How do get the #$%#@$ Revit drawings to look right....Lineweights and Object Styles!

I'm an old school kind of guy - I started in the "chalk on a rock" days where we were putting ink on mylar. In those days, you had to know everything...before you put the pen to paper. AutoCAD, for how much I love it, made us a bit lazy, since we could make all kinds of changes quickly. Even getting the documents to look right has a couple of ways to do it (CTB vs STB, layer colors mean a specific penweight - ever get into a fist fight about this?).

Now Revit comes along a while back, and all of our MEP engineers are finally starting to move forward...albeit begrudgingly. One of their big gripes is that they want the same visual printed quality that they had using ACAD and the board. Out of the box, Revit has a bit of an unusual set of lineweight settings that I'm still not really sure where they came from (when was the last time you had a 1/2" lineweight), so I went back to my old penset (Kohinoor - remember them?). We used 4 penweight as industry standards - .25, .35, .50 and .70. When we got CAD, we got a little more sophisticated and started using .15, .18, .40 and .60 weights - because our old HP 7585 supported using 8 pens (woo-hoo! technology is so cool...).

So I had to make up a little chart that helped me understand what the conversion where between the old metric and my new best friend Revit MEP. So here's my table of penweights I used to satisfy all my old school engineering buddies (yes it's in spreadsheet form - send me an email and I'll send you the file):

Anything that's highlighted is pretty close to what we used to use as an industry standard. And I gave us a few more options, so the only thing to do now is go to your objects styles, and make the adjustments accordingly.

So if you still think Revit can't produce the same quality document that you're used to, all you need is a little knowledge - and a handy calculator...and a old school geek...

Later - David B.