Template

[tjk0225]

My office has completed (or nearly completed) 2-3 projects this year with Revit and we are at a point where we need to develop a standard office template. This is one of our first steps in rolling out Revit to more users. Does anyone have any suggestions or tips on setting up a Revit template? I'm interested in what others are doing, what the pros/cons are, etc. Start from scratch / past project / standard Revit template? It would be great to have a sort of a checklist for setting up a template for office standards.

Thanks!

[sbrown]

Start from scratch with the latest revit OTB template, then set up your sheets, load in typ annotations, titleblocks, etc. check the lineweight table, load your dwg export settings. Load in any typical wall types, roof types, floor, ceiling etc. from your current projects. Delete any you will never use. Its nice to have a number of generic walls of various sizes for designers to choose from. Create any applicable schedule keys for the type of work you do. Create any schedules(note you can copy/paste these from your past projects. Set up any custom lines you may use/want new users to use. ie 2d casework, dash med, dash small, etc. To help acad converts its nice to name the detail lines the same name / color number they are used to.
Create the cover pages, ie materials legends, abbreviation lists, symbol legends, sheet index etc. anything that you want standard on all jobs should be there. Depending on how you handle details, some typical details and Ansi/Ada toilet elevations, mounting heights, etc are nice to have in there. Basically evaluate your "best" set of documents in the office and add everything you see there that you'd want in all future projects. Alot of the work is creating the families(generic annotations for section heads, etc.) Once all the content is create its just putting the pieces together.

[sbrown]

One more tip is to create the shortcut key and revit.ini file so they can easily be copy/pasted into new users program directory so all the pathing is the same, just make sure they change the workset username.

[Steve_Stafford]

One more process tip...

Once you have your template roughed out and people are using it to start new work, when you edit your office template, edit a copy, not the original. If you edit the master that Revit is directed to use by default, while you are doing so, other users will get a "read only" error message when starting Revit or starting a new project.

[PeterJ]

And you should continue to edit it and keep it up to date....

The other thing you may wish to consider is having a series of template types:


New build
New build with worksets
Alterations/extensions
Alterations/extensions with worksets
Depending on the work your practice does you may even find it suitable to break things down by job-type. If you cover both industrial and medical work it may be the case that the two disciplines have rather different sets of schedules and details, particularly in regard to area plans for example.

Lastly, make sure you include view templates in your office templates, these will speed things up and you should not be reducing the risk of setting them up differently from project to project and having someone confidently switch to the electrical plan template and print drawings only to have them go out without any electrcal items because a user had switched these off for his own convenience....