Revit Tip: Dependent Views

Dependent Views

I don’t know when this feature became available, but it was sometime between 9.1 and 2009, 2008 maybe? Next time you need to break up a plan into multiple callouts why don’t you try this little technique.

Most of us create an overall view and then do double or triple duty and have to tag, annotate, and dimensions all of those callout views. This can be a time consuming task, especially when you need to switch back and forth to make sure all your areas are covered, also a risky situation if you don’t cover everything. Instead let’s Duplicate with Detailing our overall plan first. Leave that overall plan at 1/16” scale.

What’s that other option?? Just hold on, we will get there.

Now we are going to change this new plan to our blow-up scale of 1/8” and start tagging and dimensioning the entire building. Name it something like “Overall Plan – Annotations.”

Yes, dimension everything and tag everything here. Once. Just once and you are done. No more guess work to see if everything is covered. Why? Keep reading to see the great benefit of doing it this way.

Now that your plan is complete, let’s break-up that huge plan. Wait don’t use that Callout button or that Duplicate with Detailing feature again!! We are going to use that Duplicate as a Dependent option on our annotation plan. Start with one. Now resize your crop region on this plan to an appropriate sheet sized plan.

You should notice the new green annotation crop region. This will allow you to crop anything that is in the overall annotation plan out of this one that you don’t want shown. If you switch back to your main plan, you can see where all your Dependent Views are being cropped at.

Do this as many times as necessary to finish documenting your plans. Now you have created one plan that will update all the others and vice versa. This includes dimensions and text and tags and any other annotation that we normally have to copy from sheet to sheet.

Now, you can go back and put callouts on your original overall plan that reference the new specific Dependent Views. Just make sure to hit the checkbox for Reference other view.