Aligning doors in Revit

For this months article I have something quick that should save quite a bit of annoyance. When I place a door in Revit, I have to then move that door to the correct spot after I insert it. Heres an example:

I insert the door. I want to place this door, so that I have 4 for the frame. This means that I have to use the move tool to move it there.

After doing this 15 times it gets really annoying because depending on how you have a floor plan laid out, you have to keep inserting those doors and moving all these doors individually. Even if you copy this door to other places, you will still have to go back and move some of the doors after placing them now and then.

Now, what if we could use the align tool to get the 4 space that we need? That means that I can insert all the doors and just use the align tool to align them all. Here is what I set up my family to do:

First I place the door somewhere:

Then, use my align tool, and it places it exactly 4 from my wall. Watch:

I pick my reference for alignment

Finished! It is exactly 4 inches from the wall. Personally, I think its easier to align instead of moving, since moving will almost always require that you zoom in and out constantly to hit the correct snap point.

To achieve these results, this is what you have to do to your door families:

Create two reference lines on each side of my door family.

Create Dimensions from the reference lines to the reference planes like this:

Make sure you lock both of those dimensions at 4 just like what I have here.

Now load the family into the project and test it out. Make sure you change the family type to flex it to make sure your reference lines are moving with the changing width of the door. Thats it. You could even use that reference line to align the wall, to the location of the door instead of what I showed up there. You could also create a reference line that aligns to get 18 clearance for ADA requirements. The sky is the limit!

This page last edited on Thursday, June 03, 2010