As far as I know, you can not. I believe this is because 3D views are not at a specific scale.

Ya it's weird like that. I mean for a perspective 3d, I can understand but for a model 3d we should have the ablilty to display the scale value. Revit allows you to scale and crop as normal, so why not display the value...?

I don't think I would want to put a scale on a 3d view. Imagine a contractor trying to scale something off of it because he was too lazy to look up the sheet with the dimensions...

Scales are important for reproduction. Contractors should never be scaling drawings. Ever.

And yet we show them a scale on all of our non 3D drawings.
If we wanted to be serious about this, we would not ever show scale, and we would have a little + in the title block, with a note that says "If these lines are not 1" long this drawing has not been reproduced accurately". But again, who cares because you aren't supposed to scale drawings anyway.

That said, if I have a 3D view, aligned to an elevation, so as to get transparency in the glass, and I am using this in a Planning Review presentation, and someone wants to know how high something is that I have not dimensioned, they should scale the drawing. I certainly don't want to say "Schedule a meeting for next week, I'll come back with that dimensioned."
And we scale drawings all the time in presentations with the client, in-house discussions, consultant meetings, what have you. There are probably more situations where scaling is appropriate than where it is not. My guess is that 50% of pricing is STILL being done using manual takeoffs. By ... scaling the drawings! The CD drawings. With little notes that say not to scale them.
Sure, big projects don't use this approach, but all the little house remodels, TIs, all sorts of stuff is still done using the paper set.

It all comes back to a discussion I seem to have over and over, explaining to people that Revit does Architecture, not just construction documents.

Gordon

Contractors do what they damn well please unfortunately. If you put a hot pan in front of them they're going to touch it. Easiest way to keep them from burning themselves is to not put the hot pan in front of them and don't put scales on views that shouldn't be scaled...

Well the "big" (ie. circa £1-200M) jobs that I've worked on still do... even with .dwf as a publishing format... scaling is still the default (read silly) approach here in the UK - which is why our contingencies are still so high. :banghead:


There's a great/amusing building.co.uk article that reports on Davis Langdon's gripes with the imminent UK government intiative to move toward BIM and the subsquent uptake costs to the QS profession HERE - but it's a sign-up site, so if you're not that interested, the abbreviated version is that they're moaning about the cost (ie. loss of profit) to their workflow. The luddite jokers.

You didn't let me finish!

Scales are important for reproduction. Contractors should never be scaling drawings. Ever. *wink*

I've seen one of my subs try to scale a plan with a tape measure. I kid you not.