Mastering Revit Project Management: Tips and Tricks for Productivity

Hello and welcome to the CAD Teacher VDCI video series for Revit Project Management. In this video, we are going to review some concepts that will help us throughout this course, and also introduce a few new tricks to help with our productivity. The first thing we're going to do is look at a sample project.

From our Recent Files window, let's go ahead and hit Open under Projects. From our Open window, if you notice here on the left side, we have an option here called Places. If you look, we've got Documents, My Computer, and this is typical for most applications.

Another thing that many programs allow us to do is add a favorite folder. So what I want to do is I want to navigate to my computer where I'm keeping the BIM 304 project folder. And what I want to do is I want to add that to Places.

So down here on the bottom left, you can see there's an option called Tools. I want to go ahead and select that. And then while I'm navigating to the current folder, which for me is going to be BIM 304, I want to go ahead and click on Add Current Folder to Places.

That's going to add the current folder, which for us is the BIM 304 folder, to our current Places. Within this folder, you should have downloaded the BIM 304 Lesson 1 sample project Revit file. Let's go ahead and open that up.

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This file is set up a little differently than the way we're going to do it for the rest of the course, but what I've done is I've consolidated all the systems into one file just to make this sample video a little bit simpler to navigate. You can see here in the project browser that we have a series of Level 1 views. We've got some plumbing and lighting and HVAC plans, but it's really hard to differentiate between the different disciplines.

So typically, we've just sorted our views in the project browser by just seeing all of them, and pretty much in order by type. Well, we have options for sorting these by different elements, and for this file and for our files for the rest of the course, it'll be a lot better to sort by discipline, so we can really keep track of where everything is.

If I select where it says Views here and right-click, I want to click on Type Properties. Here we have our type properties for our project browser, and this is going to help us organize them. So the different types are different organization methods.

If I were to change the type from All to, say, Type slash Discipline, it's going to sort by type and by discipline, and just to double-check that, I'm going to go where it says Folders here under my type parameters, and I'm going to click Edit. What this is doing is, and this should look somewhat familiar. This is the same structure for our schedules, and you can see here it's going to group by family and type, which is essentially the floor plan, elevation, sections, details, those kinds of things, and then it's going to sort by discipline, which is a value that we'll give each view so that it'll sort correctly. Okay, I'm going to hit OK here and OK again.

Now you can see in our project browser, under each of our view types, we have different disciplines. Go ahead and expand where it says Architectural. And you can see we've got Level 1, and that's the view that we're currently on right now.

Looking at this view, I can already tell that it's going to be too large to fit on one sheet and provide enough detail, so I want to break it down into three dependent views. So I have one overall view that'll reference three different dependent views. To do that, what I want to do here is I'm going to select Level 1 in my project browser, and then I'm going to right-click, I'm going to go to Duplicate View, and then we want to click Duplicate as Dependent.

This is going to be my first dependent view of Level 1. So essentially this Level 1, which is our parent view here, will control the visibility and graphic overrides for all of the dependent views, as well as things like scale and visual style, and also how the Revit links would show up in all of the dependent views as well. So I've got three different sections here, so let's go ahead and create two more dependent views. Again, selecting Level 1, I'm going to right-click, Duplicate View, Duplicate as Dependent.

You can see it puts it right under there, and we're going to do it again. Okay, now I've got Dependent 1,2, and 3 here. I need to name these appropriately.

The first one, this top section right here, I'm going to go ahead and follow the lead of what we have for our electrical setup. You can see it says Level 1, Lighting Plan A, B, and C. So for our Architectural Plan, I'll go to my Dependent on Level 1, and I'm going to go ahead and rename that. And this one's just going to be called Level 1, and then A. And so the portion for A is actually going to be this top spot right here across the top.

So I'm going to take my Crop Region, and I'm going to adjust it so it just clears the match line right about here. Now this is my Dependent View A, and I can go ahead and bring these in a little bit further as well. Okay, looks good.

I'll go to my second one, and it doesn't really matter which one we use here, because we are going to be renaming it and changing it. So I'll rename this one. This will be Level 1, B. And then I'll adjust the Crop Region to work for our middle section here, similar to how we did for Level 1, A. Okay, and then lastly, we'll handle Level 1, C. So again, right-click, Rename, and I'll call it Level 1, C. And then the final step is to adjust the Crop Region.

Okay, so now I have Dependent Views, Level 1, A, B, and C. And if we were to go into our Parent View, which is just Level 1, you can see I've got three different Crop Regions in here now, and those are actually representations of Level 1, A, B, and C, so I can make adjustments to those in there as well. Okay, so let's go ahead and take a look at our Visibility and Graphic Overrides. If I were to hit V, V on my keyboard, it takes me into my Visibility and Graphic Overrides.

One of the things that's been added to Revit 2013 is this Filter List. It'll allow me to filter by discipline, so you can see this is an Architecture View, so it's set to Architecture. If I were to change this to be Architecture and maybe Structural, it's now going to actually show me categories that would only be part of a Structural View.

And so what I could do is if I wanted to see Structural in this view, I could change it to just Structural, okay, and then I can actually turn off… I want to turn off all of my Architecture categories first, and then when I switch it to Structural, the Structural-specific categories will be turned on and then when I hit OK, our view looks a little different, right? Because now all we're seeing are Structural columns. So let's go ahead and create a 3D Coordination View. And so if we remember from some of the previous classes, there's quite a few tools we can use in 3D to help us look at the model in different ways.

So to start that out, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to hit the button for the default 3D view. Okay, and then this view right here that we're looking at right now is actually set up to push the Mechanical systems forward. So what I want to do is I'm actually going to change this Discipline from Mechanical to Coordination.

And this is just a View property, so remember to access our View properties, we want to just click into whitespace, just so that I'm not on any object, and that'll give me my properties for the 3D view. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and where it says Discipline, I'm going to go ahead and change that from Mechanical to Coordination. Okay, and what that does is it's going to show all of the systems in this view.

And here you can see we've got some Mechanical and even some Plumbing, Piping and things going on here, some Vents, and all the Architectural and Structural systems are showing as well. This looks good to coordinate the Architectural systems, but there's a small problem here and that is we can't really see what's going on inside the building. So one of the techniques we've used in the previous classes is to use what's called a Section Box.

If I click into whitespace again, you can see I can go down into my Extents category, and I've got Section Box. Right now this box is unchecked because we are looking at the entire model. So I'm going to go ahead and check that box to turn on my Section Box.

And you can see there's this blue box here, which defines the Extents of the view I'm looking at. So while I have it selected, you can see I get grips all the way around the model. And if I wanted to, say, look at maybe this portion where we have what looks like maybe an Air Handler unit, I can go ahead and I can take this grip and drag it back.

And so now I'm cutting through this area, and what I want to do is I want to use 3D Orbit to kind of get a better look here. If you remember, if we hold down the Shift key in combination with our mouse wheel, it will allow us to orbit. And notice what's happening here.

When I orbit, it's still using the entire building as the center of my axis. So I'm going to twist back around here. And to make that a little bit easier on me, I can select something that's locally here.

So let's say this curtain wall mullion, that might help me out. If I have that selected, and I use 3D Orbit at the same time, it's going to use that object as the center point. And so now I've got a pretty good view here.

Now I can see all the mechanical, electrical, and even a few plumbing systems in there. And I get a pretty good look at what's going on inside the model. So I'll bring my section box down a little bit further so I can kind of localize on this area.

So I'll bring it in here. Maybe even pull it back a little bit so we can look at both sides. And there's also no reason why I can't take it down so I can kind of look down into these ceiling areas here.

So maybe a little further than that. Now I can really see what's going on in there. Now if this is a view that I wanted to save instead of having to redo the section box every single time, what I can do is I can actually find this view that we're currently in in the project browser.

And we know a couple of things about it. We know it's a 3D view. And then we also know that we set the discipline to Coordination.

If I go down to my 3D views, I'm going to find Coordination, expand that, and you can see I've got a 3D view set up. Well, I want to keep this view as is, and I don't want to lose it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to right-click on 3D here, and I'm going to do a duplicate view.

And since there's no annotation elements, just a regular duplicate will be fine here. Now I have a copy of 3D. That doesn't really tell me too much about it.

So some of the things we might want to do is maybe give it a name where the grid lines are or the systems that are being coordinated. For this case here, we'll just call it all systems. And that's how we can create a coordination view in 3D.

In the next video, we're going to go ahead and take a look at our class project, and we're going to create an architectural file that is going to have mechanical, plumbing, electrical, and structural systems LinkedIn.