View template - include an annotation symbol that always will be part of a floorplan or ceiling view

[HVAC-Novice]

When creating a new floor or ceiling view I want to have a North arrow included by default in lieu of manually placing the north arrow (an annotation symbol family). 

At the end of the design i always end up manually placing the north arrow on all views. Even if north is obvious, i like to be consistent and always use the north arrow. 

Is there a way to automate that? I didn't see anything in the view template settings. I looked a tiny bit into dynamo to build a script that places the family. But that still would be almost the same work as manually placing, and I still could forget that. 

[barthbradley]

What about nesting the annotation family inside a model family and loading that into the project?  It would show up in every view as long as it is intersecting the View Cut Plane.  You could use the ol' invisible model line trick to intersect every Level's Cut Plane.  

[HVAC-Novice]

thanks. I'm afraid i don't 100% follow on what to do. Especially the "model family" part. Could you elaborate? 

and it should work regardless of level, so an actual object in the model would be troublesome since it may or may not show up all the time. I also may want to move it to different locations for different views (to coordinate with other annotations, for example). 

[ToanDN]

Are your plan views always the same or are they cropped differently?

[HVAC-Novice]

They are different for each project. I also may split views with the matchline. Or have a larger scale of a specific part of the level. Obviously different levels could have different floor plans. So an actual model element would be hard to work with. An annotation element would be best since that doesn't impact the actual model. 

I guess I would have to move the North arrow on each view to where it looks best. But the "being placed on the view" in the first place is what I seek to automate. Maybe it isn't worth the effort, but would be cool to be able to have annotation families on views by default. 

[syman2000]

This is what @barthbradley is talking about. This is a sample North Arrow that will showup in all views. It is basically annotation embedded into model family. All you have to do is define the projection height parameter and it will show up where the model intersect with the level.

[XXalessio.amodioXX]

Why not nesting a family in Title block and use Visibility yes/no?

[RobDraw]

^^ My thoughts exactly. This is the way most do it.

[HVAC-Novice]

If you mean the sheet title block, that would not work for rotated views since both rotated and non-rotated views could be on one sheet. 

I initially thought you meant the viewport (system family). But I didn't see a way to include an annotation family. If there was a way to make it part of the View tile, scale etc. that would be perfect since i didn't need to worry about where to place it exactly to not be in conflict with other features. 

Another potential wrinkle, I run a Dynamo script to read the true North from the Project Base point and adjust the North arrow family accordingly. So if I insert that North arrow family into another family, I need to make sure it still works. 

[RobDraw]

I don't think you are going to get the solution that you want. I would suggest that you look for an alternative and expect some sort of manual operation to get the desired result when you have multiple views at different orientations on the same sheet, which, by the way, can be confusing to the reader.

[HVAC-Novice]

Good points. I admit in the past I ignored setting Project North and if the long side of the building is N-S, I rotated views. I may be better off to change project north to w or E, and then don't have to rotate views a lot or not at all. 

Avoiding rotated views is better than improving rotated views. 

I placed my North arrow family on the title block. for my dynamo script to work I had to make it a shared family and had to add the parameter, but I got it to work to correctly show true north.