If you were a student in one of my classes or even a coworker I’ve had the pleasure of working with, you would know I have a mild obsession with view templates in Revit. I expect my readers are architects, designers or professionals with-in the design field who understand graphics. In architecture the way a drawing “reads” is crucial on a variety of fronts, one I’m thinking about in particular are Construction Documents.

I started my career in architecture as CAD draftsmen/Designer and mastering graphic convention was and is still a big deal. Knowing your CAD layers allowed you to present and produce drawings in manner that made sense and showed well graphically. Now with Revit, you still need to understand how to show floor plans, no different then you do with CAD. Regardless of the software you use, that will never change. So you find yourself working in Revit, your sheets are reading well and graphically perfect. What do you do to preserve that? Save it as view template!

If you are new to Revit, you may be spending your time on modeling a curtain wall or spending time populating room finishes or  playing around with the parametric capabilities of a family. After all, there had to be something that drew you to the software. The draw to Revit, for me was knowing I could create all these plans, sections, elevations for pin-up and presentation. What I didn’t know at the time (I do now after the fact) is view templates. Room templates are great because they allow you to save exactly that, a template. If you have all your floor plans of the high-rise residential tower you’re designing, with that 1/4″ A-100 Series  view template on, chances are graphically, they all look the same. View templates give you the flexibility to change the views by just modifying the template, which then applies itself to all views that have the template set to themselves (thank you Autodesk for allowing the change to apply automatically in Revit 2014 and up!). In addition, the view graphics are protected against individual edits, which can be an issue when you have multiple users in a model. Now if someone takes a view template off to modify the view, you know with confidence you can add the template back on and restore the view back to its former glory.

I can go on and on, but I won’t right now. To be continued! I do invite you to check out some videos on how I have used view templates for presentations to construction documents (coming soon).