Titleblock family types

Recently I was working on a project which was transitioning from Schematic Design to Detailed Design. The main GA sheets were already set up at A3. However, we wanted to change the scale of the views and switch them from A3 to A1. However, we also wanted to retain our A3 presentation set. So essentially some drawings needed to remain at A3, while others needed to change to A1.

The problem

Since all the floor plans had view templates assigned, modifying the scale of the views was simple. However, when trying to select only specific title blocks, I ran into difficulties. Usually, I would use the ‘SA’ shortcut to select all instances of the family in the project and substitute its type in the properties pallet. However, this would modify all title blocks indiscriminately.

Therefore I turned to Ideate Explorer to see if it was possible to achieve greater control over which title block families were being selected. However, as shown in the image below, there is no way to tell which title blocks were being selecting. They were all abstractly named ‘A3 instance’ or similar.

Dynamo automation

Rather than manually modifying dozens of sheets, I developed a simple Dynamo node called ‘View.SwitchTitleblock‘. The node is available as part of the BVN Dynamo package.

The node collects all the title block families within the project and returns their sheet number parameters. It then uses the ‘sheet number series’ input to filter the families. For example, at BVN, our floor plans are part of the ‘B series’. Sheets are therefore prefixed accordingly, for example, B-00-01. Once the desired title block families had been filtered, the script substitutes the current family for another as defined by the ‘familyType’ input. Using this technique quickly and easily changes title blocks for the selected drawing series.

Note that any instance parameters on the title block will need to be read first, before setting them on the new title block. To do this, refer to this tutorial.