Managing large Revit projects for more efficient size & speed

[patrick788181]

Hi all,

long time user, first time poster so apologies if this question has been asked many times before or if I have posted this in the wrong thread.

I need to pick the brains of those Revit masterminds that have worked on large scale projects within a team & are pro at optimizing the model for size & speed efficiency.

The Project: A 30,000 seat Football Stadium with a team of 8 working on copies of a central file. The project is split up into about 10 worksets, with structural, MEP as well as our own models linked in.

The problem: We are all relatively new to Revit with varying experiences from past jobs & projects. The model itself is about 150MB, & as you could imagine with all the worksets, imports, families, 2D drafting lines etc. it can really slow the file down & frustrate everyone especially when time is of the essence & deadlines loom :(

The Solution: This is where I need your help. :lol: Can anyone suggest or even point me in the direction of where some useful information might be & save us from working weekends/all-nighters? Has anyone out there worked on sports stadiums in Revit before? Id love to hear how you tackled such problems. I am sure there may be more than 1 way to optimize this model & im happy with any so long as it makes work flow more efficient.

Firslty, I was thinking that moving all the sheets (roughly 300) to a separate file & linking the main file into it might be a good start. The only thing is im worried that we may have to go through & create all views in the 'sheet' file all over again once the model is linked in. Would i then have to copy all 2d drafting information ie lines, annotation etc into the sheet file?

thank you all in advance for any suggestions & help.

Cheers!!

[Duncan Lithgow]

Try this search in google: "site:http://forums.augi.com big large projects" lots of good posts

Here's some of what I've recently collected:

* Managing and setting up large projects: http://revitize.blogspot.com/2008/05/best-practices-for-large-projects-in.html
* 'Managing Large Projects in Revit® Architecture' by Lonnie Cumpton. AU 2008. Se også hans presentationer til AU 2011
* Shared Parameters: Shared Parameter Converter (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=128680) and Parameter Jerk 2012 (http://mertens3d.com/tools/tools.php)
* Excitech (http://www.excitech.co.uk/products/revit_toolkit/excitech_revit_toolkit.asp?cc=toolkit) has a tool for extracting the location of many objects in Revit (free). See blog post Schedule by Level. (http://revit-waterman.blogspot.com/2011/03/schedule-those-levels-method-with.html)
* Large Projects in REVIT - Information Compilation (http://bimtroublemaker.blogspot.com/2010/05/large-projects-in-revit-information.html)

[KGC]

The problem:imports, families, 2D drafting lines etc. it can really slow the file down & frustrate everyone especially when time is of the essence & deadlines loom :(

Firslty, I was thinking that moving all the sheets (roughly 300) to a separate file & linking the main file into it might be a good start. The only thing is im worried that we may have to go through & create all views in the 'sheet' file all over again once the model is linked in. Would i then have to copy all 2d drafting information ie lines, annotation etc into the sheet file?

thank you all in advance for any suggestions & help.

Cheers!!

You do not want your sheets taken out of the model. That can become a very tedious process of recreating views.

I worked on a large airport and any 2D details we had we took out of the main model and created a model just for those. Sheets stayed with this new detail model, and checking the Use Linked Models in the sheet schedule kept our Index of Drawings updated.

For larger projects with multiple inserted revit links, we find that every link will get its own workset now. Open and load only what you need.

150mb for a single file isn't all that uncommon anymore. With proper workset usage, the work-flow shouldnt be too bad. How slow are your open/load/sync times?

[fcgibso1636447]

I'm working on a very large project (basically a small city with 6000 buildings) and we have hundreds of central files. We have a hierarchy of files for plotting only and accomplish this by using "linked views".

You can move all your sheets to a separate file, then link back to the views in your model file to capture all the information there including annotations. (In the new plotting file, create a view and then go to visibility graphics (VG), click on Revit Links then on Host view. Select the "By linked view" option and select the appropriate view, and your new view will be identical to the one in the original model file. Nicely enough, this supports nesting, so if you have nested models (like we do) the views can be inherited and added to all the way down the hierarchy.