Select faces perpendicular to view (for dimensioning)

It’s a discussion which is often discussed, but I couldn’t find anything after a quick search.

I’m trying to automate wall dimensioning in Elevation. (In Floorplan view this isn’t a problem, using dimensioning options for walls, openings, intersections and grids simplifies this process. Apparently an option many dynamo-users are unaware of based on the posts I’ve seen here.)

image

The problem is, I don’t have this automatic dimensioning available in elevation views.

Based on standard Revit behavior, there seems to be a hard-coded rule within Revit which recognizes faces perpendicular to the view for dimensioning. I’m sure most of you have encountered this issue when attempting to dimension walls within a view which is not perfectly parallel to the wall being dimensioned.

Does anyone know if the face-orientation to view orientation can be extracted?

Cheers,
Matt

Hi Matt, ever figured this out? I’m trying to get the same thing done atm.

Hi Selim,

I was about to post a quick response which is so many words said “no.”

But, I decided to spend half an hour with it and figured some very basic things out.

The script will dimension only to wall elements, and not to inserts. It is just to see how I might be able to dimension a wall.

The one thing that is missing is some automation. Selecting a wall face, and then a line might not be ideal if you had a very structured model and wanted to automate dimensioning of multiple walls in multiple views simultaneously. This is just the basic building block.

It would be possible to grab wall faces based on the view vector. (This node can be found in the Clockwork package, which you must have if you don’t already.)

I’ve attache da screenshot and the script.

Cheers,
MattAutodimension.dyn (33.4 KB)

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