High Rise advice?

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Our office is about to begin Design Development and CD's on a 42 storey hotel/residential tower and I'm looking for anyone with advice on how to handle a project of this scale.
A little background...
7 levels u/g parking, hotel/convention facilities on the first few levels
combined residential/hotel tower 42 storeys
My concerns have to do with organization of worksets, best approach for curtain walls on a multi-level project this high, repeated suite layouts in the res and hotel areas (groups or what other approach), scheduling over multiple, 'typical' floors and just keeping tha database as light as possible.
Any direct feedback, horror stories or just pointing me in the right direction to tutorials or white papers would be helpful and appreciated.
Thanks

[sbrown]

1. Do not use groups and worksets together, unless you are very careful to keep the items in the groups on the proper workset and never try to edit the group from the wrong workset, in my opinion, just don't use groups you may spend more time redoing something but much less time chasing your tail trying to figure out what got messed up.

2. Dont repeat any floors that are identical, ie if floors 1-7 are the same just do one floor plan and label it as such.

3. Any walls that go multiple stories should go multi stories not stop and start at each floor.

4. Divide the project into worksets base on the team, if someone is going to be responsible for toilets make a workset for toilets and place everything to do with what they will need to do anything with the toilet plans.

5. make as many workset "not visible by default" as possible, ie site, rendering, entourage, structural, and the biggy DWG imports.

This will save countless hours turning off worksets you don't want on in all views.

6. Make sure every member of the team is a Revit expert or better and has taken every ounce of training available. Uneducated team members can literally ruin a job. If you have someone work on a wall section and they don't understand that if they delete what they think is a line(it may be a wall, door or window or roof and they just deleted something major and once everyone saves to central 3 hours later someone figures out that something is missing, its too late.

The major concern with worksets is damage control. you have to understand that what one user does can and will effect the rest of the team. The stakes are very high when worksets are used. Our firm has not had good luck with them at all.

I've spoken with revit on many occassions and they tell me other firms are using them successfully. I hope you hear from those firms.

[christopher.zoog51272]

I agree with Scott on most points, but I will add my own thoughts


1. Do not use groups and worksets together, unless you are very careful to keep the items in the groups on the proper workset and never try to edit the group from the wrong workset, in my opinion, just don't use groups you may spend more time redoing something but much less time chasing your tail trying to figure out what got messed up.
While I agree you must be careful, I wouldn’t shy away from groups completely. We’ve used them with relative success. Here are some big no-no’s I’ve found. Do not use nested groups (i.e. apartment bathroom group into an apartment group) They are soooooo buggy it’s not even funny, mirroring them is nightmare. Revit really needs to fix this. Do not include detail lines in groups, it cause some weird display bugs, model line work ok. Be careful with plate heights in groups that contain walls, if there is a different plate height use a different group.


2. Dont repeat any floors that are identical, ie if floors 1-7 are the same just do one floor plan and label it as such.
Agreed!


3. Any walls that go multiple stories should go multi stories not stop and start at each floor.
Agree again, but I would also add use separate stacked walls for walls with exterior finishes of different widths, do not use wall sweeps for this purpose


4. Divide the project into worksets base on the team, if someone is going to be responsible for toilets make a workset for toilets and place everything to do with what they will need to do anything with the toilet plans.


5. make as many workset "not visible by default" as possible, ie site, rendering, entourage, structural, and the biggy DWG imports.

This will save countless hours turning off worksets you don't want on in all views. Agreed!


6. Make sure every member of the team is a Revit expert or better and has taken every ounce of training available. Uneducated team members can literally ruin a job. If you have someone work on a wall section and they don't understand that if they delete what they think is a line(it may be a wall, door or window or roof and they just deleted something major and once everyone saves to central 3 hours later someone figures out that something is missing, its too late.

The major concern with worksets is damage control. you have to understand that what one user does can and will effect the rest of the team. The stakes are very high when worksets are used. Our firm has not had good luck with them at all.

I've spoken with revit on many occassions and they tell me other firms are using them successfully. I hope you hear from those firms.

I also keep all my users on a very tight leash, but we are a much smaller firm than scott's, so it is easier for me. We haven’t had any disaters yet, so I guess we are using them successfully?

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Thanks for the replies folks. Nice to see that others are so willing to share experience and advice. If anyone else has a 'don't even think of doing this' type of nightmare to relay, keep those cards and letters coming!
Once again, thanks for the words of wisdom.

[sbrown]

z,
I'm very glad you are using them with some success. As you know we have had serious problems with worksets lately, the worst being not able to save to central. I got an email from support today regarding workarounds for some of the bugs we have found. They are all(almost) related to groups and worksets. Especially nested groups.

I agree groups can be used in a limited and very well educated way. the hard part is the only way to get the education is to fail trying and learn from that failure. So my advice is be very aware of every item in your group and what worksets they are on and when you place a new instance of the group what workset you are on.


I pray 6.0 has groups and worksets working well together. You would not believe the horrors we experience on our last project.

I do think a lot can be minimized if your users understand ALL of revit fully before putting them in the worksets environment. We keep trying to have new revit users just make some details and thats dangerous territory.

[jbalding48677]

Scott's list is excellent. Print it large and put it at everyone's workstation.

I have to second the notion of having all of the users being experts or above. That will go a long way towards success. A project of this magnitude is going to take a tremendous amount of cooperation on all parts. If you have not mastered several smaller, less complex projects with Revit I would advise you to do that first. Remember, you need to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run...

I think I might add to Scott's list the following ways:

1. Strategize on what will be modeled and what will be drawn. Keep it simple and stick with it.

2. Have a "Family Man" (or woman). A team member that is relegated to building families for those who are working on the model. This will lessen the workset users by one and maintain a standard for the families created.

3. Have weekly "Revit Users Meetings" discuss and document the issues and solutions that have come up so that this and future teams can learn. Use this as an opportunity to continue training.

4. Understand the change in process and be able to communicate that to the rest of the team, management, consultants and owner.

5. HAVE AN EXIT STRATEGY IF YOU NEED TO BAIL. I am all too aware of large hotel projects and their complexities; I have a few under my belt (older AutoCAD projects). Do what you have to to avoid it, but be prepared if it happens.

P.S. I attached a Hotel Lessons and Tips PDF

[Alek Sutulov]

What is shown on the image is existing hotel on the left and new 55 storey expansion on the right. Existing building is skin only, addtion has shear walls and few floor slabs. What isn't shown is terrain and partialy modeled parking garage at the back.
I started the project late last year in 4.5 and continued in 5.0 when it came out. I used every advise available including Revit's support but it didn't bring me even close to make anything of the time invested. It ended in complete disaster for me. The main reason is the hardware.
P4-2.4 with 3Gb 266Mhz-DDR couldn't handle this model with satisfactory performance and I didn't dare to invest in high end station because no one could guarantee significant improvement.
Alek
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[sami]

Sorry for reviving an old thread. But I have the same question as the original post. I’m hoping there are some more up-to-date resources now.
Any of you know of good resources (tutorials, books, white papers, etc..) for dealing with how to set up files for high rise buildings.

regards,

Sami Kazemi
Architect, OAA
www.kazemi.ca

[sbrown]

the white paper jim b posted is still accurate. We now have some more abilities with linking and grouping that didn't exist when that paper was created. One thing to watch out for are schedules, they slow down the model signifcantly when open. Ie a furniture schedule or light fixture schedule that has to count 1000's of fixtures and report what room they are in brings the model to a crawl. The solution is simple, close the schedule view except when needed.

In early design you may want to use linking for guestroom types but once you are happpy with your layout, bind them as groups so you can take advantage of wall clean ups.

[march]

I'm very glad you are using them with some success. As you know we have had serious problems with worksets lately, the worst being not able to save to central.


Scott, Thank you for an excellent beware list. I have run into your problem of not being able to save to central. We are building a model for a 6 story waste treatment center and work sharing for now is split between two files working on different floors because work sharing from one user will not save to central through our network. It is really weird when we tried to set up the network server to store the central file and it would not. Any ideas about the difficulties of saving to central...?

[Steve_Stafford]

Just keep in mind that the list was first posted in 2003 and most recently over a year ago.

[sbrown]

You have something wrong you need to solve with your network before you continue working on the project. You should not be making sep. models because someone can't save to central. Make sure everyone has the same build of revit. What type of Network are you on? What are you doing when you can't save to central? It sounds like you need to call autodesk support and see what bigger issue you are having.

I don't know much about networks but have read certain setups have trouble with revit.

[cliff collins]

march,

The only time we have seen the problem of not being able to STC was on a very large project, which was over 250 MB. This was a year or so ago when we were still using 32 bit
machines with Windows XP Pro 32 bit, which only allowed the use of 4 GB of ram.

We have since upgraded all machines to Windows 7 64 bit with 8-12 GB of ram,
and can now open and STC.

I agree with Steve, that list is really old and needs to be updated for new software and hardware considerations.

cheers.......

[twiceroadsfool]

Not being able to STC from a machine can have MANY causes. It depends on specifically what is happening when youre trying to STC/SWC.

File/Directory permissions: Are you sure every user has Read/Write priv's to the directory? A lot of times i see networks set up where the file AUTHOR has write/modify access, but no one else. So people have to keep doing save-as to be able to save. Its a simple fix.

Network pathing: Does every machine "see" the network as the same drive? Ive seen issues where networks got pathed differently depending on the mood the IT guy was in when he did it. Caused problems.

Usernames in Revit: Under Settings > Options. Ive seen two users end up with the same username, and the poor soul who tried to save last got told to pound sand. Depending on how Revit is installed, and what username in Windows is used, this can happen without anyone knowing.

Users working long periods of time without Synchronizing- Ive seen it invalidate local files and say too bad.

High numbers of warnings in the file: This starts to cause reconciliation issues when users are trying to save, and it often makes them have to save twice. Very annoying.

And yes... As cliff mentioned, not having sufficient hardware to be able to save, though normally i see that as a crash/fatal error, and less as a "failed to save." As i said, we could do better for you if we knew exactly what the problem was.

[dfi]

I can see this thread has been alive for the past 10 years. does anyone have any new experience to share about how to deal with elevator stair cores and facilities that are associated with them such as toilets and mechanical rooms? Do you model walls associated with elevator shafts from top to bottom or floor to floor and group them? If modeling walls top to bottm what do you do with doors that are associated with the walls that repaet on every floor? What about slabs that repaet do you group these or have them associated with mass floors? We have done some similar projects. I am curious what others have experienced recently.