Revit Assembly Creation and Dimensioning

Creating the documentation for a large number of elements in Revit could be very challenging. Schedules are very powerful and handy when you need to describe a lot of elements used in your Revit model, but there is no graphical information included. This sometimes is an issue.

As architects, we need to provide full documentation for the windows and doors included in our projects. This means that we need to create a mix between Revit legend and Revit schedule in order to give not only text information like count and dimensions but graphical information(front view) as well. When using window and door families we developed an automated workflow for creating Revit legend using the information from a schedule. But this is not applicable for all projects.

For some projects, we use curtain walls instead of windows and doors for exterior openings. This approach is better when there a lot of variations and changes during design. Otherwise, you need to create a large number of families or to create very complicated families to cover all the options.

But with that comes the challenge. How to document all the curtain walls. Fortunately, there is a built-in answer in Revit – assemblies. This tool is perfect when you need to document separate elements from your model. There is an option to create views for each assembly and this is exactly what we needed.

Revit API has a method for assembly creation so everything was ok whit that. There is also a method for assembly view creation, so we just needed to write a couple of lines of Python code to achieve our goal. There was one small tricky part – by default, the assembly origin is not following assembly elements orientation. That means you need to rotate the assembly origin to match assembly element orientation in order to get proper views. Otherwise, you will end up with views showing the elements sideways. 

The final touch was the automatic dimensioning of the elements in the assembly. More about the workflow in the video below.