By Dennis Collin
I was recently asked a question about how Dynamo could be utilised to place create views from an issued model where all the views and sheets have been removed.
Whilst views can be manually reinstated from their levels, it is obviously a tedious process, however, the view recreation process and the reallocation of names can be achieved via Dynamo scripting.
If there is a drawing list in Excel format, then this file can be read by Dynamo to rebuild a list of Sheet Numbers, Names and ultimately the views that are placed on them.
Whilst many of the tasks can be done with the standard out of the box nodes, some tasks are easier to do with bespoke nodes of a Dynamo Package. This will provide a useful node, “Collector of Levels”, that will recreate appropriate plan views from all the levels defined within the project. An Excel file is referenced to provide names of the original views, sheets and the sheet numbers. Each piece of information is then sifted by a Take Every Nth item node and pushed to each relevant Revit parameter. The task of renaming views is performed by a standard Set Parameter by Name node.
With the Sheet Name and Number being sifted by some additional Take Every Nth Item nodes, a ‘dummy’ padding character is added to ensure that the correct information is located at the appropriate list index.
A sheet creation node adds the required number of sheets to the project, the information of which is obtained from the Excel document, the sorted data of View Name, Sheet Number and Sheet name are pushed to the parameters of each title sheet. Initially the placed viewport on each sheet will be situated in the bottom left-hand corner of the sheet, but the viewport centre can be relocated with a simple point by coordinates node.