, sticking with what they've already got there.

Okay. We've got our title block. We are ready to push it into the project. So I'm going to say we're we're ready to test it, see how it looks. So I'm gonna say load into project and close. We don't we don't need to make changes because I'm not trying to save this out at the moment. I'm just gonna say no. Probably usually takes you back to some weird view that you don't wanna be on, but go ahead and click that places it in the project that makes sure it gets placed in the project. I'm going to delete it and then I'm gonna come over to view. Let's go 1st Floor plan.

Gonna click this existing title block and change it over to my example one, the one that I've Revitized. And that looks pretty good. I'm realizing that I forgot to remove the the CAD the CAD link that I traced over. So I'm I need to go do that. I'm gonna go back into edit family, and I'm just gonna select that CAD background and delete. Remove it. Load. Write existing version. There we go. So right.

Checking this out. And I'm noticing here, look, this I have some I have some complaints to lodge with this title block. The font for some of these, the font is too big to fit in the box they had available for the modern long sheet names that we like to have and even I'm worried about this. So I'm gonna make a decision. I'm just gonna change this because it's dumb enough for that to be that big. So three sixteenths, make quarter. Yeah. Yeah. I'll go with a quarter. Quarter of an inch for now.

Let's see. Yeah. That's better. That might be I think I wanted that centered. Don't don't be afraid to go back and forth a few times and just get it looking the way you want. So yeah. Vertical align. It was vertical align top. I'm gonna vertical align middle, and then I'm actually gonna put this try to put this more in the actual center of that box there. Yeah. That looks pretty close. Load in a project and close. Yeah. It looks much better. Okay.

So make any final tweaks you wanna make to it. Make it look good, be happy with it. And then once you're ready to replace all the sheets in your project, let's go to another one here. So all the rest of the sheets in this project are still the old title block. I'm just gonna select that title block, right click, say select all instances in entire project, and you can see here I've now got 46 title blocks selected.

I'm just gonna change them all over to this one. So if I were just click on any random one, you know, it's on my it's on this new title block that I just Revitize. Okay. And so final thing, if I'm like, okay, I Revitize this. This is great, but it's not just for this project.

Maybe you're Revitizing your firm standard title block, maybe you're gonna have more projects with this client, so you wanna save out this title block. Go back in to edit family, and you can just do a file save as family to your standards folder somewhere and save a copy of it so that you can easily use it. And if you've got your template and you want this in your template because it's your firm standard, go ahead and push it into that. Go ahead and push it into your template wherever you need it. But so that is that is pretty much that. That is how to Revitize a CAD title block.