Revit Crash Course 1: Intro to BIM & Revit

welcome to Revit crash course for Architects Session One introduction to Bim and Revit this course is designed to help transition from 2D drafting to Revit and master its essential tools and features in the easiest and smoothest way possible let's begin [Music] by the end of this course you should know how to accomplish the following tasks we're going to navigate the Autodesk Revit workspace and the custom mg Schlatter template that's been designed just for you we're going to work with a basic drawing and editing tools we're going to create levels and grids we're going to create a whole 3D building with walls curtain walls Windows Doors and More we're going to add floors and ceilings and roofs to this building model we will learn how to create component based and customized stairs we'll add component features such as furniture and equipment we'll set up sheets for plotting with text Dimensions details tags and schedules and will create construction details we're going to go over all of the tools that you need to utilize revvet to create a 3D building information model let's get started when you first open Revit what you'll see is the open screen this has a couple of dialogues on it we have projects families and resources this projects area is where you'll open all of the projects you'll be working on you'll see thumbnails for the last four projects that you've opened but you need to be very careful do not ever click on one of these to open a centralized project we'll go over that in a minute families are the components that you build your models out of each of these is its own separate file that then gets loaded into your project the MJS template comes pre-loaded with a number of components so you shouldn't need to bring in too much but we'll show you how to load things modify them and in time create your own families the resources tab is really great Autodesk has a lot of information for training you on the basics of Revit what we're going to go through is how to use rabbit on a day-to-day basis with your mg slider template if at any time you need help with how to accomplish something you can always go to the Autodesk resources and watch their videos as well all right so let's get into a project the first thing I'm going to do is actually set up a new project so I can walk you through this we're going to click new and you'll see it's asking you for a template file Revit comes pre-loaded with four separate templates construction architectural structural and mechanical in our case we're actually going to browse to where our template is located you can see the US Imperial file this comes as part of revit's basic software when you install the package so I've clicked on the Revit template file and I'm going to use that to load this project and here it is so the first thing that you're going to see is what we call the splash screen this will show up every time that you open up a project using the MGs Schlatter template so the first thing we really want to do is create our project so we need to come in here and you'll click on this and when it turns blue what this means is that this is a family that's pre-loaded into this template you can also see that up here the borders change to modify title blocks and you have a little button called edit family if I were to click this it would actually open up this family in this project and it would allow me to edit and change it in this case we're going to click on these text boxes and these are set up so that you can just type right in them so we're going to type in new construction our project name will be sample project one our owner will be MGs and for our address when I click on this one it actually opens a text dialog box because there's more to type in so I'm just going to put one two three main okay now this information is smart information it will report to other pages in the template automatically so if we come down to our project browser down here this is everything that lives in the model so I'm going to scroll down to Sheets and I'm going to click the little plus button and that will open up the dialog that shows you all of the sheets that are pre-loaded in the template so let's go to the first floor plan I'm going to double click on this and it will magically open our sheet view so it comes pre-loaded with the border and if I zoom in on this it is automatically filled in all of the information that we just added for the project okay so let's go back to our open glow sheet view I need to set this model up as a Central File what that means is it's its own Standalone file that multiple people can work in at the same time if you are ever in a situation where you are the only person who is possibly going to work on a project it's okay not to set up a central but it's best practice to always have a central because it automatically creates backup files and you never know when you're going to need to ask for some help so let's save this and we'll walk through that process together I'm going to come up here and the first thing it's going to ask me to do is I need to save this file because we just opened it and it doesn't even have a name yet so I'm going to click the save dialog and in my case I'm going to save it to this folder and we're going to call it MGS sample project one and then I'm going to add Central after this and you'll see why in just a minute okay so up here you can see that it changed the name of this Central project so it is saved but it's still not officially a Central File what I need to do is actually turn on the collaboration tools so again up here at the top of the toolbar we're going to scroll over to collaborate and you can see that there's a bunch of things that are grayed out you can't click on them yet that means that the file is not properly set up so we're going to click collaborate and it's going to open up this collaborate dialog your network means that you would be on your local area network or your Lan or your wide area network w-a-n this assumes that you are actually Linked In on a computer system with someone else and it's Internet it's internal to your office Bim 360 is an online file management source that has been provided by Autodesk we'll go through that in another series of videos but it's the way of the future your Revit models will essentially live in the cloud and Bim 360 allows anyone with the right credentials to access that project so we could be working on a project in the Philippines and I could have access even though I'm not physically connected to the office so in this case we are going to do it within our Network and you're going to save the file on your computer as you're working okay once all of that is finished you'll now see that these buttons up here have colors to them that means that we've properly set up our collaborative work sets and you can see those by clicking on this button up here work sets these are the work sets that automatically appear in all Revit projects you can create your own and we'll go through that in another video but just know for now that you need to have these work sets enabled and visible in all views in order for your project to work properly okay so now that we've gotten our collaboration ready we're going to save this file one more time and then we're going to get another dialogue do you want to save this as the central model the answer is yes and that's the reason that we saved the file with that name Central after it what you'll notice now is this little save button has gone away and this little green one up here called synchronize is on I'm going to click this this is the first time that I'm synchronizing and I'm going to say okay it will go through the process and now the central model is ready it's all synchronized the work sets are ready that means that I can now open a local version of this and someone else could also open a local version of this and work on it at the same time so let's go through that I'm going to close the central I'm going to close this so this is the way that you're going to open your project every single time you have a central so now we're going to go open and we're going to navigate to where we saved our Central File okay so here is that Central when you're working in a file you're going to create that new local when you detach from the central this means that you're setting up something different you're you're taking a package of that model and pulling it apart and like setting it off on a shelf somewhere detach for Central is really useful if you're collaborating with consultants and you need to send them a copy of your model things like that but for the most part you'll be working in a new local model so let's click open and here it is it looks just the same but you'll notice up here that I have the project file here's all those names that we put into it Central and then it added automatically after that my username from Revit so um when you have your own local file your unique Autodesk ID will follow after this under our architecture tab you'll see that a number of these are grayed out at this time that's because I'm still in the splash screen I actually have to be in a floor plan in order for the Architectural Components to start being active so I'm going to come down here to my project browser again this is my my navigation my map to the Revit file and you'll see that it's organized in a number of different ways so when I look at the splash screen it follows this standard so each of our sections or our plans or our details all have a code and this is how this template is arranged now if you ever work in templates for other offices you may see some differences not everybody follows the same standard but this is how this template has been established so if I want to navigate to a floor plan I go under my views then I click this plus button next to floor plans and you can see I have exist and new and this has been set up because not all projects are new construction they might have renovations to existing so if you have to model existing conditions you want to make sure that your phases are properly set in Revit that's why there's two of these so for now we're going to say that this is a new building and I'm going to start on F1 or the first floor okay the template came pre-loaded with four walls that's really handy but let's say I want to add another wall first thing I'm going to do come up here and I'm going to drop something down okay these are the properties so this is where you'll start to see some of the pre-loaded information in this template so let's pick a generic four inch wall and just come over here and start drawing something um so I've taken it and you can see my Snaps are on so very similar to AutoCAD you're going to get mid points and end points and you can change these settings as well if you want more or less of them to show up um and there I have it I had four exterior walls and now I have four rooms okay so let's say I want to add a door I'm going to click on the door button drop it down my first one that comes up is a four inch frame I have a bunch of other sections that I could choose from but for now let's say I want a wood door that's three foot by seven foot I click on that component and as I go to the wall it automatically places it I can choose to flip the orientation I can place it on another wall once I click it's placed in the physical wall so now this is a smart component if I click on this and I look under the properties here there's a bunch of information that we can fill out and things that we can turn on and off and we'll explore all of those as we go through this training process all right let's keep going let's drop in a window and let's just change this one to a double hung 36 by 48 and we'll plop it in right there okay so we're moving along in this um and then we want to go to our components so the components that are pre-loaded in the template are organized by CSI category and that's based on specifications now the ones that you see in this one are are limited but the template that you'll be receiving at the end of this course will have numerous components already pre-filled out so let's just drop a quick plastic laminate countertop in here and you can see I can grab it I can move around I can pop it in the corner I can stretch I can shrink I can change the height of this if I come over to the properties I can scroll down and I can say I want this height to be 30 inches and even though you don't see that in plan view it did change the height in 3D all right so now we've dropped in these components let's start looking at them in three dimensions that's the great benefit of Revit right so we're going to go down to our views and we're going to click the plus sign by the 3D views over here Revit will automatically create a single 3D view whenever you start a file you can always create more 3D views and you can duplicate and save them and rename them and all sorts of different things but you will always have this one with the brackets called 3D it's just automatic and Revit so here is our very simple Box model and you can see there's our countertop along with our window I want to turn the side Splash and the backsplash off on this so I'm actually going to select these check boxes and I'm going to turn those off and now let's say I want to change that height again so instead of it being at 30 inches I want it at 42 inches and once I do that you can see it physically move in the model so when you now go to your floor plan and I create a new view for instance so we're going to scroll all the way over here to the view tab and I drop this down and I say I want to add an elevation Revit is smart and it can toggle between where there are physical elevations in the room just by moving the marker I want to do this elevation and there you go so you can toggle where the viewports land it has automatically created a very simple interior elevation for us to use now we can annotate this and we can modify it and the great thing is that if I move this window over 11 feet this way it's automatically moved in the floor plan okay so getting back into our architecture tab there's quite a few more things in here that we can utilize The Columns this is something that you can do if you're actually physically loading structural columns in we're not going to do that in this session adding roofs will come later but you can click on it and you can see some of the basic roofs that are pre-loaded into the template now I've actually started a command here and the reason I know that is because my toolbar turned gray which means that I can't enter another command until I finish this one so if you find yourself sort of stuck in a command there's a couple of tips and tricks that you can do you can press the escape button and that will open you back to this modify tab you can see this one's changed colors that's telling me that I'm still in a command so if I cancel this edit mode now everything is back to normal so I I was in the mode where I was going to draw a footprint of that roof but now I've exited out of that mode so sometimes in CAD you could get stuck in a command bar sequence sometimes this is similar in Revit you just have to finish what you were doing first either save the work or cancel out of it the next quick thing that we can do is pop in a ceiling again we've already got some pre-loaded ceiling types in here and I'm just clicking on the rooms Revit is automatically sketching the outline of my room based on my walls so we click on this and we got a little dialogue down here that's because in the template you can't see ceilings in a floor plan in our case we need to go navigate to the reflected ceiling plan so again back over to our project browser I'm going to drop down ceiling plans RCP F1 and there's our ceiling it's automatically put in it's a smart grid so if I want to shift it over all I have to do is click on one of these grid lines I can select my move tool I can move it this way that way I can rotate it let's say 45 degrees so it's very simple to edit these pieces now again this is a 3D ceiling it's not just a hatch pattern so if I go back to my 3D you'll now see here's that ceiling if I click on it it turns blue and you can sort of see through it so on my floor plan I'm going to add a working Section all I did was go to view and then click on Section I'm creating a new view and then it draws the indicator and there it is now when I click on this you'll see this box this indicates how far back the scope line is cutting through your section again you're cutting a section through a live model so you have to tell Revit how far back or how close up you want it to see in this case let's move our box back and that reduces our view range which you can see up here it's called our clipping offset to about five feet I'm going to zoom in on the section arrow and double click it and that automatically opens my view so here you can see my exterior wall with that window the ceiling that automatically got put in at certain height and then you can see my door you can see my levels and you can see here I'm missing a floor right now but this shows you how quickly you can get stuff built in Revit so when I click on my ceiling let's say I wanted to change my height again go to your properties for that ceiling and you get eight feet let's change it to 10 feet and it automatically moves up in the model it will also change if you were to tag this ceiling in your reflected ceiling plan all right so let's go back to our tools so here's where we can add a floor very simple I can do it in three dimensions but it's easier to do it in a floor plan when you create a floor it's very similar to a ceiling except that you are going to create the boundary line so I'm going to click this box zoom out and let's say I want to add a floor slab right underneath those exterior walls you see these little locks they can be used to align lock your floor to your wall so if you move one the other one moves you want to use this command pretty carefully I don't usually recommend it because things can randomly happen with it where items will get deleted but it's a good thing to know about so I've set my level for my floor at the first floor I can also drop this down and I can choose to change it to be the foundation or the second floor or the third floor but for right now this is just a slab on grade so we're going to say it's the first floor and we're going to click our check mark to indicate that we're done okay so the floor plan doesn't look much different but once I go into the section now you can see the outline of my floor slab right here all right so in no time we've built four walls a door a window a ceiling and a floor so let's add a little bit more to our model I'm going to go back to my floor plan you'll see that these tabs indicate the different views that you have open you can open numerous views at the same time and you can toggle in between them by either clicking on the tabs or you can tab on your keyboard and that will scroll through them so on my floor plan I now need to add an area or a room to this model I'm going to click on the room button and very similar to how it does ceilings Revit automatically recognizes the boundaries of the walls so I'm going to click on this it automatically tagged my room so it automatically selected a finish tag I don't want that one I want the room name and number and area okay there it is so it's automatically calculating all of this information for you now when I click on my room tag I can change the room number very easily I can change the room name I'm going to say living room and type it right in and again Revit automatically is calculating my square footage for me so if I move on to structure again I'm just going to Breeze over this one quickly unless you're drafting structural drawings you won't really use these a whole lot the foundation tools are great for adding footings and Foundation slabs you can add and integrate actual beams that are structural Framing and there's lookup tables now none of these are pre-loaded in the template because we're assuming that you're not going to do a huge amount of structural design but that can be modified in the future you can add trusses braces beam systems all sorts of components again model text and model lines for structural purposes and the same openings datums and work planes now steel this is part of the structural connections as well but what it's working on is how you cut and chamfer beams coping and mitering them how you modify the connections for your steel members modeling structure is a totally different set of videos we'd be happy to go through that at another time systems so you may find that you want to add systems in your model you can actually physically model ductwork air terminals all of the pieces and parts you can pre-load mechanical equipment a lot of vendors now have items that you can add right into the model and they have their own parameters that will report to Mechanical schedules you can add pipe you can add parallel pipes you can add bins and turns and all of the piping accessories that you need so it's a very thorough method of documenting everything in your building all right so when we look at the insert tab this is where we might interface with Cad and Revit so a few things to note here you're going to have Revit links and you're gonna have CAD links but you very very rarely want to import anything and the reason is when you import a cad file there is a bunch of backup information that comes with those CAD files so they might be adsk files in the background they might be all of the different layer and numbers and layer names so if you ever bring one in you're always always going to link it and never import it now we can bring images right into our file and that can be great to save time if you're documenting something you can manage those images and this is where you would load families that aren't pre-loaded into the template all right so let's say I want to annotate our little plan here this is where I'm going to come when I want to use Dimensions or when I want to add text or tags that all lives underneath this annotate tab so first I'm going to select the aligned Dimension these tools are very similar to CAD you're going to start at the edge of one of your walls start on the inside and then just continue on so in my case I'm actually going to scroll over and grab the center line of my wall here okay and these weren't added on any special dimensions so they're not going to be perfect but there's your string and it's automatically created it automatically connects and if I move this wall it moves with it so your dimensions are smart just like your building components are now we can add our angular Dimensions radial Dimensions if we have round elements we can add spot elevations for our floor for instance so that's at 100 feet we can add regions and detail lines and components you want to use these sparingly these are very similar to the 2D lines that you used in CAD all the time so we do have line styles that are pre-loaded in the template and it automatically defaults to your sketch line and this is a bright pink line very similar to the magenta line you may have used in CAD and it's great for creating base sketches and then you can erase a region might be something that you would want to do during a programming phase so we do have a number of hatches that are already pre-loaded for different types of materials and different colors so let's say that we wanted to indicate that this area was going to be orange for some reason we select and in this case my invisible lines were on I'm going to drop down my line Style and I'm gonna look at either my sketch lines or let's call this a solid black line and now you have a filled region now this is only a 2d element it will not show up in 3D so if I go to do our 3D View and I look around and I navigate you don't see that orange Square anywhere in there that's because it's only an annotated element okay so let's say I wanted to add a detail component we have a number of things that are pre-loaded into the template that are 2D components that will not show up in three dimensions but they can be used for simple annotations for modifying things uh quickly so let's say that I wanted to add an under cabinet light indicator here I just do this in 2D this stretches I can pull it over here I can pull this one over here but in three dimensions it doesn't show up anywhere so you have to remember the difference between 2D tools and 3D tools all right so we have a lot more in the annotate tab that we'll cover in some later sessions but you can get a glimpse at some of these items here right now let's add a text node so this is Revit reminding us that we want to save our project yes we want to do this so let's say that we want to add a text note to our floor plan I'm going to click on text and it automatically opens a modify placed text ribbon I can add text without a leader text with a leader I can have a straight leader or I can have a curve leader it can go on this side or that side Revit has quite a few tools that can be utilized for this so let's say we're going to add two segment text and I'm going to add it here and I will say note 1. all right now I can change this and let's say I want to add an arrow or a DOT I come over to the properties for that text and here are all the pre-loaded options from the template so I'm going to select a DOT and the T after it so that means that you see how this note here is landing right on the dimension string well right now you would see this and it might cross through the middle of a letter or the middle of a word and it looks a little odd so if I click on this again and I change this T to an o it automatically creates an opaque text that cleans up over anything that it lands on so this is really handy Time Saver um generally we wouldn't want to have notes crossing over Dimension strings anyway but in the instance that you've got a note that just has to cross over a wall or a region or an area know that you can automatically change this right so moving on there are tags by category Tags by all there are things that are loaded for just about every component that we have so let's say I want to tag my exterior wall type there's my wall tag that's already pre-loaded I can click on this click on the tab and I'm going to say wall type one and then this is giving me a warning that I'm changing a type parameter for the wall this means that when I'm using this I'm changing all of them at the same time so let's do this I'm going to click on this okay now there's a type one I'm going to create another one over here and let's say for some reason that we changed this wall to be a type 2. it's going to give me that warning again I'm going to say yes to and look over here two so it automatically remembered that this wall type is whatever is in that family parameter massing and sight so let's say that you wanted to start a model but you didn't want all of these components you just wanted it to be a mask that you could push and pull and modify well you can do that in Revit there are other programs still that do it a little bit better so I don't often use these tools but they are here if you want them the Topo surface is very very useful this can actually be used to create and drape a surface if you've got a cad Topo file or 3D laser scanning or something like that of your site and it will actually create that site for you in Revit you can add site components like trees Islands parking lots things like that parking components these can be added to your surface all right so there's there's really no end to what you can do here I would say that civil 3D is probably a better program than Revit is for site work but if you're doing presentations or if you're going to do renderings it's great to know how to build your own as well we've used the view tab a little bit so far in creating our quick model here your view templates are already pre-applied in your MGS template so you really shouldn't have to modify these very much but we will go over that in a later segment visibility and Graphics filters turning your lines on and off so let's say you didn't want to see the heavy weight lines while you're drafting you can do that two places you can click on the thin lines you can click on the button the macro or you can actually type in TL on your keyboard so there's a number of shortcuts just like in AutoCAD for the most part we're not going to utilize the rendering tools that Revit has there are many plug-in tools that can be utilized in place of revit's rendering engine and I would highly recommend those now you can do your 3D views like we talked about but let's say I wanted to set a camera view I wanted to be in this room I click on the camera I pull it out and there I am I'm standing in that room now it's not a great rendering but it was quickly modeled and it can help you understand your space better all right call outs this is if I wanted to do an enlarged plan area for instance of my desk so I create the call out and it creates a head but this head doesn't have anything assigned to it yet I have to go in and create my view and then I would have to drag this view onto a sheet so let's go over that now you can see that Revit automatically renamed The View when it created this call out what it's telling you is that this is a subsection of the floor plan view in my case I want to control what this name is so I'm going to call it plan detail one now if I go back to my floor plan you'll see that my indicators have these blanks in them that's because they don't belong anywhere yet so let's navigate down to our sheet our first floor plan and we have some room on this sheet so I'm going to click on The View and I'm gonna show my cropping regions these are just like your viewports in AutoCAD on your sheets I'm gonna change the extents of this and I'm going to double click outside of it I can move that view I can move my title I can turn off my view I can turn off my viewport and then deactivate it and now let's say I wanted to drag my section or my reflected ceiling plan or something onto this same sheet so let's let's grab our plan detail that we just created and we're going to literally drag it onto the sheet and there it is so now this belongs on our template and if I go back to my floor plan you can see this is detail one if I go back to my floor plan if I zoom in on my floor plan there is the detail one indicator again if I change this on the sheet plan detail one and I change this to be C1 because of where it falls in the grid A1 C1 we could even change this one to D1 if we wanted this automatically changed that section call out so let's do the same thing with our section indicator again I'm coming down to the project browser I'm navigating I see sections working Section and I'm going to zoom out to my sheet I'm going to drag this section right on and there you go okay again I'm zooming in now the section indicator is filled out automatically so again I'm going to rename this this one is going to be D5 and there it is okay so I know we've thrown a lot at you in the last half hour or so but I wanted to show you how fast you can pull something together in Revit once you learn all of the tools the template is going to help you because you don't have to go looking for all of these things and that's the really great part so let's finish out our lesson here by printing a sheet right so the quick way to do this is to actually hold control print on your keyboard and it will automatically open the print dialog box in my case I utilize bluebeam PDF and it's going to ask me a couple of it's going to ask me a couple of questions so with my file I'm just going to print this one sheet a101 so it's okay to say combine them into multiples into one file now I have to tell it to print this sheet so when it's asking for a print range I need to select the sheet that I want out of the list so when I drop this one when I select this item now I can select here and here's everything that's in my model I can navigate these to print just specific views or I can select specific sheets so I turn on and off the views with the check box down here and now all I have left is the sheets we want a101 here's a 101 on the list click the check box and that's what we'll print nothing else will print in this so we're going to say okay do I want to save this no not at this time but this is really handy if you're going to be printing a full set of drawings all right now I already have this preset for a 24 by 36 and that's what this sheet border is loaded in the project as you can change them however you need to you can change the offset you can fit it to the page you can change it from black and white to color which you will not find in this is the CTB files that were in AutoCAD and the reason is that all of the line weights in Revit are vector based so when you print each of your lines has an integral line weight already with it there are no separate CTB files so you can work on changing those line weights in your line Styles if something's not appearing like it should when you print it out but you will not have a pre-loaded CTB all right so we selected our sheet we selected our settings we have our printer I'm going to say okay it's going to ask me do I want to print this as a separate file the answer is yes the reason it's asking me this is because if I have 30 sheets for instance it might be better to just PDF them into a single file and then I can extract them in another software program it's the easiest way to batch print something in this case I'm going to slip yes because I only have this one file so my dialog box has opened up and here it is and it's asking me where I want to save this in my case I'm just going to save it back to my template folder because we're in a training video in your case you would want to save it wherever your project location dictates so you might have a progress PDF folder or you might save things separately on your desktop and then upload them to a network either way you choose this just like you say of any other file Revit will automatically include whatever the sheet name is that you're trying to print but it will also include the full file name in front this is just a common setting and so I choose to just delete that front part and say you know a 101 first floor plan all right all the rest of these settings these will change based on what your PDF printer is but for the most part if you're utilizing a simple PDF print 72 DPI is fine for anything that's going to be viewed on the screen but if I were to be printing something at a higher level I'd want to be in this range between 150 and 300 depending on what I'm printing okay so I am going to save this file and here you can see the converting dialog box and now in my case I have it set so bluebeam opens automatically and here is our print so you'll be able to see everything that we worked on is now on a sheet so this concludes our first video in our training series you learned how to navigate the Revit interface you learned about the tabs you learned about the properties bar the project browser the splash screen you learned how to navigate to views and sheets and you learned how to print don't worry if this all came at you really fast we're gonna go over it again during our following videos thanks very much for sticking in there with me today and I'll see you in the video next this course is provided by MGS Global Group we provide Revit archicad and AutoCAD drafting for architecture and design firms feel free to reach out to us if you need production drafting at mgsglobalgroup.com don't forget to 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Channel: MGS Drafting

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Keywords: revit, crash course, revit crash course, revit course, revit tutorial, revit beginners, revit for beginners, revit tips, revit training, revit hacks, crash course for revit, america, united states architecture, america architecture, america revit, US course

Id: JcrslncSa0E

Length: 44min 28sec (2668 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023