File Linking

[jcoe]

I have muddled through the Revit help files and tutorials and searched the forum, but am unable to find what I am looking for.

This is what I am trying to do.

I have two existing buildings - originally drawn into AutoCAD a few years back - and have imported them and set them up as two Revit projects. One is a bus garage and the other a school building. I would like to combine the two via linking. In addition to this, the bus garage is at a lower floor height than the school building by almost 4 feet. I read the release notes for Revit 8.1 regarding added linking capabilities with respect to scheduling and such and would like to take advantage of that for this project, but I am uncertain as to where to begin.

1. How do I begin to set this up? Is it just a matter of opening a new file and selecting File>Import/link>RVT and placing the two buildings.

2. How do I account for the different floor heights? I read something regarding Shared Levels but cannot find it again.

3. Now that I will have potentially three files, which one do I do my construction documentation in? The overall, or the individual linked files.

Thank you in advance for your help.

[iru69]

I recently did a similar thing, and in my opinion, this is currently not a good way to go. I can see the use of linking a large site plan into a building model and I'm sure there are other uses - but I found the existing tools available extremely lacking in trying to document multiple buildings in a single set of drawings. There's no sub-category visibility control of linked files. There's no workset visibility control of linked files. You can't just create a floor plan from the level of a linked file (you could create plan regions or you could set up new levels in your host file that corresponds to the levels in your linked file). You can't tag linked files, so while scheduling linked files is neat in theory, you won't have any tags (e.g. door and window tags) in your linked plans. You can't have the host file and the linked file open at the same time, so if you have to do a lot of back and forth work, you're going to spend a lot of time waiting for files to open and close.


1. How do I begin to set this up? Is it just a matter of opening a new file and selecting File>Import/link>RVT and placing the two buildings.

2. How do I account for the different floor heights? I read something regarding Shared Levels but cannot find it again.

3. Now that I will have potentially three files, which one do I do my construction documentation in? The overall, or the individual linked files.

1. Pretty much, yes. Create a new project file for the site (contours, pads, etc.). Set it at the correct elevation (Relocate the project as necessary). Link your building files and position them as necessary. Publish their coordinates back to the original building files (Tools > Shared Coordinates > Publish Coordinates). You also might want to link the site file back into the each building file, etc.

2. There's tons of stuff on the forum - try searching "shared elevation" or maybe you have a more specific question?

3. This is where things get rather messy in my opinion. You'll probably have to split the set of drawing up between the files and set up some sheets in each project file. So, your site file might have the site plan and building elevations. Your school building would have the plans and sections for that building. Your bus building would have the plans and sections for that building.

Sorry to sound like such a downer, but that was my experience on my particular project (two townhouse buildings). Maybe others can share more positive experiences. Good luck and update us on how it goes.