Using Integers for Tricky Titleblocks

Have you ever come across a project with a keyplan in the titleblock and wondered how to go about managing the keyplan shading? The last thing you want to be doing is clicking every single check box across hundreds of drawings.

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In this jumbled mess there are a total of 14 shaded areas on the keyplan. 3 for the basement, 3 for the roof and 8 for ground and first floor. So what is the most efficient way to manage it all?

The answer is integers.

An integer is simply a number that is not a fraction. It is a whole number. In the instance of our keyplan, integers can be used to control the shading for our titleblock by associating those values with an on/of visibility parameter.

In this example, I have used the following number sequences

Basement = 1 – 3 (you could use negatives here)
Ground & first floors = 21 – 28
Roof = 31 – 33

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Each of the visibility parameters are then associated with the integer value by simply using the formula KEYPLAN_INT = x where x is the value associated with each level and zone. So for example, KEYPLAN_INT = 24 looks like this

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But we don’t have to stop there. You would have notice we have two wings on the project that has resulted in the drawings being rotated at 10 degrees, this means on those 3 zones our north point will be different to the rest of the project. We can again use our integer parameter to solve this.

As these rotated views are only on ground and first floor, they are associated with the codes 25, 26 and 27, this means we can control our north point rotation with an and formula nested inside an if formula. The formula that I’ve used is if(and(KEYPLAN_INT > 24, KEYPLAN_INT < 28), 3.091°, 13.091°) so any drawings that have a keyplan integer of greater than 24 and less than 28 will have the north point rotated at 13.091 from north, the remaining drawings will have their north points rotated at 3.091 degrees.

But what about the drawings that we don’t want a northpoint, or a keyplan for that matter? Drawings like schematics, details and drawing lists. The shaded parts of the keyplan already only display if the correct code is used, so we can take advantage of this and simply create another visibility parameter that is associated with the building outline, the additional border line on the titleblock and the north point. In my example I’ve named this parameter NO_KEYPLAN with the formula of not(KEYPLAN_INT = 0). When the integer = 0, everything is switched off.

If you have people that don’t know how to read hydraulics drawings (I’m looking at you Sydney), you can also associate this parameter with Stratman and his sweet 70s style.

So on the left we have an integer value of 24 and on the right, the same titleblock with an integer value of 0.

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You can then use your favourite bi-directional Excel option, be it Dynamo, BIMLink or some other alternative, export all the data to excel, set the integers for each sheet, re-import the data and you’re done.

 

 

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