Change the Orientation of Project to Actual/Real world in Revit (True North vs Project North) (03 of 10)

With the default setting of Revit, you always model the elements parallel to the screen orientation. But have you ever wondered why is the orientation like that or what is the actual orientation for the project and how to reflect it in the model? Well, the simple answer is, the default plan orientation is set parallel to the screen for the user's convenience. So, how to set and display the actual orientation of the site?

To do that we need to understand the 2 different Orientation in Revit, Project North & True North. These two orientations of the project are associated with the 2 different coordinate systems in Revit, Project Base Point & Survey Base Point(respectively) which I've explained in detail in my other post.

By default, all the plan views(except site plan) are set to orient to Project North. You can change the settings in the Properties tab(shortcut - CTRL+1) > Graphics > Orientation.

Site Plan vs Level 1

So the basic difference between Ture North and Project North is that Project North is user/project based setting and the True North is Global setting. But if dig a little deep into these settings,

To better understand the difference between True North and Project North, let's have a look at the Sun Path in Site Plan & Level 1 in the Sample Architecture Project and the Orientation of Project base point (

) & (

) Survey Base Point

True North

True North displays the actual orientation of the project as it would be on site., ie.., the Real/Physical World Axis. So if you set the view to orient to True North, it displays the actual orientation of the project. In the image shown below, the plan towards the left is the Site Plan, which is by default set to orient to True North.

The Orientation of True North is associated with the Survey Base Point, as this is the real world point that is calibrated on-site using survey tools. As you can see in the image below, the orientation of the Survey Base Point (

) in the Site Plan is parallel to the screen. That's because the Site plan Orientation is set to True North. There are many ways to set/change the True North orientation of a project in Revit.

Project North vs True North

Project North

Project North, on the other hand, is not a defined/standard orientation. It is a user-defined orientation and can be changed to make it easier for the user to model elements. In the Level 1 plan in the image above, you can see that the Project base point is located at the corner of the building and the orientation is parallel to the walls of the project.

The Orientation of Project North is associated with the Project Base Point, whose location and orientation can be customized by the user. As you can see in the image below, the orientation of the Project Base Point (

) in the Level 1 Plan is parallel to the screen as the Level 1 Plan orientation is set to Project North. You can find the various methods of how to change the orientation of project north in my previous post.

Comments

Power Query - "SUBSTITUTE" Function: Remove/Replace multiple values in a column in One Step.

Often times, when you get data from a source, there will most probably be something incorrect that needs to be fixed using an ETL process of Power Query. And most of those transformations would require either Replacing or Removing string's that are not necessary. For example, if you extract any financial data from a source which has multiple currency symbols, there's a chance that the numbers get extracted along with the currency symbols like "$700"/"€700" instead of 700. And these type of cases makes it tough to Transform the Data to our wish as the value will be considered as a text instead of a number. In those type of cases, we would most likely have to create multiple steps to remove the multiple currency symbols from the Column. But thanks to the solution provided by Marcel for one of the questions posted on Stack Overflow, with a little manipulation of the Query language (M), we can replace/Remove multiple strings in one step using the List. ...

Grasshopper: Voronoi Holes on a Planar surface

One of the best natural examples for a Voronoi is the Wing structure of a dragon fly.Grasshopper can help us to build a shape like this in Rhino. Image Courtesy: The Pond blog Grasshopper by default has a node for Voronoi, we just have to prepare the necessary information to feed into the node. The following example shows how to create a Voronoi shaped holes in a surface Create a planar Surface from rhino or grasshopper Randomly Populate the surface with points using the Populate 2D Node Feed the surface and the points into the Voronoi node and feed a number slider too to adjust eh radius This forms the required Voronoi structure which you can edit the number of points or radius. To create the holes we need to offset each and every inner portion towards its centre using the Scale node We can find the centre of each of the inner portions using Area node I'm not sure why but using the offset command su...

Grasshopper: offsetting curves on surface vs scaling curves on surface

Though in Grasshopper Offset and Scale are two different node functions, when it comes to a planar surface, the results of the both are similar. But, I found the " Scale" node to be effective when you want to loft the resultant curve with another. The following images show the different results of a Voronoi structure that yielded when scale and offset nodes are used. When the Offset node is used When Scale is used

Group and Scribble in Grasshopper & Rotating scribble

Grouping & Scribbling in grasshopper can be helpful, especially when your document is filled with hundreds of nodes with wires going all around the screen. Often you might find it difficult to locate the set of nodes you'd like to adjust or alter for your project. So grouping the nodes and annotating the groups would be a nice idea to keep your document organised. Grouping In order to group a set of nodes, you just select them and right click on the screen(not on any of the nodes). You'll find the option to group. You can even name the groups just by right clicking on the group. Although naming the groups would be enough to identify the group. The name bubble of the group will disappear when you zoom too far out. So, the solution to be able to identify the group from a zoomed out fairly far is to add a scribble(with a text height of min 25) in the group. Scribble & Group in Grasshopper Scribble Like the name says, Scribble is just to add some notes f...

Guru-G

Search This Blog