Setting up levels and grids - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, I want to introduce you to levels and grids. Now, levels and grids are what we call datum elements. They're used to provide the reference for other geometry. So any geometry that you build will be associated with a level and possibly with grids. So levels are used for horizontal heights within the building. So honestly, any real level within the building, if you've got a three story building, then you're going to have at least three levels. And then grids are typically used for structure. So it's going to locate where your columns and your beams are as a rule. Now, you're not required to have both of these, but I'm going to quickly show you both here in this video and then we'll jump out to the sample model to see a practical example. So I've got to start a file here that was based on the default multi-discipline template and I want to start off by creating some levels. Now you must work in either an elevation or a section view in order to create levels. You can't do it in a floor plan. So there is a section view right here and I can double click that on the project browser to open it up. Or if you prefer, you can right click it from the floor plan and choose go to view. Now this item and this item are existing levels that are already here in this file. So there's an L1 and an L2. Let's create another one. So we can do that on the architecture tab, on the datum panel using this button right here. Now notice the tool tip that appears, it says level, but then in parentheses it says ll? As an alternative, you can execute many of the commands in Revit using the keyboard instead. So I can either click this button or I could just simply type the letters l + l. Now don't press Enter following that, just type l + l without the Enter key and that would do the same thing. So either way, run the command and then what I'm going to do is start anywhere on screen and click and notice that when you start drawing the level, you can go left or right, but it only runs horizontally, okay? So that's a rule with regard to levels. They must always be parallel to the ground. So I've created the first level there, and I'm going to roll my wheel to zoom in a little and notice that the name that got assigned to that level was L3. And that's simply because the last level that was created in this file was L2, and it just sort of picks up from there. Now notice that if you get nearby the endpoint of an existing level, it will try to snap to it and I'll do that on both ends, and that creates L4. And the purpose of that snapping behavior is because now, you can put your mouse right over that little open circle, wait for the tool tip to say drag the extents of this level, click and drag, and notice that you're not just reshaping L4, but it's also taking L3 along with it as well, okay? So that's one of the behaviors that you get automatically from the levels if you just pay attention as you're drawing them, okay? Now I'm going to come over here to the modify tool and I'm going to click that to cancel the command. You can also double Escape on the keyboard. Notice that here on the floor plans branch, I also got L3 and L4 floor plans. And then under ceiling plans, I got those. And in fact, it even created this structural plans branch here and created those here as well. Now why is that? Well, when you run the level tool, there's a setting on the options bar. There's a setting right here that says make plan view. And when that's checked, that's exactly what you get. Not only do you get the datum, but you also get associated floor plans. If you were to uncheck this and then create another level, notice that I get level five, but it does not create an L5 floor plan in any of those other branches. Now you'll also notice the difference in color. L5 is black and the other levels are blue. So the blue color indicates that they have floor plans associated and the black color indicates that they do not. Now, let's zoom out a little bit here and talk about L2 and L1. Notice that when we look at those, the little open circle there is not at the end point, it's inset a bit, and in fact it insets to this location right here. Now, we talked about what this dash green box was in the previous video. That is something called a scope box. Now in that video, we discussed how the scope box could be used to set the extents of the view itself. Well, here what we're seeing is that there's a different scope box called grids and levels which is setting the extents of the grid elements and the level elements. So the way that this works is, let's say I select this level right here, hold down my Control key, select this one and this one. Even though those do not match the size of L1 and L2, and they don't even match the size of each other right now, if I have those three selected and over here in properties it says levels three, so that's how you know you've got three levels selected, scroll down, locate the scope box property. It currently says none, but if I open up that list, there's some choices and if I choose grids and levels, notice that those levels will now match the extents of the original ones. And more importantly, if we select this scope box and we modify it, it will change the shape of all associated levels. So that is optional. You're not required to do that, but it can be a nice way to control the extents of all of those elements. So those are level elements and you primarily create levels to control which floor plans you have, but also geometry gets placed at whichever level you happen to be working on. What about grids? Well, let me open up one of these floor plans. I'll just go back to the L1 architectural, the one we started with. And you create grids in much the same way, except that they just run vertically instead of horizontally. So here's the button on the architecture tab. The keyboard shortcut is g + r and it works kind of the same way. Pick a start point, drag it, pick an end point. If I zoom in, notice that the default name for that grid is grid number one. So I could continue in that fashion, line them up the same way I did with the levels and I could create grids two and grid three. If you change direction, it will keep going at four. So it's important that you click right on the name and change it here, I'll do capital A, because if you don't, then the next one would be grid five. But if you do, then the next one is grid B. So with a little bit of strategy, you can control the way that numbering occurs and save yourself the effort of having to renumber them all later. When you're done, you can click the modify tool and cancel, select any one of these, the open circle at the end will adjust the length of any that are associated with it, or optionally, you can select many of these and I'm just holding my Control key down, grids five and you could assign them all to the same scope box and they will respond the same way that the levels did. When I go back to the section, it is cutting through grids one, two, and three. So you see those reflected in this view as well. Another way to visualize this is to simply go to the 3D view and notice that levels are a horizontal plane parallel to the ground and grids are a vertical plane standing upright. And that's a good way to visualize what these elements actually are. Now, in earlier videos, we looked at the out of the box sample model. So what I'd like to leave you with is I'd like to reopen that model now and show you the grids and levels that are set up in that file as a good example of how you might configure some of these in a real project. So I'm going to go to file and choose close, and I don't need to save this file. This one was just for practice. And then if the architectural model is right here in your home screen, you can click it and reopen it that way. If not, go to the file menu, hover over open, slide over to sample files, and then open it from that location. You want Snowdon Towers Architectural. Either way, when it opens up, it's going to open to a sheet view and we will need to open either a elevation or a section to work on the levels or a floor plan to work on the grids. So I'm going to start with a floor plan here, L1, and then zoom in a little bit. And you can see grids one, two, all the way over to grid nine here. Notice that grid eight is parallel to all the others, but grid nine follows a different angle. So the grids can go at any angle that they need to. And in this case, there's an angled wall there on the end so grid nine follows that angled wall. The lettered grids go in the opposite direction here. You can also see that it's not necessary to use just letters or just numbers. You can combine letters and numbers and create intermediate grids, like this B.1 here. So those are good examples of things that are very typically done in real projects. If we open up one of the elevations, so I'll scroll down and I'll locate the south building elevation. Here, you'll be able to see the levels in this project. And over here on the left hand side is probably the best way to see it. Now there's a parking level down here. Level one is actually following the slope of the road so there's more than one of those. So there's a lower level one and an upper. There's a mezzanine here. There's a level two, level three, level four, all the way up to different roof levels at the top. So there's a roof one, a roof two and even a roof three at the top of the stairwells. There are also some levels for parapets. Notice that the parapet levels do not have floor plans. So they are there just simply marking where the parapet is. The actual roof is here and the parapet is a distance above that. So I encourage you to explore further in this file or in the previous file if you want to keep creating on your own. But just get a little bit more comfortable with using both the level and grid tools and hopefully this sample file gives you a good example of how you might use those in practice.