New Revit Implementation Procedure and Example Structural Model

[chrisd385116]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for stopping by. I work for a small Australian structural engineering firm, and I am tasked with the implementation of Revit here. I have been using AutoCAD for over 20 years, have done some training, and can produce a model (of sorts) in Revit. Unfortunately I do not have anyone else here who has any Revit experience. It currently feels a little like I am standing at the base of Mount Everest ready to start the climb. I am looking at all sorts of items including templates, families, visibility graphics, sheets to name just a few.

To add to the challenge, I do not really have any budget to employ a guru to do the setup for us. With the number of Revit guru's out there, I was hoping for some guidance. Firstly, does anyone have an action plan/list for an implementation from scratch (structural discipline)..? We seem to be doing bits and pieces here and there, but don't really have a concise list of what we have to do to get Revit working in a production environment.

Secondly, I was wondering if anyone had an example STRUCTURAL Revit model that they would be happy to share with me, either here or privately. I am trying to start simple, so my aim is to draw a steel framed & precast office/warehouse building. The difficulty I am having is knowing what is "best practice" for all sorts of things, one example being to split panels at joins, or just to draw model lines on the elevations. This is just one of hundreds of questions that I have. I was hoping that if I could see a few examples of how other people have created their models, with their intricacies, I might gain a lot of insight. I understand that there are probably commercial realities that come into play, but I am not looking to steal anyones work. I just want to see some real-time examples of structural models that others have created, and to hopefully learn something from them.

Thanks for your time. I hope someone out there has something they can share...

[Craig_L]

Hi Chris, welcome to a world of pain....
I have been through the teething stages of implementing revit on a few occasions now. Two times in Australia, and once in Switzerland (which I am currently working on now).
I have the misfortune of having to do the setup during a project running- similar to yourself I am currently the only person with revit knowledge, and another time in Oz I was the only person in the office with the knowledge.

My advice to you is this. First - manage the expectations of the principals. Often revit is touted as this amazing program that can do anything. Whilst that isn't completely untrue, it can handle a lot of tricks, actually achieving it, and achieving it to a budget, is another thing entirely.

Secondly, focus on these points, in this order -
1. Templates
2. Library (detail elements, and families, and annotations to company standard Section heads, detail bubbles that sort of thing also.)
3. General Training - getting other people in the office up to a basic standard to be able to model, and document (two entirel different things also). This will mean its not all resting on your shoulders. Currently, if I am sick or on holiday, there is absolutely no one who can continue my project which is, as you can imagine, limiting and stressful. I will be doing some in house training once my project schedule backs off a bit more.
What I did at another place was to make a VERY basic structure, with some common elements in it and do a step by step guide on how to produce that model, and then this had some sheets in it and some produced views, plans, detail views, legends etc and I had a text document on how to do it "step by step" to company standard. This was a brilliant training tool but did take some time to get set up, but in the end writing the step by step point guide, really cemented for myself the methodology.
4. Key role training - once you have done step 3, you should see some people that are more apt at using the software than others and you can then elevate them to be able to work on helping you get the library and families in order, and for new "on demand" content creation (such as specific families, useful annotations etc).

Often your templates will arise out of a project, so it can be a good idea to get your base template ready with as much done as you can - but then this will evolve after your initial project and perhaps the first 2 or 3 projects will bring new template settings, dont be afraid to revise your templates as your ability evolves.

As I said, managing expectations of clients, and those managing you, will be as integral as those steps outlined above.
As for the rest, the first time I did it I was lucky enough to have some well organised templates and annotations which I was able to essentially "back engineer" to set mine up.
Its not evident the amount and level of customisation that you will need to do, it will take you some time, and as with the templates your families and annotations library will, and should, evolve over time.

Contact me and I can send you some real templates that I have developed and you can use them to back engineer your own. I would say stealing someone elses templates is quite hard, because they are so customised that its just not viable anyhow, I am happy to share with you some basic templates but they will possibly be too large to send via email so I might need to burn you a CD or something.

Cheers, and I hope this helps.
Oh one last thing - if you are setting up templates that work all in colour like you used to in CAD keep in mind that colour means nothing in revit, your lineweights are set in another fashion...
This means for your plotter - if you set colors to a line, they will print in color and not to the thickness set in CAD for that color (there is no CTB file for revit) the line weights are handled entirely differently.

Lastly I would say, if you wanted to I could possibly give you a hand over skype or some kind of VOIP at some stage, but keep in mind I am 8 to 9 hours behind you in Oz there.

[david_peterson]

Autodesk has several white papers on how to implement Revit.
There's also some good stuff from AU out there.
It's a long climb to the top so plan on setting up a lot of base camps.
It took our firm about 3yrs to fully develop a template and a game plan for doing revit project.
Find a Bim execution plan that you like (there's many examples out there to choose from. I think adesk has a basic one and I there's been some examples that people have posted on Augi.
To start with I'd go with the basics. Use revit for what it's good at. Basic plans, elevations and schedules. (well maybe skip the schedules until you have a good understanding of parameters). Detail in cad, leave the cad in cad and the revit stuff in revit.
As time goes by and you get a few projects under you can really start to take the benefit's of revit. But that's going to take time.
For example I did my first project in revit in 2005. I just completed my first full project in Revit. It's a long road and it just gets longer.
We're still making updates to our bim standard and our execution plan.
Best of luck.

[chrisd385116]

Craig and David,

Firstly...thank-you very much for your detailed advice. It has not only given me some renewed energy to keep going, but also reinforced some of the things that we have been doing. Interestingly enough, I made the decision a little while ago that we would start by producing plans and elevations with Revit, and continue detailing in CAD for the time being. So we're already on the right track there!

We have a work-in progress template underway, which we are adding to on a daily basis (I spend the first hour of each day doing revit stuff). I'm not sure how far to go on purging out some of the default items in the template, so I would be interested if you have any thoughts on this. Also, do you have lots of different templates for different types of jobs, or just one main one that is used for everything?

General Notes blocks - We have made individual families for each different set of standard notes. We don't often have a big cover sheet with all notes, rather put the blocks on the sheets adjacent to their respective plans. I was hoping that we could combine all of these individual families into one family file, which could be loaded to bring all of the families in in one go, but this did not seem to work. I have read that legend views or drafting views can also be used for these, but they have their own limitations. What is the general consensus on how to manage blocks of notes..?

We have started to develop some annotation/detail components to use on elevations, which seem to be working well so far. I have enlisted the help of one of our younger draftsmen (there are only 4 of us in total including myself). I have given him some training videos to watch, and he seems to be getting a handle on things also. Between us we are very slowly working our way through making some fairly basic families. But we are finding there seems to be a lot of limiations..

File structure - Can you suggest a file structure/file naming convention for our families library. We have started something, but I am concerned that
a) there may be too many sub folders (ie too many clicks)
b) finding the family you need may be difficult (given that there will be hundreds of them).

View templates - How many should we have.? At the moment we have been advised by our A'desk reseller to start with 4 different ones, being Plans-working, Plans-final, Elevations-working, Elevations-final. Does this sound reasonable, and would we require others when we progress further in the future?

Schedules - something I need to get onto next. Just need to start with a fairly basic structural steel schedule.

As far as managing expectations, yes that is a challenge. Although I am one of the senior decision makers, getting the top dogs to really understand the complexity involved in getting this thing set up and working efficiently is not easy! They seem to figure that we've spent a lot of hours on it already, so why aren't we doing jobs with it yet... sigh

So anyway, that's where we are at the moment.Thanks so much for your help!
I will monitor this thread, and probably post some more items here as we hit the inevitable hurdles.

Cheers................Chris D.

ps Craig I will send you my contact details privately

[Craig_L]

"View templates - How many should we have.? At the moment we have been advised by our A'desk reseller to start with 4 different ones, being Plans-working, Plans-final, Elevations-working, Elevations-final. Does this sound reasonable, and would we require others when we progress further in the future?"

You will need more;
Sections/Details 1:100, 1:50, 1:20, 1:10
Plans 1:100, 1:50

Also;
Assuming you are showing load bearing walls under - A view that filters just load bearing walls, and shades them. You then overlay this on the sheet with your plan view to achieve your shaded walls under. The order which you place these views will affect how they print (From memory, place the shaded walls first - then the plan over it - they will snap into place over each other) Your shaded walls should be walls only showing (no grids, no slabs, etc etc) They should show dashed/hidden line in this view (as they are elements underneath slab) and change the hatch to a solid hatch, with a halftone over ride or use a greyscale color (232, 232, 232) I think it is.

[david_peterson]

We currently have 6 "project" templates. Arch, Struct and small project combined for Imperial and Metric.
We have some basic view templates set up in each project. However those will need to be modified as you can't have view template set up for linked models until after they have been linked in.
We've pulled most of the content stuff out and are in the process of creating "warehouse" models. A project file that contains all the doors for example. Then one for cabinets, one for stairs, one for walls..... you get the ides.
As for finding content in a library, there's a few add op options out there. If you like something searchable, CTC has some really nice tools. You can set up something for each individual project if you wanted. Then you can set up what ever categories you like. Works kind of slick.

[valejandro_ibarra]

Hey chris, in what part of Australia are you? Right now im in Adelaide, i implemented revit a few years ago in a company

[bfung]

The USACE has developed a lot of standards, documents, and template. They are in English units only at this time. It may be a good source and give you some ideas. There is a security certificate problem with their site, but it is safe to enter:
https://cadbim.usace.army.mil/default.aspx?p=a&t=1&i=3

[chrisd385116]

Thanks for the extra info guys.
Valejandro... I am in Melbourne.
Cheers....

[Lines&Circles;]

Hi,
I run a small consultancy and took it upon myself to teach myself how to use it after losing people I paid to get Revit trained.
A couple of points I would suggest
- Assuming you have Autocad experience you need to let go of the autocad way of doing things.
- Levels are important including reference planes its the way revit and you will locate things so make sure you name reference planes and levels that you create so you know what they are and what they're for.
- Don't get to caught up in trying to model everything from the on-set use a combination of modelled elements and drafting lines to produce your early projects and as your modelling skills build you can model more.
- Families are the key to efficient use of Revit. But dont just think beams and column families there's so many other families you can create such as hatching families or line type families. These are things that you can attach keynote to which speed up the annotating process.
- Google is my friend when sorting out issues/hurdles i come across with the software.
- Source and watch as many videos you can.
- Be patient, ive been using it for 4-5 years for about 1/5 of our projects and It's on a par with Autocad for efficiency for work production but I know this will improve so its why i persist.
Best of Luck