concepts that don’t have exact corollaries in Revit. You’re probably used to thinking in terms of
what needs to be drawn and coordinated: plans, sections, elevations, details, schedules, and so
on. You’re also used to keeping that information in a lot of separate files that have to be linked
together in order to reference other parts of the building. And you’re used to being allowed to
have only one person in one file at a time (which can be particularly frustrating from a workflow
standpoint). And finally, maintaining all your project settings and management is a struggle
across so many disconnected files.
Revit contains all of these kinds of things. But at a high level Revit is about the four key
components of a holistic and successful design process: relationships, repetition, representations,
and restrictions. These concepts are respectively managed in Revit by data, content,
views, and project management. And they are managed from within a single, bidirectional
database.
what we like to think of as a Revit organization chart, which should give
you a visual description of these four top-level categories and the kinds of things these categories
contain. In the following sections, we’ll discuss each of these categories and describe their
particular role in your Revit project environment.
Datum
Datum consists of references, grids, and levels.
The reason that datum is all about
the relationships of your Revit project is because they establish and control your content (the
building, stuff that goes in a building, and the stuff you need to document your building).
Reference planes can be created in any 2D view from the Home tab, but once created they
may be visible in 3D. After you add reference planes to your project, they can be set and seen
from the Work Plane panel. This will allow you to work with respect to the desired work plane.
Like reference planes, grid lines can also be added to any 2D view. Keep in mind that grids
may only be perpendicular to levels. Furthermore, grids are only visible in views that are
aligned with the grid. So if the grid is in a North/South orientation, you’ll only be able to see it
in plan and from the North/South–oriented views.
Levels may be seen and created only in views that are parallel to the analytic ground plane in
Revit. So you can’t create levels in plan and they can’t be diagonal to the ground plane. To create
any datum in Revit, simply select the desired type and then pick two points to define the start
and end location.
