From the course: Revit Architecture: Family Editor (Imperial and Metric)

Exploring annotation families - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit Architecture: Family Editor (Imperial and Metric)

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Exploring annotation families

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- [Instructor] Architectural drawings contain all kinds of graphics and standard symbols that get used to convey certain types of design intent. And most of these symbols in Revit are families that we can actually customize and modify. Now in this case, I'm using all out of the box symbols here. I've got some standard door and window and room tags, I've got an align symbol, a center line symbol and a north arrow. Just to give you a cross-section of some of the different types of annotations we can create. Now let's make sure we're clear on what we mean by annotation families here. One of the most important aspects of annotation families is that they are view specific. So here I am in a floor plan called Level One, but if I were to right click that view, go over here to duplicate, there's a few different options. Well, if I were to just duplicate the view I would only get the model geometry, whereas duplicated with detailing would actually copy all of those annotations. So if I do that first option, notice how I get a blank view without any of the annotations. So that's what we mean by annotation families in Revit, these are view specific elements that can only exist in the view that you actually place them in. I'm going to go ahead and close this new view that I just created and return to the original one here. I also mentioned that these are all out of the box symbols. Now they all kind of are stored in the same general location so if you were to load in a new one, so for example, if I went to annotate and came over here to the symbol tool on the far right, here I will have some choices available to me from the ones that are already loaded in this project but if I come over here and click load family, most of the annotation symbols are stored in this annotations folder. If you're working in Imperial, it'll be the US Imperial folder and then annotations and you'll see several items here. If you're working in Metric, it'll be a similar folder structure, US Metric and then annotations. If you're working in a version of Revit that's a non-US installation, you might have to search through a slightly different folder structure but you should find something similar. In this case, all of these symbols are stored in that folder and you could load in additional ones if you needed to. If the symbol you want is not available, then we can of course create our own custom symbols in the Family Editor and we'll be doing a few examples of that in the coming videos. Lets talk about some of the key features of annotation families. They can of course contain graphics and you're seeing examples of that in all of the various tags like the window tag, the door tag, and the room tag, and of course in this north arrow. Notice that the north arrow only contains graphics, it's just lines and circles, there's no text at all in that case. You could certainly could create a north arrow with the letter N if you wanted to, or the word north, but that would be up to you. In the case of the room tag, or this align symbol, or this center line symbol, all of those contain text. But there's actually two different kinds of text that can be contained in an annotation family. In the case of the center line symbol, the letters C and L are static text. We cannot edit those in any way, so if I was to select this center line symbol there are no properties here, and if I click edit type there are no properties here other than the possibility of doing a leader arrow head. There's no way for me to modify those letters other than going to edit family and changing it in the Family Editor, which would of course update all of them. Now in the case of the align symbol, or the other tags that are on screen, those also contain text but it's a little bit different. Notice I can click right on the word align here and it actually becomes editable text. If I were to actually make a change here, it would warn me that you are about to change multiple elements and I'm going to say no in this case, and that's because if I were to go to edit type on this symbol, the label in this case is using the word align and that's actually a type property. If you needed another label, what you'd really want to do is duplicate that type, rename it and then edit it there. But notice that label is what we would actually be modifying. Room tags, door tags, window tags, those have labels as well, so if I select this room tag here and I go to edit family notice that there are several pieces of text here on the screen. I'm going to select the one that's called room name and come over here to the properties pallet and click the edit button next to the label. A label is just a piece of text in the family that is editable. Now in the case of a tag family, it actually is pointing to some property in the host object. So in this case, the label is pointing to the room name value of the room element that it's hosted to but there are several other properties that it could point to as well and it would be up to you if you wanted to make a custom version of this tag and have it point to other values. If you needed static text in this room tag as well, then you would simply use the text command within this family and that's how the center line symbol was created. I'm going to close this family and there's no need to save it so I'm going to click no here, but that gives you some idea of the kinds of elements that can be contained in annotation families. They're really quite simple. They can contain graphics like lines and circles, they can contain static text like the center line, or they can have labels which are either associated to a host object in the case of tags, or in the case of a generic annotation the label is just a customized label that you can type in anything that you like.

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