"......I didn't know that!" or Managing Views more effectively in Revit

By Dennis Collin 

During training Revit Essentials I always stress the importance of naming views logically and consistently and keep the Project Browser organised and controlled using filters, view templates and sorting parameters.

If working on a larger project, say, a University Campus it is quite likely that you will be unable to fit an entire building onto a sheet at certain scales. This obviously can be quite a challenge to a new Revit user however help is at hand with the Duplicate View as Dependent option. This creates a tree like structure within the Project Browser where you have a 'Parent View' and a number of 'Child' or Dependent Views. The purpose of this function therefore is by configuring display controls, like Filters, VG Overrides, LOD (Level of detail) changes. Will apply to the appropriate dependent views and vice-versa!

Furthermore views can be cropped using the crop region tool and then the extent of overlap can be managed with the parent view which is often not placed on sheets and is just used for coordination and model update purposes.

This is great until you realise that if the building was to have several stories a dozen floors or more, can result in a lot of effort duplicating views, arranging crop regions consistently and so on. Okay, one may reason we would have exactly the same challenge in AutoCAD, but actually Revit has an answer to this point too.

It is the Apply Dependent View configuration. This tool lets you propagate a dependency arrangement of a  view to other views of a parallel aspect and scale. If none of the view matches an error message about no valid views is displayed.

This then gives us repeated split view arrangements consistently across all floors like the image below. All that is left is to name the views in which copy and paste is always useful!