Auto Legend Builder
PremiumGenerate legend type inventory report with usage analysis. · Explore the live interface below - every control works exactly as it does inside Revit®.
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Test it Live - exactly as if you are in Revit
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Get Started in Minutes
Four simple steps to bring Auto Legend Builder directly into your Revit® environment.
1
Create Account
Sign up for a free NexionTools account - no credit card required.
2
Download Installer
One installer, 52 professional Revit® tools. Under 15 MB.
3
Open Revit
Auto Legend Builder appears in your ribbon automatically - ready to use.
4
Activate License
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Why Auto Legend Builder exists
A colour-coded legend is a drafting job pretending to be a documentation job. You decide the categories, pick colours, draw swatches, type the labels, line them up, and then the model changes and a value you never drew appears in the drawings with no entry in the legend.
How Auto Legend Builder works
Pick a category - twelve model categories, plus six visual ones: room finishes, materials, line styles, hatches, filled regions and annotation symbols.
Choose the parameter to group by. The list is built from a sample of the elements present plus a set of common type parameters, with instance and type parameters separated. The visual categories skip this step entirely, because the colour comes from the element itself.
Colours are assigned across the values automatically, or you pick them per value from a twenty-colour palette - or from a colour picker when none of those is the one you need.
Style it - title, size preset, then text height, row height, swatch size and padding if you want finer control, plus options for counts, header fill and alternating rows.
The preview updates as you go and reports how many types and instances are covered. Generate places the finished legend, makes it the active view, and lands as a single undo entry covering the view, the text, the swatches and the lines.
Before
Legends are drawn by hand and drift out of step with the model as soon as a new value appears.
After
The legend is generated from what is actually in the model, so its contents come from the same source as the drawings.
When to reach for it
- Wall type, door type or material legends for a drawing set.
- Colour-coded legends that need to match a colour scheme already used on the plans.
- Regenerating a legend after new types have been introduced.
What it does not do
- It builds a legend from a category and a parameter. A legend combining unrelated categories is still a manual drafting job.
- The project needs at least one legend view family type, or one existing legend, for the tool to have something to create from. If it finds neither it says so rather than half-building anything.
- Generating on a category with nothing in it produces an empty legend - title and header, no rows.
- The preview shows a capped number of rows on very large value sets, with a count of the remainder.
- The smart parameter defaults are English-only, so on a localised project the tool falls back to the first available parameter and you pick from there.
- Placing the generated legend on sheets is a separate step - that is Legend Placer.
Questions
- How do I create a legend in Revit automatically?
- Revit's legend views are drawing surfaces - you place components and draw the rest. This reads a category and a parameter from the model, assigns colours to the distinct values, and generates the legend content for you.
- Can I control the colours?
- Yes. Colours can be assigned automatically across the values, picked per value from a twenty-colour palette, or set exactly with the colour picker - so a legend can match a colour scheme already used elsewhere.
- Can it show how many of each type there are?
- Yes, showing counts is one of the options, along with header fill and alternating row shading.