How to utilize revit to display recent changes in a linked model?

[bsepter]

When our company recieves an updated revit model from an architect, more times than not, the architect does not include any notifications (written or visual) of the changes that they made to their model. To find any changes in their model (so our firm can calculate heating/cooling loads) we have been exporting the individual levels of the architectural model to autocad, and overlaying the old and new files to spot any changes. I understand that revit can copy/monitor walls from the linked model, but is anyone using copy/monitor to show alerts when the linked model has changed?

I attempted to copy/monitor a particular floor of the linked model but I was discouraged when I couldn't get revit to select more than one wall at a time. Is there a way to select multiple walls when attempting to copy/monitor?

How are you guys keeping track of architectural changes to the revit model?

Thanks

[Hopper88]

Working with in-house or outside architects, there will always be large or small changes that they will neglect to tell us. Our company only C/M levels and grids. I'm not sure how large your projects are, but if you C/M every wall, then your model will become huge. When it comes to the envelope information such as window size, louver locations, overhangs, etc. I always take 30 seconds to do a 3D orbit in architectural /coordination mode to view those obvious changes.

[CADastrophe]

This is kind of a silly way to do it, but in this large four-story office building, when one of our architects kept changing interior walls sporadically, I created a Space Schedule with Room Numbers, Names, and Area. Before updating, I printed this schedule. Then after updating, I printed this schedule again. By putting these two schedules side-by-side, I could identify exactly which rooms were modified by the interior wall adjustments by the difference in Area. After the third time, I exported the schedules and imported into Excel, in which I created formulas to compare the schedules quickly.

[bsepter]

Normally our Revit projects are pretty large hospitals so you're right, c/m the walls would slow our model a lot. I've started creating a seperate file for calculating loads. I will link the arch model and create spaces to extract information about the rooms. I don't like spaces in the project model because they bog down the project too.

I like the idea of creating an excel spread sheet and exporting the area of the spaces. I will definitely give that a try.

[colmag6]

Something I've been meaning to try is creating a blank project and linking in both versions of the arch model, and then override the graphics so that one is red and one is blue (maybe with filters) then you can do the overlay thing directly in revit, both for plans and sections, and you can also use the section box in a 3d view to cut the models back and see what's going on.