Line Systems Assembly Tools

Why shop drawings in Revit took hundreds of hours

Revit's Assemblies are the right feature for documenting a partition wall unit, and almost nobody uses them. Setting one up by hand (the assembly, its views, its dimensions, its sheet) takes long enough that people give up and draw it manually instead. So the model holds the geometry, and the workshop drawings get made a second time, from scratch. Tedious placing of dimensions and tags, and updating them was taking hundreds of hours.

Custom Revit tools for assemblies and shop drawings

Five tools, each removing a step that was being done by hand a hundred times a project:

• Create Assembly: curtain walls in, a named assembly with its views and sheet out.
• Place Tags: panels, mullions, doors and generic models tagged from chosen types.
• Assembly Dimensions: every assembly view dimensioned to the office's own standard.
• Installation Sheet: the sheets the site crew installs from, built and laid out.
• Update Assemblies: assemblies kept in step as the design changes.

Create Assembly

Click the curtain walls you want. Picked walls turn green; walls already belonging to an assembly show red and cannot be picked, so you can see at a glance what is left to do. Name them by prefix and number, one assembly per wall or several walls together.

Out comes a complete assembly: the whole unit gathered rather than the top layer of it, with its 3D, plan and section views created from the office's own view templates, and section markers pointing at the real doors and panels. The sheet too, if you want it.

Place Tags

Tags the elements inside selected assembly views (panels, mullions, doors and generic models), each from its own chosen tag type, and says up front which tag families are missing instead of silently tagging nothing.

Assembly Dimensions

The tool that saves the most time. Select the assembly views and each is dimensioned according to what it is (elevation, plan or section) and to the office's own standard: what gets dimensioned, in which style, at what spacing, set once and then driven by how the office authors its own families. Angled units are handled as readily as orthogonal ones.

Installation Sheet

Builds the drawing the crew installs from: a fresh installation elevation for every assembly, packed onto as many sheets as they need, in natural order, inside the usable area of the client's own titleblock. It can be run again as the project grows without disturbing what is already there.

Update Assemblies

Designs change. When panels are edited or added after an assembly was made, this brings the existing assemblies back in step, instead of anyone rebuilding them by hand.