Drawing Sheet issuing / revisions ??

[Chad Smith]

Hello all,

I am currently reviewing Revit 5.0 for implementation in our office and would like to ask a question about issuing and revising drawings.

A bit of background first.
We currently use AutoCAD and ADT, and have the following directory structure:

Project Root - working drawings
[list:0651cd7e86]Issue - all issued drawings
Super - superceded drawings.[/list:u:0651cd7e86]
When we issue a drawing, we bind all xref's (linked files) to the drawing and save a copy into the 'issue' directory. This way, we can keep working on the project and have a copy of all issued drawings.
When a second issue is made, the previously issued drawing is moved into the 'super' directory and the newly issued drawing saved into the 'issue' directory.

I guess my question is how would I go about doing this in Revit?
Or does Revit have it's own process?

This is important to our company for contractural reasons.

By the way, this is a great forum. I'm sure I'll have more Q's to come.

Thanks,
------------------------------
Wanna be Revit user.

[beegee]

In Revit, all drawing sheets are contained in the one file, the model file.

If you have individual buildings linked to a master ( site ) file and those buildings are being amended and hence the drawings also, you would save the new master file as your " Issue " and move the old master file(s) into your "super" directory.
The individual buildings would also need to be saved to " issue " / " super" directories, so that you keep track of the changes.

You would print from the "Issue" directory(s), since it contains all the latest drawings. Of course, some of the drawings in the " Issue" directory may not have changed, so I don't know if that creates problems for you or not . You would still identify each drawing by issue/revision.

If that doesn't suit your work practice, I guess you could save out the individual drawings as dwgs to the relevant directories. the problem with that is you loose the ability to creat and update a drawing schedule automatically, which is one of Revits many advantages.

Hope that makes sense ?

beegee.

[Martin P]

Hello all,

I am currently reviewing Revit 5.0 for implementation in our office and would like to ask a question about issuing and revising drawings.
.

We do the exact same thing in our office with autocad files as you do. The process we use with Revit is to print a PDF each time a new revision is issued. It has no drawbacks for us, as once a drawing issue is archived it should never be altered anyway. So the fact that it is no longer editable in cad is a bonus, (we always make the autocad files read only) - it also means much smaller file sizes - and it it is very easy to find and issue an old or current revision of a drawing to just about anyone with email - works like a dream!! and I am sure you have come across the odd unbindable xrefe with autocad, that is a real pain in the ***, aint it?

[JamesVan]

Good point, Martin. However, it sounds like there might be a need to retreive old building data from a previous issue. (Happens all the time with NY clients).

Perhaps a suggestion would be to save a copy of the Revit file along with the issued drawings in PDF (or DWF when Adesk gets around to it! :wink: ) onto a CD- or DVD-ROM. That way you can reprint or cut and paste any legacy data as needed. Thoughts?

[Martin P]

You are right - we can also have to go back sometimes too. Major changes probably I would be keeping an old model floating about. I used to keep a model for each revision - but when I got down to keeping a 20Mb file because I altered a note on one sheet..... :?:

[Chad Smith]

Thanks for the inputs.

I thought about the PDF issuing process, but am not to sure about it at the moment. We occasionally change old drawings that have been issued for city council approval, but while these drawings are in for approval, we still develop the working drawings up.
So effectively, we could have 2 drawing sets running at the same time.

:idea: But now that I think about it, I could develop a Revit project that is heading in the approval direction, and then when the working drawings are to be started, save another copy of the Revit project file.

All drawings would be issued as PDF's, at least until Revit gets DWF.
I don't think this would be such a bad process.

----------

I went to the Australian Autodesk 2004 product Launch last night and had my first preview of ADT 2004, and while it much better than version ADT 3.3 and has a lot of Revit functionality, I still fore-see Revit as the better product for now and in the future.