Automating Revit views and sheets by rule: lessons from Views for Revit

On a documentation-heavy project, modellers spend hours on work that adds nothing to the design: placing elevation markers room by room, dragging crop regions, renaming views to the office standard, arranging them on sheets.

All of it follows rules, so all of it can be automated. This article explains how rule-based creation of Revit views and sheets works, where the hard parts are, and what we learned building our own tool for it, Views for Revit.

What "by rule" means

The user defines the rules once. The tool then produces the whole set in a single operation, and produces it again when the model changes.

The pipeline

1. Collect the sources. Rooms, areas, spaces or reference lines that match the filter, including ones in linked models.
2. Compute the geometry of each view. Boundaries, directions, crop shapes and depths. This step is pure calculation and can be tested without Revit.
3. Create the views. Elevations from markers, sections from oriented boxes, each with its crop applied.
4. Apply templates and names.
5. Create sheets and place the views by the layout rule.

Step 2 holds most of the hard logic and needs no Revit to test, which is why it is kept apart from the steps that touch the model.

Everything happens inside one transaction group, so the user sees one Undo entry for the whole run.

The hard parts

Curved walls

A section or elevation is flat. A curved wall is not. One view of a long curve distorts everything away from its centre.

The answer is to split the curve into segments and create one view per segment, each facing its part of the wall. The segment length is a rule too: short enough to keep the drawing true, long enough to avoid fifty views of one wall.

Rooms that are not rectangles

An L-shaped room needs more than four elevations, and a rectangular crop around it shows the neighbouring rooms. The tool has to follow the real boundary and shape each crop to it.

Linked models

On most projects the rooms are in the architectural model and the documentation happens somewhere else. Reading rooms and their boundaries from a link means applying the link's transform to every point. Get this wrong and the views appear in the right shape at the wrong place.

Names

Revit does not allow two views with the same name. A naming rule will produce duplicates sooner or later: two rooms with the same number, or a second run. The tool needs a defined answer, such as a suffix, an update of the existing view, or a clear report.

Running it twice

The second run is the real test. If the room moved, should the existing view be updated or a new one created? The tool has to remember which views it made and from what. Without that, every run doubles the view list.

Sheet layout

Placing views on a sheet is a packing problem. Views have different sizes once cropped. A fixed grid wastes paper, and a tight pack looks random. A good rule fixes the grid and lets the tool choose the scale or the number of views per sheet.

What Views for Revit does

Views for Revit is our own plugin for this job. It began as a proof of concept requested by a client and grew into a product. It currently:

• generates views from rooms, areas, spaces or reference lines,
• works with elements in linked Revit models,
• adjusts crop margins and depths and handles curved boundaries,
• splits curved walls into separate documentation views,
• applies predefined view templates,
• names and organizes views to the office standard,
• places the generated views on sheets by layout rules.

Three lessons

Start from the drawing set, not from the API. We learned the most from looking at sheets that offices had already issued. The rules are visible there: margins, naming, how many views share a sheet.

Make every rule visible. A tool that produces 400 views from hidden defaults is frightening. Users want to see the rule, preview the count and then run it.

Speed matters less than predictability. A run that takes two minutes and gives the same result every time beats one that takes ten seconds and surprises.

When it is worth it

Automating views pays when the project has many similar spaces, such as hotels, hospitals, housing and schools, and when the office has a documentation standard to apply. It pays less on a small project where every room is a special case.

A general tool covers the common rules. Firm-specific conventions usually need a custom rule or two on top. Our guide to Dynamo, pyRevit or a C# add-in helps decide what form that should take.

Views for Revit is listed on our products page. If your documentation rules need their own tool, book a Feasibility Review. You get a written verdict on what can be automated and what it depends on. More on how we build: plugin development.

FAQ

Can Revit create interior elevations for all rooms automatically?

Not with built-in commands. Through the API it can: a plugin places the markers, creates the views and crops them by rule.

Does automated view creation work with linked models?

Yes, if the tool reads rooms and boundaries from the link and applies the link's position correctly.

How are curved walls handled?

The curve is split into segments, and each segment gets its own view facing that part of the wall.

Can views be placed on sheets automatically?

Yes. A layout rule sets the title block, the grid and the number of views per sheet, and the tool creates and fills the sheets.