Sharing Revit Files with Consultants

[richardarchitect]

At the risk of sounding naive, I've been studying Revit for a couple of years now, and I'm just getting into actually attempting a simulation of sorts of creating a set of Construction Documents using Revit. Back when I was using AutoCad, files (drawings) were broken out by drawing, so it was possible to just send an individual drawing to a consultant (I know xref's made this problematic).

With Revit it seems that there is no way to send individual drawings, which makes sense because Revit is all so interconnected, and any change propogates through the entire project. The only way I can share a project in any form via email is maybe a PDF of sheets. As my present project is presently 70 MB's and growing, it seems maybe setting up an ftp or some other direct access into my network is the only option.

As I am a 1-man firm, exotics like a T3 and unlimited server space aren't an option from a financial standpoint. It seems on the surface that I become locked out from truly exploiting Revit for these reasons, however I may simply be missing something.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

[cdatechguy]

Just as you can print individual sheets you can export sheets in dwg.....or you can just export the individual floors instead of sheets....which we do all the time for our non-Revit folk....

Some we know they have Revit so we send them the Revit files and let them extract the dwg's themselves...

[Dimitri Harvalias]

When working with consultants who are not using Revit (some folks aren't using Revit yet?? What the...) I create a series of Consultant Export views. Plans, sections, elevations are set up as overall views i.e. not broken down or tiled and have an associated view tempalte to maintain graphic consistency.
The files names and origins never change and I just do a quick batch export to DWG. They all get zipped and posted to and FTP site or e-mailed. The consultants simply unzip into their x-ref folder and since the names and origins never change they automatically have updates in all their drawings. They can x-ref the overall views into as many views as they require and they never have to muck with visibility and layer control.

[richardarchitect]

Just as you can print individual sheets you can export sheets in dwg.....or you can just export the individual floors instead of sheets....which we do all the time for our non-Revit folk....

Some we know they have Revit so we send them the Revit files and let them extract the dwg's themselves...

Yes, I noticed that I can export sheets in dwg format. I haven't yet tried to do that to export individual sheets or views to look at the file size. But i would expect it to be similar in size to an autocad drawing, and that would work. However, if I try to do it that way to someone that has Revit, I would assume something would be lost in the translation to dwg then back to rvt.

What I have been doing so far is sending PDF's, but to zoom into detail on them is next to useless, which is why I want to send them in native rvt format. However, the file size of my Revit Project is 79 MB's, which pretty much precludes sending the project by email.

Perhaps what I want to do is just impossible in the Revit environment, or simply just needs more resources than are presently at my disposal. I'd like to make the move to all Revit, but to me this poses a real problem.

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Check out www.Dropbox.com
You can get 2Gb of free storage and then invite the other consultant to share the folder.
Drop a copy of your Revit file in there and it will synch with their Dropbox folder.