9 Steps to Setting up a Good Revit Model

hi everyone niall here welcome back to the h20 bim channel today we're going to talk about nine steps you can take to start pretty much every revit project um in kind of a controlled and rhythmic manner um this is really for people who don't have access to high quality office templates to office standards to a bim coordinator or bim manager who they can bounce ideas about how to set up per project specific models this really is just a generic step set of very basic steps that any user can undertake to meaningfully get started before they model in such a way that they will be able to let's say coordinate externally without issue and to be honest with you they won't look like a horse's ass um and also just kind of give a proper framework to every project in a rhythmic rhythmic set of steps so that they kind of have the framework in place every time automatically um so this isn't a model generation tutorial this is not a template generation tutorial it's it's much more rudimental than that it's a series of initial steps when you get into the revit environment to get your project up and running meaningfully so as always if you like this content you know what to do down below hit like and subscribe i will have a download to this model once it's complete and by complete i mean the framework is complete so that you can go and have a look at that and analyze that as you wish as well that will be in the link below okay um so as always i hope you enjoy leave a comment below if i've missed any steps that you like to integrate just to make sure other users can consider them as well and uh i'll see you for the next one as well okay let's get into it so step one is how to create your project from scratch okay and the reality is you need to ensure that you have access to whatever template you should be using if you're working in an office environment okay so if you're working in an office or you're working from let's say you're you're a college student make sure you talk to the people the bim coordinators or your department head or whoever it may be who's responsible for the template information to ensure that you're starting a project with the correct template for your specific discipline okay i would recommend when you create a project that you always go per discipline try not to create an amalgamated model of all disciplines very very few projects really work with all disciplines integrated what you really should have is each individual discipline as a distinct model that are all interlinked and coordinated in uh basically geo-located relative to one another and correctly on site okay so that's the ideal workflow um you know unless we're talking about something like a garden shed i really don't think you should ever really integrate all your disciplines into one model environment okay so that's one consideration for you okay and so look if you have access to a high quality template an office template a university template whatever it may be please ensure that you're working with that when you start if not the autodesk generic ones are absolutely perfect to get you started with and we're going to work on one of them here now okay so as i said pick your discipline so on screen here we're going to go to new project and in this instance i'm going to put the construction template you can pick architectural templates structural or mechanical i'm actually going to pick the architecture template for this and press ok and as you can see we've already started a new project file okay what i would say to you is if for any reason you have problems with your installation in revit you don't have that drop down list from your template locations i have a little video coming up in the eye in the corner there that goes through in depth where you can find all the default information for revit families that come with the the installation system families and template file locations all of that kind of stuff that's very long it's very inclusive it's definitely informative but you can just go to the it's all timestamped you can go to the subsection that you need to find the templates just so you can redirect the file path in case there's any problems with your file install okay so moving on so step two is to assign your project information this is something i see missed all the time people just they get straight into the model and they first thing they do is they start drawing their walls and their floors and everything and they've never actually taken the time to implement the project information um and really it's it's not a lot a couple of of text based families that are populated with some project specifics okay if you're working on a high high-end template you will have a splash screen whenever you open the model and that splash screen will be populated with all the project information as a start so the first thing you do on the splash screen is you enter in the project information okay and in this instance obviously we're using the default template so that's not readily available to you so i'm going to go through where some of that information is on the drawing sheets at least so you can front end that and that mean you're actually embedding that project information as well at the same time one thing to know is just kind of the nature of things that are typically included in the project information so you normally have the project name the project number the project client the project location information so you will have an address but you may want also want to include some of the geolocation information if you have that present at the start of the project but it should definitely be introduced after the information is received at least off-site and then you might have various notes such as um let's say sharing criteria for external design stakeholders for example or model license information that if you share it you put in contingencies what people are allowed to do and what people are not allowed to do with this model and you may also have certain things like standard notes that you like to implement and have um let's say a couple of let's say standard specification sheets depending on the discipline okay so they're just considerations to implement front end into your model and make sure that each model has them present okay if you're developing a template it's something you should include as a splash screen with all that information it really makes life easier if you're working off the template that we have in front of us here now at the moment if you just go to the sheets data here you can see that we at least have the project name the project title and the client already there okay and we can implement this so we can say um we can call this uh apologies oh my god this is just all notion this is made above top of my head um so this is um we're going glamorous with the warehouse and the client owner is um okay so as you can see but understand that these parameters here these are project-wide parameters so although i'm only populating them on the sheet here there are actually there are other ways to implement these in but just if this is the data you're working off of that's the easiest way okay go and get that information correct front end okay so step three is when we actually start populating some information into the model beyond just text-based information and that is to implement your grids okay so regardless of the scale of the project i firmly believe that all projects should have grades appended to them um i don't care if you're if it's again a small block or shed or if it's a block work residential or just a standard construction residential building without necessarily column and beam systems or even if it's something akin to an organic kind of um a more um conceptual design that has a lot of organic forms that have been generated there is still a grid that can be applied in a sense applied to that project and grids should always be implemented so even if you don't have um column structures you should still align grids to let's say the core center line of your wall buildup and this is just good practice it should be implemented in every project so i i'm just going to go through a very quick creation process for grids okay just so you know and the the fundamentals okay so if you go to structure tab you will see we have grid over here under the datum subsection this is also available on the architecture grid datum so you can pick your poison here okay you can also use the short key gr and that will pick up the grid line okay and now using the first line draw tool you click and drag okay what you can do is you notice that only one bubble is open okay and the other is closed you can actually click here to turn on the other button bubble or turn it off or if you want as a default both bubbles to be shown in every instance you can go into edit type and your plan view symbols end one you can turn on and n2 you can leave on and you will see that will automatically populate you can also and i recommend this always change the first um the first iteration that you place let's say the first grid bubble so i understand turns to a for the moment so you can see it because when i begin to copy this into intervals now you can array and there's other means of of copying here but using the standard copy i'm going to press multiple i'm going to go down 6 000. okay and you'll see that'll automatically populate with b and for it again i'm going to go down to 6000 again and you can see c okay and then again i'm going to press g or to go in the opposite direction you'll notice that's probably going to incorrectly populate d now because we don't want that okay but i'm going to change again that first value to 1 and then i'm going to copy and we're going to do 5500 oh in this direction and i'm just going to continue that process all the way down and if i want i can speed things up and just go line to line okay so i'm going to extend that out a little bit there and now i'm just going to grab my elevation markers and just move them into a neater position just outside the extents of the grids and centralize them and note that your elevation marker shows the full width so you're not missing anything there okay so that's how to set up the grids initially the thing to note is that um you have to ensure that your grids are working in all three axis so we've only set up our grids into two axis there but what we should also do is we should go to our northern elevation and you can see that our grids are currently going across the height of the levels so they're high enough across the project as it stands but we're going to introduce more levels to this project so i'm going to bring the grids way up and i'm also going to reduce them down so they go beyond the foundation level and we also need to do the same on the reverse elevations so in our east-west direction as well we need to ensure that our grids are sufficiently high for the project okay and finally if you want and you don't want any active edits to happen on your grids you can select all your grids and if you're happy that they're confirmed in the short term or you don't want anyone to have the capacity to accidentally click and drag them you can press p n and that will pin the grids okay alternatively when you have the selection available you can see that the unpin is there and that button pin is below okay so that will stop anyone accidentally clicking or dragging or altering the grids the grids should be relatively static for a project and so i recommend you do that front end okay so that's step three setting up your grids so step four is to set up our levels okay so as you saw on the um the previous point we were in this plan view here okay and if i go to the south elevation you can see that we have two existing levels already present as a default in the in the template that we're using again if you're using a different template you're going to have a different arrangement okay but these levels are not necessarily pertinent to the design model that we need to generate so i'm going to start editing them okay the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to rename level 0 as to ground floor okay now you can see we get prompted would you like to rename the corresponding views so this again is a criteria that may be dictated by an office standard or you may want as an individual if you're working as an individual so some offices would like you to have your views and your levels with the same naming convention so that the views reference the level succinctly and intelligently okay but that being said it's not very workable it becomes kind of difficult as the project develops and you have multiple duplicates of the same view the association can get kind of loose then anyway okay so it really is a choice matter whether or not you want your levels and your views to correspond to another because this is a tutorial video i want people to understand specifically what they're looking at so in this instance i'm going to say yes i'm going to rename the corresponding views to the levels that they're associated with similarly here i'm going to relabel this to first floor okay i'm gonna press yes okay so that's the first thing we've done is we've relabeled the existing views that we have okay as before with the grids you can see that we only have our marker on one end and not the other we do have this little checkbox at the end that we can show the bubble yes or no okay and as you can see when i move one one level all the levels move okay and the idea is you see this little lock and this dashed line this is showing that the node is connected to the node below and it keeps all your levels tied into one another in plane okay if i turn that off it'll move it independently okay i wouldn't recommend that try keep your level locked for presentation perspective purposes and you will see it just keeps things nice and neat okay finally if you want as a default the level indicator to be on both sides of your drawing on all your elevations and sections again you can go into your type and you can put your symbol at each end and press ok all right so now that we have updated the existing levels we're going to create a couple of new levels okay so again in the structure or the architecture tab you will see we have a datum okay and under datum we have level and grid because we're an elevation level is now present to us it wasn't in the plan view earlier on so we can click here or we can use the shortcut key ll and that'll bring up our level function okay here i'm going to put in one level i'm going to put it in another level and another one on top and finally i'm going to put one in down here now again this is obviously project specific okay so i'm doing a commercial project in this instance and um the floor to floor is approximately about 37.50 okay so i'm going to change the first floor to 37.50 and then here it's going to be 7 500 okay and on top of that then we are going to have our roof level so i'm actually going to put this as the roof eve thieves okay oh sorry apologies i'm renamed the wrong thing um roof eves okay i'm not going to rename that corresponding actually i will for the moment i'm going to rename the corresponding view from mount okay and this is going to be part level yep okay and here is going to be our second floor okay so that distance there i want to have em to the roof eve is going to be 1125 and then i actually want to eave to the parapet level to be 1500 so i put a dimension between the two and now when i select this i can actually just change the value of the dimension to make sure the level to level is correct that means i don't have to do the the maths if i don't want to and i can delete that then okay so again as before i'm just going to increase the grid slightly so noting that they're all pinned so i'm going to actually go back to my ground floor i'm going to select all my grids i'm going to press pn or up apologies to unpin them and then i'm going to go back to my elevation i'm going to select my grids and i'm just going to increase them and decrease them a little bit just so i'm given enough breeding room around the model data and again i'm going to go to reverse side and do the same increase them and decrease the overall height okay finally i'm just going to rename this one and found level foundation okay and obviously that's not going to be 1900 below and that's going to be minus 900 in this instance okay now as you can see we get a bit of a dog leg and we get a bit of an overlap and the way to avoid the overlap is we can actually dog like these so you see this little um this little break indicator here okay that's um that adds the elbow to the dog like and as you can see that drops that node and that node locally okay and then we can actually expand out either side around the text just to make it a little bit more presentable and now we have kind of a presentable looking group of levels okay i'm just going to expand these out in either side and the east to s direction as well give breeding room and again do the same on the north and you will have to do this throughout now truth be told you can bind your levels and your grids to scope box and you can control them all with a scope box i actually have a detailed video if you want to look up in the top right hand corner there that goes into how scope boxes function and then using them you can actually select these elements and you can propagate extents and you can match the presentation that you've created in let's say the north elevation here in every corresponding view that looks the same okay so that's a hard kind of a concept to get around it's too detailed for this but just note that you can do this once and if you're intelligent about it you can actually publish it to all other views okay so that brings to close the step number four which is to create the project levels so step five is to put in your project base point so um the project base point is a tricky one people get kind of confused about an awful lot generally geolocation and reverse seems to cause a lot of grief okay but in this instance if you don't have any specific survey information that's come in yet and if you're working ahead of survey information let's say on a conceptual scheme or something like that then you still want to assign a project based point the reason why this is so important is because you can actually use it as a reference point for linking all other discipline data and it makes sense to do it before the the information gets too dense in the project you can do this across all your disciplines and very easily then you have your models coordinated going forward okay so i'm going to go if you look on the floor plans that we have here on the right hand side i'm going to go to the site okay and with the side plan okay i'm going to select you'll see we have this little kind of um marker down here if i select one of these elements you will see the shared base point okay so this is the project base point this shared site there's also an internal point but i'm not going to go into that for this particular tutorial okay so this is the project base point and you can see it's got norden's eastings and elevation okay and similarly if i want to tab select you will see below that is a little triangular indicator and that's the survey point okay and that again if you think about it that is your datum for your project base point to be set off of in the future okay and in this instance we do not have either um the we don't have any survey information essentially so what i want to do is i want to nominate a known point for the duration of the project that is not very likely to change okay now that's an important criteria what you want to do is establish something that you think is pretty much locked down so if you're working off of an existing building and you're extending it there's a lot of points of reference that probably aren't going to alter and you can set up all of your project base points on your various disciplines to that one intersection let's say that's not going to change in this it's all it's a complete new build let's say so there is the need to establish something that likely isn't going to change in this instance i'm going to establish that okay a1 no matter what or maybe c1 depending on the site orientation is not going to change so we have a site orientation roughly of this and as you can see i've highlighted a1 as the least likely element to change now it could be c1 we could have a minimum distance from planning requirements or something that we have to keep from the boundary and in which case you might choose c1 so look it's it's project specific in this instance we're going to use a1 okay i can literally select these two elements together and move them onto the grid intersection you'll notice suddenly the whole project's after shifting up that's because i never actually stopped the association of the current location of the project base point information and server information from the data i've already created so what i did when i moved that up is i actually moved the whole project information up as well which is not what we want so i'm going to control set that to undo that okay and what i'm going to say is you can see that you have this little clip okay and again i'm going to turn off the clip for the survey point as well now what this means is i can freely move these within the model without the model moving with them the point of this is to have a standard point across the model that if you relocate the model the whole model relocates but you actually need to unclip them first if you want to move them independent of the information you've already created so now that they're unclipped i'm going to select the move and i'm going to move them up to create intersection a1 and you can see this time nothing moved except the project based point and the survey point okay again i'm going to select the base point and i'm going to clip it just note you can see the easings and the nortons are after updating okay and the elevation remains at zero always set your project base point to your ground floor top of slab level unless you're told otherwise so basically it means that before you have any datum level that'll give you an elevation you are working relative to your ground floor level and that means all your levels are relative to that ground floor level it's just a really good way of keeping control on the building heights and the respective geometry that you need to extrude up and down relative to the ground and that means all you need to do is find out what your top of finished slab level is going to be relative to your survey change that one value and you're sorted okay and again i'm just going to tab select again and i'm going to pick the survey point i'm going to do that okay and now we've basically relocated our project base point and it means any external referencing models that are going to come into this that we're going to link to if we establish the same point the same grids the same levels that are pertinent to the discipline then everything will just automatically overlay if you do auto argent origin or auto project base point it depends okay so that was step five which was to how to assign your project base point so step six is to create your standard views and your underlays okay so this is an interesting one in this example that we've already presented when we were creating our levels the views were automatically being created so as you can see on the floor plans on the right hand side we've already loosely populated all of our floor plans okay but this isn't always the instance it depends on the way that the levels are created and the level indicators as a default they're blue when there's a view associated to them and they're black when there's not so that's just something to be cognizant of you can see here on the structural plans that we've only got a few of them for example so not every level is deemed a structural level at the moment so it's just to understand that levels of different properties i can create views okay and and in this instance what we're going to do is i'm going to actually delete are roofies parapet uh second floor foundation and first floor plans and i'm gonna go to the process of creating all them which you know okay so all those plans are gone okay and you can see all the levels are still present so nothing has changed about the the levels nothing has been affected about the levels just because we've deleted the associated plan views okay but what we can do now is we can go to our view tab and under plan views we can create a floor plan okay and here you can see do not duplicate existing views so you can turn that on and off depending if you want to create a new existing view or not okay so in this instance i'm going to leave that active and i'm literally going to select all of these the first floor of the foundation the powerpoint level the roof eaves and the second floor and we're going to create a new view for all of these okay so when i press ok quite simply on the right hand side you're going to see all those views populated okay now what's interesting is people never really understand what order they should model their buildings and should they start in foundation should they start with the ground floor should they start with the first floor should they start in the 3d view and develop the external envelope there's a lot of different criteria that could be considered the best way to start depending on the project in my opinion the best way to start is project dependent in terms of modeling but setting up your underlays is not project dependent there's actually an intelligent way of doing it each view can reference a view below or a view above if you wish okay and that's something to understand so as you can see on the ground floor here okay you can see that on the left hand side we have all of this information okay and looking for the underlay segment where is this it's escaping me sorry underlay here apologies um late night last night uh we have the the range base level okay and what we can do is we can actually change that okay so being in the ground floor i can actually create a foundation underneath now what's difficult here is we actually can't see anything okay and the reason we can't see anything is because we haven't actually populated any model data yet okay but you can see that the top of the range this gives us the range base level okay which is the foundation level then it gives a top which is the the ground floor okay and you can set the orientation to look down or to look up depending okay so what's interesting about this though is i can go into the foundation level and under that i can pick ground floor and you can see that the top of that is first floor and saying to look down okay so i can say look up look down okay i'm gonna look down i'm still gonna treat it as if we're looking down upon us okay so this is still not presenting any information okay but if we go to the ground floor and i let's say generate a series of walls okay so i'm going to press wa okay and i'm going to set the top of my wall constraint to parapet level okay and i'm going to select chain i'm going to leave that particular block work wall that we've assigned okay and with this i'm going to join the location line i'm going to say um core center line and i'm going to put the core center line on the grid boundaries okay so i'm gonna do a rectangle and i'm going to draw directly to the grids okay as you can see the core the inner wall is now aligned to the grid because the inner wall is deemed the core when you go into the structural build up you can see that the core boundary is this structural wall only okay so when you draw the core center line you will draw to the the structural center line provided you've got your your element assemblies in the correct sequence okay what's brilliant about this is let's say if i went and offset all these walls by 500 for argument's sake okay i can actually align these walls to the grids from the core center line and lock them and again tap until i get the core centerline lock align to the grid tab until you select core center line lock and align to grid happens it gets core center line unlock okay and this means what we've done is we've locked our walls to the grids so if i unpin that grid okay i can drag the grid line and the wall will always stay adhered to the grid and more importantly the structural element of the wall is attached to the grid okay that's just something to be cognizant of so i've undone them and that is now pinned again okay and so everything is back as it should be okay so in the ground floor we've populated this and what we can see is our our full um wall build up all the way to parapet in this instance however we want to see the ground floor in the foundation plan okay so that we can work and make sure that our walls both are external and our internal let's say so let's say i'm going to pick up the internal partition and i'm just going to draw a notional series of um walls there just for argument's sake just to make it clear okay so we've actually got the first floor walls that are present as well okay so i can go down to the foundation view and because i have set the underlay to ground floor all the way up to the first floor looking down on our foundation plan we can now see the information above that we can then model out against so i can actually press wa here for the wall and i can go to wall foundation 440 block work i can pick the core center line okay and again much the same way as previous i can draw that across the grid intersections as such and now i have a foundation no obviously this hasn't been designed out this rising wall but i have a foundation wall in place and then i can go into my structural tab and create our wall paste give me a moment i'm just going to set that minus 500 nice 500 so we can actually see your new fans and there you go so now i've got a strip foundation under the rising wall under the the um the ground floor walls let's say okay so in 3d space you can see that that's all arranged now okay um but most importantly then once i'm done with that underlay here i can literally just set that to none again on the left hand side okay and what we're seeing because the view range is going up i can actually change that view range there to let's say um zero and zero so we're only getting what's on the found level and now you can see that we have the foundation just the strip okay again i could go back and change that to 300 and 300. and you'll see that we have the rising wall there okay but again i can go ahead and turn on that underlay for the ground floor at any time even though the view range doesn't go that high so setting up your your underlays so that you can see the information pertinent to the levels above and below is a really really powerful thing i can now go to the ground floor okay and do the same you can see that we have the foundation level okay and to the to the top of the foundation level basically so what we can see although we can't select this is we can actually see that inner line of the rising wall from the foundation so again if you have a linked structural model that has the levels correctly aligned to let's say your model and everything is geolocated correctly you could set the underlay to the foundation level with the structural model visibility turned on and you will see the structural model underlay so if you're populating architectural walls you can find where the structure is lying below it's just a consideration to know okay um so that is step six which is how to create your standard views and how to assign the sensible underlays on a per view basis step 7 geolocate your project so i need to preface this first of all to say that you may be at a point in the project that you don't necessarily have survey information or site information available to you you may be doing a conceptual design scheme of the back of google maps or something like that that is not the point to do this exercise then this exercise is for when you actually have the survey data from the site and you can set out relative to a known um coordinate system for your area for example in ireland it's the irish transverse mercator or the itm coordinates okay it's going to vary depending where you are in the world this is a point to do the moment you get your survey data not beforehand okay um so with that in mind you can do this at any point in the project the earlier in the project you can do it the better because it means that it gives you more time to have all your disciplines developed off the back of this already located rather than having to go and push the coordinate system onto all your links down the line okay um so to start i'm in the site plan here and you can see that i have the the survey point and the project base point visible if they're not visible for you you go into your visibility graphics you go down to site under visibility graphics sorry apologies where you're hiding um and you can turn on your project base point and your survey point there okay now from there what we want to do is we want to select our survey point so i tab selected there and i'm going to change the clip state i'm going to unclip that i'm going to change the nordings and easings on this to zero zero respectively okay and as you can see that's loosely located back to where we had at the start of the video i'm also going to clip that there now so that cements that in place your datum level is always relative to zero really unless you have a project specification that migrates it closer to the building but let's just assume in this instance we're working off of zero zero zero okay then on our project base point now we can actually start putting in the values that we want okay so i want to go to a sample image there to explain what we're doing with the site okay so this is a theoretical site in a theoretical location that doesn't exist all right but it should give you the uh the bones of what you need okay so as you can see we have our true north direction here and desired project north is at 25 degrees from that we also have our nordines and eastings for where we want our intersection at the grid a1 to be or our project base point as well as our final desired level for the ground floor top of slab level okay so that's the ground floor elevation is at 69.125 meters okay so we have 720 000 765 000 and 69.125 these values here just know they're notional they will change depending on where you are in the world so from that going back to the model okay i'm going to put my nordings at 720 000 respectively and the model will disappear into the ether you double click your middle mouse wheel you will find where the model's gone in space it may be very very far away but you will see it okay and then if you come in you select the same point again and you change your east-west direction that was 765 000 i believe i'm going to press enter again it's disappeared little mouse wheel to zoom extents and then you'll find your project finally because we set our project base point at the same level as our top of floor slab level when we started the project we can now assign the elevation to that that we want and we want 69.125 or in millimeters which is the base unit for the autodesk and default template i'm going to press 69125 millimeters and press enter now what's interesting about that is you can see everything has relocated from the project relative to the survey point so that's our zero zero and everything is relative to that okay finally if you don't want to be looking at your view like that on your site plan you can crop your extents here so when you zoom extents it'll locate in but the just note that you still also need to turn on your annotation crop for that but you will always zoom if the survey is visible it's a survey point so you should go into your site information then and you should probably turn off the visibility of your survey point so that when you zoom extends you'll zoom into your model each time when you're on your site plan okay i also want to note that this is not set up to any kind of particular orientation you can see that this is set up to project north or true north okay but you can see there's no variation yet because there hasn't been any rotation placed okay so now that we've placed loosely um our well not loosely actually accurately we've placed our relative new orleans eastings we can now look at our elevations and update the reporting information from our elevations so when we go into our north elevation here you can see that our levels are not reporting the necessary level change relative to the survey point and that's because we actually have to instruct them to do that so in our level information here and under edit type we can select whether they reference the project page point which is the zero and everything is relative to the top of slab as we've earlier discussed or the survey point and when we press survey point you can see it's going to update to report our 69125 and everything then is relative down to our site date okay so because of the scale of the projects that i tend to work on we always reference our levels back to the datum to the known survey point um due to the way that the setting up techniques and stuff we can automate a lot of that on site with gps equipment that kind of stuff that can understand the relative values but if you're doing something like a domestic project you may want to keep your reporting levels um on your standard elevations relative to zero and for construction drawings and relative to the survey information let's say for planning drawings for example so they understand the relative elevation okay and so that's just consideration just to understand you can also duplicate and create a new level type that will report let's say your relative to your project based point and you can have a second level type and you could change your levels presentation on a per view basis if you wish okay and so following on from that and we have now updated our levels and we've updated the relative elevation and the northeast and eastings but one thing we haven't done is we haven't given the project north versus true north rotation okay so going back to the site plan on the project nor i'm going to go to coordinates okay and you'll see that we can acquire publish coordinates not kind of that's not what we want under position we can say rotate true north okay you must be rotated to north available only in plan views the views properties to use a different view okay so what this is telling me is i can't rotate the true north location yet because i don't have a view aka the view i'm on set to show true north okay so when i come back here i am going to go to the orientation on the project proper on the floor plan properties sorry i'm going to select true north okay from that then on the position i'm going to rotate through norse and from here i'm going to rotate 25 so you can see it picks the center rotation and you rotate at 25 degrees now if you look at that that doesn't look correct does it we look at the cyclone you can see i've gone in the opposite direction okay but the interesting thing about that is our true north direction is actually facing so if you imagine the orientation of our building okay the true north is basically up up off the top left corner so if we rotate from the center in that same direction we're actually going to do the inverse of what we wanted okay so i'm going to control z that and under under the position settings i'm going to rotate through north and rotate 25 in this direction okay and now that's looking a little bit more sensible isn't it on our site plan though we can then after the fact change whether we go to project north or true north so our site drawing should always show us our true north orientation and we now know that this building is oriented correctly in line with what we want again we can go to any one of our other plans and because they're all set the project north they stare they stay kind of square to the views that you're working on everything is nice and perpendicular whereas on our site plan we now have true north rotation in place for the project duration so that's basically a very quick overview of how to geolocate your project and i will do a more detailed video on this and maybe i'll do a full amalgamation of multiple disciplinary models into one let's say not necessarily a federated model from the navisworks sense but one combined um revit project that has multiple links that are all geo-located and correct relative to one another i think we'll do that in the near future so hang tight for that okay step eight set up your design options so depending on the nature of the project that you have you may need to create design options an example of that may be that you have a known building footprint but within that building footprint you want to test different arrangements with the client to see what best suits their needs let's say other brief okay so let's say these internal wall layouts you may want two or three variations of this to feed to the client and to get feedback from okay um historically in cloud you may create multiple individual cad files for this or control it with layers turning on and off but this instance we can actually control it all natively within the one project and um the way to do that is true design options now i have much more detail breakdown of design options in the top right corner i can never get the direction right i am when i'm doing the mirrored so press the i button there and it will send you a link to design options if you want to know more about them in a bit of detail but in this instance i'm just going to show how you can create the framework for design options not necessarily how to assign your design options okay so if you go into your manage tab under design options you'll see that the design options dialog there and when you open it there's nothing it says you are now editing the main model so everything as a default is added to the main model in this set we want to press new okay under option set and this gives us basically a container for multiple design options to be placed in and we have as a default option set one primary okay and then under option we can select new and that will be our option two and new and that would be our option tree okay and as you can see there's been no change to the geometry but we actually have multiple options available design options available below so let's say for example i wanted to select these walls okay i can select those walls and i can pop them into option set one primary okay oh sorry my apologies i did that a little bit incorrectly and i was meant to go back to manage add to set and i can add them to option set one for example okay so nothing changes because option set one is set as primary okay and all you can see is the amalgamation of main model and primary as default but if i go down here and i change to option two you will see that that information has disappeared because it's only pertinent to the main model and the option set one but it's not present on option set two so that's a loose introduction of how to set up your design options in route step number nine is create your phasing for the project so um depending again on the type of project you have all revit projects have phasing technically in the sense that by default there's an existing and a proposed phase present most people just get started drafting in what's called the new construction phase as a default and they don't even recognize that there's just there's phases when they're starting out but this is something that um can trip people up okay so if you have an existing building that you're making additions to or you have to do enabling works to enable the the project to proceed or you have multiple phases of works for a proposed project you need to introduce your project phasing this is not a catch-all you don't need to introduce phasing as a default and or additional phases as a default it's more just to be considered that they're there and understand your project context and how to introduce them if you need them i have two very detailed videos on phasing the primary one there again is in the top right corner on the eye make sure to look it up and um yeah we'll get into it okay so looking at phasing very briefly and please go view that other video it's very detailed and most people seem to have gotten a grasp of it after they've watched it but if you go into the phasing information here the way to set it up is if you go to manage tab okay you can go to phases under the phasing tab okay and you will see as default as i said there's an existing new construction phase okay but you may have new construction phase one phase two phase three depending and what you can do is you can actually add um additional phases into any project one thing i will always make sure to note is you do not need a demolition phase the demolition or enabling works presentation is controlled by phase filters okay so you can see we have new construction okay i want to introduce i'm going to call that phase one okay and then after and i'm going to call that phase two and that automatically updates okay so i've actually introduced an additional phase to the project now okay in the phase filters you can see that these are the controls as default to present the information so to show previous phase for example does not show any new geometry belonging to the phase you're looking at it does not show um it shows existing as overwritten demolished is not displayed in temporary is not displayed these are kind of hard things to explain to understand basically your view as a default is set to face okay so i didn't save the settings there so you can see that i still have new construction okay but as a default your phase filters are specific to the presentation of the view phase that you are showing okay a little bit convoluted again advice check out that video to see the workflow okay but going back to our manage tab i'm going to go to phases i'm just going to reintroduce those phases that i didn't save okay um so that's phase one and then i'm going to put another one afterwards base filters are okay and then the graphic overrides you can change how the various phase filters interact with geometry to present the geometry okay so in this instance i'm not happy that the demolished is automatically on a black dash line i'm actually going to change that to red and i'm also going to change that to red on our cut patterns i'm going to change them also to red and press okay and on the projection surface pattern i'm also going to change it to red and that means no matter where you're cutting through your demo layer will show that's red okay so i'm going to press apply i'm going to press ok and as you can see our project is on phase one there because that was the intermediate phase a new construction phase that we originally drafted on but in the ground floor plan here for example so i'm going to rename that ground floor and i'm going to call that let's say phase one sorry do i want to rename the corresponding views in this instance this as well as getting that earlier on in the video where i said that it can get very convoluted when you keep renaming views or adding views or duplication views so in this instance i'm going to press no okay and i'm also going to duplicate this view with detailing and i'm going to rename that view phase two okay phase two now looking down when i'm in phase two here on the left hand side you can see under the view properties that the phase for the view is set to phase two i'm gonna set that to phase phase one i'm gonna set that to phase two and i want you to look at the geometry that's been created and what happens to it so when i press phase two you can see it grays out it becomes less visible less strong okay and on the previous i'm going to sell previous and new so with that what we have is we've kind of gray scaled out the existing geometry and now i can come in here i can press wall okay and i'm going to draw in a new wall construction from here to here oh not that wall or not um give me a second i'm going to pick draw a new wall construction from here to here okay and as you can see that's darker than the default around us but i'm also because i'm intersecting that wall now i'm going to tab to select oh i can't select that one in the previous phase no oh is that sorry that's on primary set one policies so on the primary set one okay um on the option set i'm going to set that phase demolished to phase two so in phase two of works that gets demolished okay and then i'm going to go back to the main model option here so design options combined with phasing can become very confusing make sure if you're putting together a strategy for your model and you have design options and phasing that you outline the strategy in a document that can be passed upon around the entire design team if you are not the one who's going to be anchoring the project if you're anchoring the project the whole time or you're working solo you you have an understanding of what's happening within the model but you really need to be descript for any other user who's going to come in after you or make edits if it's getting passed on to another technician or or architect or something okay um so now we put in a proposed well you'll notice that we can't see the demolished one okay but what i can do is i can duplicate with detail and again our phase two and i'm gonna rename this and i'm gonna call it ground floor phase phase two enabling works okay basically demolition for phase two and under the phase filters i can show previous and demo and now you will see the dashed line for the wall that's been constructed the walls has been demolished sorry and the wall is being constructed is no longer available because we've changed what the actual the um phasing filters are allowing us to show okay so again if we go i've i said show previous and demo and here you can see that the new geometry is not displayed but the existing is overridden aka its grayscale okay the demolish is overwritten aka it has gone to the demolished presentation of line styles and finally the temporary items are not displayed so that's a very very quick overview of how you can set up your phasing for your project in particular okay so that concludes alarm and hopefully sufficiently detailed video for for everyone who may be starting out in revit and just needs to get a footing on the best approaches to to kick off the modelers okay it's not about just sitting down and immediately drawing the walls if you put the framework for the model in place first then everyone you're contending with afterwards everyone you have to um design alongside and coordinate with they'll have an easier life you'll look more professional as a result and you'll be able to manage the project a little bit better now there's more management strategies into maintaining the integrity of the file to go through you know we didn't i didn't go through um project browser organization for example i didn't go through and you know sheet and view organization i didn't go to view templates any of that kind of thing but really the fundamental steps that i outlined there are your initiation steps basically instigation steps for every model that you start and give or take maybe one or two instances on project particulars so if you can habitualize them you would have every model that you start up and running within a matter of minutes that was a very long-winded exercise to explain it but the reality of the actual production to get to that point is very very very quick okay so i'll have a corresponding blog post with this all broken down into subsequent steps to go to go for you to go over and just kind of read through at a more linear slow pace if you wish and that'll be over at 8020bim.com i have a little support page now as well over on buy me a coffee if you want to get me a coffee or a beer or something just to justify the late nights you're more than welcome to i won't stop you too and i am starting to set up a membership portal as well anyone who'd like to become a member they'll have a discord chat available they can come in they can ask questions all that kind of stuff just want to kind of harbor a bit of a community really and get a bit of feedback on what what people would like to to learn about more so than me assuming what people would like to learn about and so yeah that's it i hope you enjoyed it i hope fair play tv lasted this long i barely did and look i'll see you for the next one mind yourselves be safe you

Channel: 8020 BIM

Views: 8,677

Rating: 4.98524 out of 5

Keywords: How to setup a Revit Model, starting steps to model in revit, project information in revit, opening a new revit model, grids in revit, creating grids in revit, levels in revit, create levels in revit, adding levels in revit, revit project base point, move project base point revit, create revit plan view, Revit View Underlay, Geolocate a revit model, revit coordinate system, revit true north, revit project north, create revit design options, create revit phases, revit, autodesk

Id: hXQasFhUaY8

Length: 55min 51sec (3351 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021