Essential Revit Terminology and Interface Concepts

Building Information Modeling (BIM)

BIM is a complete representation or depiction of a building that aids in its design, construction, and continuous management. This is an evolving concept that changes as technological capabilities improve.

Revit Elements

An element in Revit is a discrete building block or piece of data, such as an object or drawing sheet. The four basic types of elements are:

• Model Elements: Walls, doors, roofs.
• Datum Elements: Levels, grids, reference planes.
• Annotation Elements: Tags, text, dimensions.
• View Elements: Plans, sections, schedules.

Views and Drafting

• Detail Line: Designed to appear only in the view in which it is placed. It is treated as an embellishment to that particular view and is not added physically to the building model.
• Drafting View: Provides a blank sheet suitable for importing legacy CAD details, image files, or natively drawn sketches; it is not linked to anything in the model.

Interface Components

• Navigation Bar: Contains navigation tools such as zoom, steering wheel, and view cube.
• Options Bar: Located below the ribbon; it displays options based on the item or tool currently selected.
• Panel(s): Each tab of the ribbon is composed of panels.
• Properties Dialog/Palette: Allows access to the instance properties of any selected element, new elements being created, and current view properties. To edit type properties, click the Edit Type button.
• Quick Access Toolbar (QAT): Located above the ribbon, it includes tools such as Open, Save, Synchronize, Undo, Redo, Measure, Tag, Text, Default 3D View, Section, Thin Lines, and window management tools.

Project and Data Management

• Instance Properties: When an item is selected in the model, the parameters appearing in the Properties Dialog are the instance properties; changes here affect only the selected item.
• New Projects: Inherit three conditions from the project template: Levels, Settings, and Families.
• Parameter: A set of physical properties whose values determine the characteristics or behavior of an element in Revit.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Commonly used Revit shortcuts include:

• AL: Align
• AR: Array
• CO: Copy
• DE: Delete
• HL: Hidden line
• MV: Move
• OF: Offset
• RO: Rotate
• SC: Snap to center
• SD: Shade with edges
• SE: Snap to endpoint
• SI: Snap to intersection
• SM: Snap to midpoint
• SN: Snap to nearest
• SP: Snap to perpendicular
• SQ: Snap to quadrant
• ST: Snap to tangent
• TL: Thin lines
• TR: Trim/extend to corner
• WF: Wireframe
• WT: Tile view window
• ZA: Zoom all
• ZE: Zoom extents
• ZF: Zoom to fit
• ZO: Zoom out (2x)
• ZP: Zoom previous
• ZS: Zoom sheet size
• ZZ: Zoom window