Guidance Needed - Modeling a large project

[swmarais]

We have slowly moved over to Revit in our office and it is working well...
Production rates are better, information quality is incredible and we have virtually no issues on site - everything is resolved beforehand.

To date all the projects on Revit were small to medium sized... We've just started a very large office building.
The building shape is fairly organic & complex, the footprint in quite large (long direction more than 1500ft) and it will be broken into roughly 8 blocks by joints.
It consists of a double basement, sloping podium level rising to the Ground Floor and 5 (may increase to 7) office levels above.
From level 1-5 the floor plate footprints are fairly similar
The main office floors will consist of trough / ribbed slabs so we will be using LOTS of pan joist beam systems

What is the best way of modeling such a project in Revit.
At the moment it is a single project file (with work sharing of course) but we are beginning to pick up issues with our network traffic being to high.
Already maxing out our network switch and the model is only in the prelim design stage....

My plan is to break the building up into sub-models for each block and reference them all into a main model handling all the revisions, printing, etc.

Is this the correct way of doing it?

What would you recommend as the best approach?
All tips & suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Schalk

[lbeyer593018]

I've never tried this, but breaking it into sub-models and linking them all to one main final model might work. Do you do most of your detailing in sections and callouts? I'm not sure if you can show the detail components of a linked model in the main model, or if it just shows the modeled components. So the main issue would be whether all the separate models will be detailed in their divided state. If you modeled everything separately and then detailed it in the final model that might work, but I don't know if it would solve your network traffic issue.

[stephanschneller]

Hi,

I would break them up into individual models as suggested but keep all sections/ details within each sub-model.

So i.e. block A would contain all model/ detail component/ annotation etc of block A.

Also link block B into block A to clarify what's going on between these two blocks.

If you was to manage sections/ revisions etc from a 'main model' than every time you wanted to change something say in block A you would need to re-open/ amend and save block A which would become v. time consuming.

Regards,

Stephan

[swmarais]

@lbeyer... We do not really use a lot of detailing line work and components... we only use the modeled components

@stephen... That is exactly how I planned to do the building after I wrote the post. 1 master model with all sub-models linked to use for coordination and main sections + elevations covering the full extent of the building.
Each building block or sub-model will then contain the relevant sections, details & layouts relevant to that part of the building.
The adjacent blocks will be linked to each model with proper filters applied to show them in a lighter colour.

Thanks for the advice

[david_peterson]

we are currently working a project that also has a 1500' long tunnel. that portion of the building is about 750ksf. We're doing it in one model. Things are going smoothly. IMHO Less models = less time and easier to handle. now that said I'm only going to have 1 other person working in the central file at a time (max 3 total) so that will come into play. More people working on it means more banging on the central file. If you've got the workstation to handle it, one or two file are better.