Learn how to manage Revit projects by skillfully retrieving consultant files, organizing them into server file structures, and creating an integrated model. This article specifically focuses on the usage of the BIM 304 ARCH user file and the importance of checking work set settings.
Key Insights
- Revit Project Management involves retrieving consultant files, placing them in an organized file structure on a server, and creating an integrated model from these files using the BIM 304 ARCH user file.
- It is crucial to check the work set settings when opening a local file, ensuring it is always set to 'not editable' to the current work set. This prevents any accidental edits or modifications to the work set.
- Creating a quick launch button for managing links is beneficial as it provides rapid access, especially when dealing with multiple linked files in a project. This promotes efficiency and ease of navigation within the project.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Hello and welcome to the CAD Teacher VDCI video series for Revit Project Management. In this video, we're going to go ahead and retrieve our consultant files, put them into an organized file structure on our server, and then we're going to create an integrated model with all of those files. So let's go ahead and start off by opening up our BIM 304 ARCH user file.
So this will be your local file that we're working from. Okay, so one thing we always want to check when we open up a local file is we want to look down at our work set settings and make sure that it always says not editable to whatever the current work set is. Okay, so now we're going to go and navigate through File Explorer here and we're going to take a look at our BIM 304 drive.
So for me, it's on my D drive. Yours should be on your desktop somewhere. Okay, and you can see we've got files for all of our different consultants here.
What I want to do is I want to create a new folder for each one of those. Now that I've got the folders created for each one of my consultant files here, I want you to take a look. You can see we've got a BIM 304 ARCH central backup and then also because we have our central file and our local file at the same location, I've got the user one backup as well.
Those files are automatically generated whenever we create a user and a central file and you'll want to keep those. You definitely don't want to delete them because this is where all the backups for those files are being held. Okay, so I've got my three files right here downloaded and I'm going to go ahead and move those into the appropriate folders.
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Okay, and if you wanted to, what you could do is you can keep a series of dated folders in here and then always make sure that you're updating with the current one every time you download a new one. But for this class, we're going to go ahead and just stick with just the one here. Okay, so let's go back to Revit.
And what I want to do is I want to bring in my mechanical plumbing and structural models. And the first thing I want to do is I want to go to my insert tab and we're going to be linking Revit files. So you can see we've got an option here on the left that says link Revit.
So I'm going to go ahead and select that. And just like when we brought in CAD files in previous classes, we want to make sure we use the correct settings here. So I'm going to start with my mechanical model.
And again, I'm going to navigate to that BIM 304 folder and then I'm going to go to my mechanical file. And you can see my mechanical file is right here. But what's really important is that we make sure we use the right positioning settings.
So the way that this model was generated is the Architect provided the mechanical engineer with a base model essentially. And in theory, what the mechanical engineer did was they used that architectural model as a base and worked from it. So the origin points should be exactly the same.
If we were to use Auto—Center to Center, it's going to take the center of the architectural model and the center of the mechanical model and line them up. Well, in this case, the architectural model has much more mass than the mechanical model does, so the chances of them lining up is not pretty good. But what will always work is if we use Auto—Origin to Origin.
That's going to line up the 00 point from the architectural model to the mechanical model. And that's what we want to go with for all of these. So I'm going to change it to Auto—Origin to Origin and we're going to click open.
Now you can see I've got a few components from the mechanical model loaded in. You can see when I click on it, I get some boxes. These are actually called spaces.
It's what mechanical uses to identify the zones. And some ducts kind of popping through here. That's pretty good.
Now I'm going to do the same thing with the structural and the plumbing model. So I'm going to say link Revit. And I'll navigate to the plumbing folder.
Do that with Auto—Origin to Origin as well. And click open. So what's happening here is plumbing actually has the architectural model loaded in.
So what it's saying is, hey, this link is not going to appear because it's set to overlay in that plumbing model. But it's letting me know that in that plumbing model there is an architectural reference file. So this is no big deal.
We're going to go ahead and hit close. And now you can see we've got some components from the plumbing model showing up in here. And let's go ahead and finish this off by linking in the structural file.
And, of course, we want to use that same Auto—Origin to Origin setting. We've got the same error that we had with our plumbing model. But that's okay.
We'll go ahead and say close. And now we've got some structural components showing through as well. And we'll have to resolve that and see why those are showing up so prominently.
Now the next step here is we want to make sure we have these on a system that we can turn them on and off whenever we want to pretty easily. And one of the options that we'll be accessing quite a bit is the manage links. And what we want to do is instead of having to always go to insert, manage links, or manage, and then manage links, I want to create a Quick Launch button for manage links.
So I'm going to go to my manage tab. And then I'm going to go over to manage links. And I'm going to right-click.
And I'm going to select add to Quick Access Toolbar. And this is really going to help us out because we're going to be accessing this quite a bit. Okay, and you can see by clicking that it places a shortcut in the Quick Access Toolbar for me.
So I'm going to go ahead and click on manage links. And you can see these are the links that we have loaded in here. And then they also have a path type that they have saved.
And these are relative paths, so they're just going to look for the last couple parts. It's not going to try and find an absolute path, which is what we want. Okay, so I'm going to hit okay here.
And now what I want to do is I want to create a work set for each one of these individual Revit links. So I'm going to go ahead and go down to my work sets and select it. And you can see right now we have shared levels and grids and work set one.
So I'm going to go ahead and click new to create a new work set. And I'm going to give it a name. We're going to create a work set for mechanical, plumbing, and one for structural.
So I'm going to type it in, Mechanical. Okay, I'm going to create another one, call this one Plumbing. And notice as I create the new work sets, they're coming in as editable.
And they're showing me as being the owner. So one more here for Structural. And we'll go ahead and hit okay.
Now I need to put the appropriate elements on those work sets. When we imported the links, they automatically go on the current work set. And right now we can see here that our current work set is work set one.
So all the links that we just brought in are on work set one. So I'm going to go ahead and select my structural link because it's the easiest one to grab here. And I'm going to change the work set.
You can see it's set to work set one. I'm going to change it from work set one to Structural. And now I have it on the Structural link.
I'm going to do the same thing with my Mechanical model. Change it from work set one and put it on Mechanical. And then I'll also do the same thing with my Plumbing one.
You can see I can kind of grab it right in here in the middle. And I'll put it on Plumbing. Now what I can do is I can access the visibility of these through both Visibility/Graphic Overrides and also through my work set settings.
So I'm going to go to my Visibility/Graphic Overrides. So I can hit VV on my keyboard or I can just select Visibility/Graphic Overrides here. And we have a tab at the very end.
It's called work sets. And here it will show all the different work sets that I have. And right now I've got them set to all be visible.
And then I can also go to Revit links and it will show all of my Revit links here as well. So in the next video we're going to take a look at how we can better control the Visibility/Graphic Overrides of our Revit links.
