Monday 5 September 2011

Rotate a Generic Annotation 360° and Beyond - A Method

The following video outlines a method for rotating a Generic Annotation through 360°. In the example, a north arrow is nested into a drawing sheet. This builds on a previous post here, regarding rotating tags. This method however, solves the problem with the array breaking at 0°/360°. The main points are outlined below:






  • Create a Generic Annotation family and load into a drawing sheet
  • Insert the annotation
  • Now to set up the array. A bit of reverse logic is required here. Firstly, rotate the element by an angle, in this case 120°. Make sure this is from the rotation point you want to use
  • Now draw a second element. In this case, I have added an invisible circle. The purpose this serves is to allow all elements, except the one we want to show, to be excluded from the groups formed by the array. If the array group contains only one element, this won't work; Revit will delete the group and the array along with it. The aim is to leave 'empty' group containers
  • Pick the annotation and the circle. Pick 'Array'. Ensure 'Group and Associate' is checked and also that the 'Last' radio button is selected. Array through the same angle, with rotation at the same point, as the earlier rotate operation. This should bring the end of the array back to 0°
  • With these settings, the array will always rotate leaving the last element in a static position, in this case, back at 0°
  • Now exclude all elements from the array groups as shown, leaving only the annotation at the 120° angle in place 
  • Hover over the rotation point area and tab. The array looks like a slice of pie
  • Add an angular dimension to the array. You may need to tab to ensure you get the correct lines
  • Pick the dimension and add an angle parameter
  • Load the sheet into a new project and spin the angle to your heart's content

2 comments:

Mateo said...

Thank you very much for this post and for your blog. I've done and it works perfectly.
Is there any possibility that the future Revit can use angles with grads (400) in addition to degrees (360)?
Saludos.
Mateo.

Darren Snook said...

Hi Mateo
Glad to be of help. With regards to grads in Revit, that's really a question for Autodesk to answer. The only workaround I could see would be a number parameter that you could enter the grad value, then have an angle parameter that converts it to decimal degrees to drive the geometry
Regards
Darren