well, there's probably more than one way to easily accomplish this in Revit. I would lay the room out in plan just like you do in Acad except use reference planes (not lines). Create the wall angles and correct diagonal dimensions that give you the proper 4 sided room. The layout would be to either the center or one of the two faces of the wall, you decide. Then when starting the Revit wall tool select the correct face for wall placement in the Options bar (upper right under the Ribbon tabs) and select each corner of the reference plane intersections one at a time. Done. Hopefully you'll get some other quick and easy ideas about how to accomplish this. Creating the walls is the easy part, it's the layout that takes the time, just like in Acad.

Bit like a site survey I did a dumpy on recently. nothing square. I used circles and their radius measurement a lot, to indicate wall length, and mapped it from there.

Personally, I would rather work on an AutoCAD file with non-parallel walls than a Revit model with non-parallel (non-dimensionable) walls. For interiors, I prefer Revit models to be "nominalized" for the sake of producing documentation, as most as-built deviations fall (or are supposed to fall) within construction tolerances. I would make sure that your clients want to receive a Revit model that is non-parallel. You may want to deliver both formats, a dimensionable Revit model and more accurate set of AutoCAD as-builts.

Building the model and documenting it are 2 different tasks. Regardless of how you accomplish the layout, if the walls are non-parallel, they won't dimension easily and reliably with the native Revit tool. There are various tricks to dimension non-parallel entities in Revit, but if you are positive you need diagonals for EVERY ROOM, I would probable create a Detail Component that behaves like a dimension (which is generally frowned upon, as it "breaks" the safeguards Revit uses for dimensioning). Again, verify that this the deliverable your clients want. For a current project that requires laser scanning, our design team have specifically requested that the Revit model be delivered in a dimensionable state (to be used for future projects).

these are typical building that i measure

Wikimapia - Let's describe the whole world!

i'm thinking best way is to draw the walls in autocad, link them in revit, trace everything in revit and dimensioning i use what they say in this link https://knowledge.autodesk.com/suppo...led-walls.html

Malta - very interesting place.

If it's any help I just use the line tools in Revit to draw out complex plan shapes to give me something to snap walls to - I've never used Autocad so don't see the point of using it but if you are more comfortable doing it that way you are not alone - a local firm of architects admitted to me that was how they drew up all their surveys - first in Autocad, then tracing the plan in Revit

Just curious if it would be helpful to utilize grids as one would normally set up grids, that are not necessarily aligned with walls but are a trusted datum from which to dimension from. Thoughts?

I tend to align the straightest wall line available in the survey to horizontal then work from that.

Maybe just me but I don't get on well with grids but it would be handy to be able to lock the cursor to angles such as 90 and 45 to a particular wall or surface as I often find that once walls are at lots of different angles placing even reference planes at right angles to one of them can be tricky.