Monster 1 man project....

[Martin P]

Mmmmm..... just got out of a meeting with the boss, it seems I am to be doing a very big project - pretty much on my own to begin with.

The plan is for the first 4 months I am going to get it modelled, then others will come on board to help with the detailing, sections etc,etc...... Its a bit of an odd job as we already have a load (I mean a LOAD) of details, sections and so forth. The job was basically started, infact all but finished - by another architect - we are (all above board and agreed I must add!) taking it on and doing a revised (cost saving) version of the building. We decided that as it will involve an awful lot of revising materials and contructions - Revit seems the sensible choice, even though it will invovle a lot of initally re-doing things, when they start to tear it apart it will be easier to deal with on Revit.


Right, so what I am asking you Augi members who have done monster big projects for is....advice!!!

Template file I will get set up first, maybe take a week on that. I will then do as many of the obvious families that can before I start.

Worksets are something I will have to use, but havent had a lot of experience of yet. Any tips on deciding on a sensible plan of attack on those would be great. Its a very large, complicated single storey building - lots of angles, curves. glazing etc on plan and on roof. steel, complicated grid layout.....

PC SPEC?? what sort of machines are suitable for this type of project? at the moment I have pentium 4 2.8 ghz (dual I think?) , 1 gig ram - on board graphics card..... This is not going to be adequate, what sort of thing do I need to suggest as suitable? and what is it that REALLY makes the biggest difference to performance?


thanks in advance for any advice...

[ejburrell67787]

I would say it is worth spending quite some time deciding on your workset structure on a big project based on how you will work on it. If you get the right worksets it makes it so much faster to get on with.

[Martin P]

What about linked files? is there ANY merit in using these say for the structural side of things. I will definitely do the external/sitezf works as a linked file, Revit structure I think uses linked files to speak to Revit building if I am correct? - should I go down this path with the structural side of the model?

Is there any sort of documented guidance on worksets and how to break them up? I have no real concept of the pros and cons of getting this right or wrong - I only know that it is important not to get it wrong ( I just dont know what "wrong" is!!) Bear in mind I am going to pretty much be doing this as a 1 man act in Revit. the detailing later will likely be done by our Autocad/detailing expert in the office....

What about massing - would it be worth using massing even though the building is pretty much already designed, is there going to be any advantage to me in doing that?

Project size, whats the best way to stop a file becoming overloaded?

I will be honest, for the past year and a half I have been churning out dozens of houses, I can now do this in my sleep with Revit - my PC does not struggle with these either, I think at the moment both me and my PC need to go into this one prepared... this all going to be pretty new territory to me with Revit. - 8.1 I havent used yet, but I believe worksets are much better in 8.1 so I will get onto using that with it.

[Elmo]

I don't know if others has noticed this but if you create an in place family it tends to make the project heavier than needed ,so try and use and create families then load them into the project. Also if your project does start getting quite heavy and you see that revit takes longer to "think" about things you should consider upgrading your PC. My company always reccomends to get a high end processer with lots of ram and a standard graphics card ( something like a Nvidia 6600 GT).

[DaveP]

Your 1 Gig of RAM should be good for a project up to about 60 or 70 Meg.

We've done a few up to 80,000 sq ft (not sure how that works out to sq m. Is it something like 8,000?) successfully with 1 Gig, but the one that was was 120,000 killed us.
the big one was our first project & we did use a bunch of in-place families, plus brought in (and exploded) many AutoCAD details.

We started out with a workset for the Building Shell, then one for each floor & drawing type (plan, ceiling, furniture). That got kind of messy as people didn't pay nearly enough attention to what worksets they were putting things on.

Now, with 8.1, worksets seem much less important for structuring your work effort & are turning into a method for reducing the bulk of the project. You can turn off any Worksets you're not editing to speed things up. I'd set up your worksets the way you'll be working. Definitely separate Furniture, Interior & Exterior walls

[ejburrell67787]

It might be better to link the structure as a seperate file so that it never gets effected by any editing you do and can be worked on entirely seperately (which you can do as a workset anyway). We have often speculated if it would have suited us better but it is hard to tell. We have the following worksets on a big housing project (45 units / 5 stories / 60+mb)

Structure
Substructure
Partywalls
Internal partitions / ceilings / doors etc
External shell
Fixtures and fittings
Electrical
Mechanical (SVPs, RWPs etc...)
Shared levels and grids
balconies
External works
Stairs

Important one I find are Fixtures and fittings, Electrical, Mechanical because I almost always have these turned off!! They only really need to be on for flat layouts etc.

I also wonder if party walls should be on the main (external) shell workset instead of separate.

I think the suggestion about having worksets for floor levels is good, or otherwise by blocks if you building is in blocks. Our project could have benefited from having the external shell in 3 blocks probably.

2 things to keep in mind are -
what chunks of the model will you want to work on at any time, and
what parts of the model do you want broad display control over for views/sheets. (eg turning off internal partitions or all fixtures and fittings on large scale plans)

[david.kingham]

I just went through the same thing this past year Martin, I had to do a 150,000sf medical building, the first 3-4 months I worked by myself and later added one more person. When we got close to cd's we added a couple drafters to get the details done. It went pretty smoothly and I don't think you'll have any major problems. Get the template in very good working order first.

I wouldn't worry about worksets, turn them on but you really don't need to seperate them out anymore unless you have a huuuge project. Our file is up to 130mb and has the structural file linked into it which is 40mb, we had performance issues with 512mb of ram but once we upgraded to 2gb we had no problems, just takes a few minutes to intially open the file but once it's open all is well.

I would highly recomend modelling the structural file seperately, this was a godsend imho, keeps you from accidentaly moving any of the structure and seemed to help performance. You don't need RS either, just do it in RB

I don't see any benefit for you to start with massing if the design is done...just start building!

[Andre Baros]

Regarding worksets.
I have slowly switched from thinking of worksets in architectural terms to thinking of them in memory management terms. I create worksets of things that show up less frequently so that I can have them off most of the time. For example, electrical devices, they only show up in a few views so I can leave that workset off. Structure, I divide into a workset of things you see and things you don't see. Stairs, I always have a workset for each stair or stair area so that I can isolate them to work on. For the main model, I divide it up into "chunks" that refer to pieces that I will work on a one time mostly regardless of what is in them because in Revit you never just work on a plan, you tend to move from plan to section, to elevation, to detail, back to plan, etc.

[Martin P]

Excellent tips and re-assurance, thank you all for such promt replies to this.

I had left the meeting feeling very nervous about this, but you lot have already put me at ease :)

[Phil Palmer]

MArtin,

as others have said. Worksets are not a major issue anymore and we use them more for momory management with the 'selective opening' options with your local file.
Structure I think is best linked in
If you try to be too rigorous with a workset strategy you will find you can spend a lot of time changing things onto the correct workset as our users forget what they draw goes onto whatever active workset they have at the time.

8.1 is a MAJOR help with worksets and to be honest you can happily work away and not even really realise you are in a workset project now. We have a current project with 8 full time users and we very rarely trip each other up like we used to with previous releases.
Our current policy is to actually not check any workset out (make editable) and borrow everything as we work - works a treat !