Revit townhouse Project Planning

[DoTheBIM]

Just fishin' for ideas here. Say you have a townhouse project where all the units layouts are identical. Say 6 units maybe. But on the ends you have a different wall than the shared wall. (options here?) Then in the basement you have poured concrete walls exterior and shared, but you want to be able to divide the cost of the shared wall between units and still give the whole foundation to one contractor to build. there is an 18" step up in each unit from left to right for the first 4 units and the last 2 step down 9" each. Now throw in the idea that the units are offset from front to back by varying amounts of 1 foot increments. By doing this some units roof will change to have overhangs between units and other units will have siding at the offsets from front to back.


What would be your plan of attack? As I sit here and play with ideas, I feel there's lots of options with linking and options, but I'm not real sure on which way to go. Sort of a question might be would you keep the foundation walls in one file while linking units with their floor and above in to the foundation. Basically I think the question boils down to what do you link and what do you option. I guess I'm looking for someone that has experienced this before, but I'm open to everyone's ideas.

[PeterJ]

It has been discussed before, try searching on keyword 'townhouse' and username czoog.

[DoTheBIM]

It has been discussed before, try searching on keyword 'townhouse' and username czoog.
Sorry - no matches. Please try some different term

I did find this thread after a bit of searching
http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=4831

Being slightly dated, (before scheduling accross linked files)... Is it still the concensus to use options and groups in one building project vs. linking seperate units into one building. My "feel" from what I've read and "think" I understand is yes this method on the previous thread linked above still holds as best practice and linked files are better left for site wide purposes. Can anyone confirm?

Now throw in that you'd like to be able to schedule the individual units seperately. Can you still keep everything in one file and do this or will it have to be broken into individual units and thus less coordinated. I'm sure this is not coming out the best way to understand... Please feel free to ask any questions. and I'll try to reword my explainations.

[PeterJ]

I was thinking of something other than that but I can't find it now either.

The complex issue is that as you say you have a party wall that becomes an external wall as the similar units slide back and forth relative to one another to gain streetscene variation. I can't recall if linked files heal to one another and don't have Revit here to test it with.

I think that what people have said before is that if you make all the additional elements in your plan, say plumbing fixtures and kitchens, floor hosted rather than wall hosted then you can place them at the perimeter of a group and they need never be hosted off the surrounding wrap. Groups do heal to the remainder of the model but you do need to be very careful that you don't have elements within the group that end up constrained to something outside the model.

From the above you can develop a series of internal layouts, twist them rotate them, play with them as you like and then only the external treatment need change, but you aren't trying to make an entire stock building mesh with another and get roof elements to heal etc.

[iru69]

I would strongly suggest staying away from linking multiple buildings (or parts of building) that need to be part of the same contract set of drawings.

There's a law of diminishing returns in trying to avoid duplicating repetitive layouts - sometimes it's just faster and less of a headache to draw it multiple times than trying to get groups or design options to work for you. That obviously depends on the size (and amount of duplication) in the project as well as the ability of groups or design options to do what you need.

[Wes Macaulay]

You could use groups to start and ungroup ones that get cranky