Templates by Unit?

[HelmetFire]

Ladies & Gentlemen,

Is it necessary to have separate metric and imperial templates or is it sufficient to have a metric template and a project units be changed to imperial if required? Thanks.

[KoryCox]

The problem you will run into is that all of the families will be set to one or the other. You can change the master Units from Metric to Imperial and vice a versa more or less with impunity, however whenever someone edits a family, that family will be in whichever unit it was originally modeled in. This would be an endless source of frustration to your teams in various locale. It only takes a second to change, but they would never chase them all down.

I would suggest that a Metric and an Imperial template is best, with separate libraries for each. Each time you create a family make two copies and put them in the appropriate library. It's twice as much work, but will pay off!

[digihumminbird]

I guess I would agree with Titan, but only have applied that level of discipline for hard metric. Most of the time, I've found that if a team is used to working with soft metric, that the project instance units can be changed to suit the team, and documented in Metric or Imperial regardless of the Project Units, so long as you have the Dimension Types built for what you need. Yes, the Families themselves start out set to Metric or Imperial and stay that way unless modified. I've found that by the time I've done my first project in Metric, I already know the nominal dimensions in both Imperial and Metric and can facilitate editing in both units. Since Revit is agnostic, and no matter your Project Units, if you type cm or mm or ' and " into the command, Revit does the math. It will just display in whatever your working Project Units are. In some ways this has been a relevation (especially if you've every worked in Microstation for any length of time). You'll want to make sure no matter how flexible your day to day operations in Revit are that you have the correct Annotation Types set to display in your desired units format (regardless of your in-project /in-family Revit settings).
Cheers,
LC