How Quality Survives the Last Week: Aligning Plans Across Sheets in Revit
As a structural engineer, I’ve made drawings in my career. That’s what engineers do, so other people can build stuff.
These days, in BIM roles, I set others up to do theirs well.
And whether you’re making drawings or managing them, the time dedicated to drawing production is always the same: the last week.
The small details go first
Asking for quality in a window that short comes at a price, and that price rarely gets paid. The small details go first.
One of them: plans aligned in the same place across the entire project.
Flip through a set where every plan sits in exactly the same position on every sheet, and the building stays still while you move between levels, sectors and disciplines. Flip through one where it doesn’t, and the drawings jump around from sheet to sheet. It’s the kind of detail that separates a good set from an average one.
Three ways I tried to get there in Revit
Over the years, I tried three approaches:
- Measuring each view from the paper edge. Slow and imprecise.
- Guide grids. Better, but clunky and still slow.
- Guide lines (a cross) in the title block to transfer positions between sheets and projects. Faster, but not fast enough.
All three work on a small set. None of them survive hundreds of sheets and a deadline.
Then came another data center
This time with hundreds of megabytes and megawatts. The tightest deadlines, and a client with high standards.
Doing it manually on hundreds of sheets was not an option, so I built a set of add-ins to do it for us.
Building an add-in sounded simple. It’s what we do. Until we fell down Revit’s rabbit hole of view, viewport and sheet coordinates, and had to invent a few things along the way.
From internal tools to Via BIM Tools
What started as internal tools is now available to everyone as part of Via BIM Tools, including Align Views on Sheets and the Viewport Marker family it works with.
Once the setup is done in one model, every other discipline follows in minutes, whether it’s 1 Viewport Marker or 22. That’s how quality survives the last week.
Watch how it works on YouTube (sound on): Align Views on Sheets in Revit
Try it yourself at apps.viabim.co, with a 30-day free trial.
Want this set up for your team?
Tools help, but they work best on top of a clear standard. We help teams define their documentation standard - title block, sheet layouts and viewport positions - and automate it, so every discipline delivers a consistent set without spending the last week fixing it by hand.
Contact us and let’s set up your documentation standard.
