Revit Standard Library Management

[ming87]

our firm is just starting out on the task of converting our large standard library from autocad to revit. i'm curious to know how other firms are managing the completed library details and obtaining detailing content.

1. are completed details held in individual files, container files (several details maybe on sheets), or in the company template file? my concern with the template file is that it would get bloated with excessive data from unused details.

2. there are some websites with detail components as well as out of the box. how is the creation of new detial components managed to company standards, file saving, etc...

any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

thank you

[renogreen]

We catalog our standard details by specification section. With that in mind, we have a separate Revit file for each section. In each Revit file are the drafting views with the standard details. For example, for all of our masonry details, we have a Revit project file called Division 4 Masonry.rvt. In that file is quite a few drafting views...standard masonry details. We do this for each division.

So if I need some standard masonry details, I open up the Division 4 Masonry.rvt file and copy/paste the details I need into my project.

[ming87]

thanks reno, i like that approach. have you experienced any issues with inserting multiple versions of the same detail component family? i believe in the past, there had been some naming issues.

thanks again.

[gtarch]

I think Renogreen has the right idea.

Except, we are just getting started with our conversion/construction of a Revit Library. So for the time-being, we are keeping all of our details in a single Rvt file. It is easier to manage line weights, standards, shared details components, etc. With Revit there is always a large benefit if you can keep things 'in one file'. You certainly don't want 1 file for each detail, as was the common practice with ACAD.

At some point, when our details are looking good and the single file is too large to work with, THEN we'll break them out into separate files by groups/divisions.

[Valkin]

When we were in autocad we cataloged our library by specification number as well. As we went into Revit we realized that didn't work for us, since some details contain objects from multiple specifications. Instead we've cataloged our details by the uniformat number, which is about assemblies. Also we put all of these 2d details into revit library files that can easily be brought into our projects.