To view the entire course, click here:
In this course, Brian DeYoung from SOM will show you how to work with custom families and parameters in Revit 2016.
When you create the second tag with those three same parameters but we’re going to do it in a slightly different way. So I’m going to open up a new family under Annotations and go to Room Tag. And this time, instead of just putting it all into one label, I’m going to separate it out as three separate labels. This is going to provide much more flexibility. So I clicked Label and it’s asking for an insertion point. So I’m just going to go ahead and randomly click some place. And we’ll add name. And then because we’re just doing one at a time, that’s all is required. There’s no break because there’s no other line. It’s just name. And if I zoom in real close, there it is right there. So I can then drag this down and I can center it, sort of eyeballing it. Like so.
And then we’re going to go back to Create and another label. And then this one is going to be for Number, and Ok. I’m just going to leave it there for now. Go back to Create, Label, and this one is Area. So now there are three separate items. And because they are three separate items, it allows me to do things to them that don’t apply to all of them. So for example, Name. I want to have the name be in bold and then the Number and the Area to not be bold. So what I’m going to do is click on Name, say Edit Type. I’m going to duplicate this because I don’t want to overwrite it. I just want to duplicate it. And I’m going to call it one-eighth bold. And then I select Bold right here, click Ok. And now, the Name is in bold but the other two are just regular texts.
And then I’m going to move the Number down into place. Now when you have separate labels like these, the labels themselves will snap to each other. So you can see that it sort of snaps to the name. So you can get these things to align onto themselves but they won’t unfortunately snap to the reference plane and there it’s snapping to the other two, the Name and the Number. So now we have those three.
Now it’s really just a matter of graphics and how you want these things to look. So it’s just shifting the Name around. Let’s move the Area up a little bit to get it closer. And right about there is good. And let’s move Area down slightly. Now in most ring tags that I’ve seen that look like this, there’s typically a box, like a visible box that goes around the number. So if you want to do any graphic like that, you’re going to go to Create and just use lines. But up here, you have different subcategories. So I’m going to click on Room Tags, and that’s the subcategory. And I’m just going to draw a rectangle around the number like that. But now I have to define the size and the shape and the position of that rectangle.
So what I’m going to do is it’s not really necessary to lock it down with parameters and all that sort of thing. You can just set this with these temporary dimensions. So I can go in here and I can change that and can make that one-eighth and say, “Look, looks pretty good.” And so we’ll do one-eighth on this side. Just typing that in. So now that box is centered that way and then let’s check the height, let’s see what the height is. So we’ll change this number to, I like to have nice round fractions. That’s too big so let’s go down to a quarter. That’s starting to look better.
Now because this is a label and because it’s sort of fixed, you don’t really have worry about locking the size of that box down. It will just stay that size. You don’t really have to worry about it. But what I do want to do is massage this a little bit. So let’s move this up. I’m just highlighting the box and the Number label, and just sliding that up a little bit. And then the Area. I’m just using the nudge command. So the up and the down arrows nudge these things.
And then, once you get it graphically looking the way that you want it to be, one other thing to check is the size of the boxes, of course, making sure that the Name box is appropriate length. The Number will pull that in. This is also a little trick of how you can make sure that the number is actually centered on the box. As you pull this in and see how the box is hanging out on this side but it’s lined up on this side. So that tells me that the number is not actually centered within that box, so then I use the nudge tool to slide it over.
And then if I know that the number is now in the middle, then I can click on the Name, slide that over and it should snap to the new position of the Number and slide that over, and there it goes. It’s very faint blue dashed line that appears to tell you that you’re snapped. And so now all off those…shrink that box a little bit. Now all three of those three labels are lined up to one another.
Source