How big are your templates?

[DanielleAnderson]

Questions:

1) Do you use a custom template or the out-of-the-box template?

2) If you use a custom template, what type of work is it for?

3) If you use a custom template, how large is the template file to begin with (before you start drawing)?

[dhurtubise]

Questions:
1) Do you use a custom template or the out-of-the-box template?
2) If you use a custom template, what type of work is it for?
3) If you use a custom template, how large is the template file to begin with (before you start drawing)?

1) We use a custom template
2) Mostly hotel, restaurant and commercial
3) 8.2 MB

[Calvn_Swing]

Ours are at 7.02 and likely to get smaller in the next few months. We do a wide range of work, so our templates are basically an exercise in minimalism. We are killing everything we can.

Long term, they'll grow a bit bigger as we get more standards, and start standardizing things like materials, etc... We are an integrated firm, so we want standards to streamline estimating and construction where possible.

In terms of objects, walls, families, etc, we've deleted pretty much everything Revit will let us. it simply isn't that hard to go to a wall catalog file and copy what you need, or to go to our library and load our families. About the only thing we left are highly modified "generic" types.

The 7.02 MB is mainly documentation stuff, view templates, standard sheets, schedules, etc...

[jcoe]

Questions:

1) Do you use a custom template or the out-of-the-box template?

2) If you use a custom template, what type of work is it for?

3) If you use a custom template, how large is the template file to begin with (before you start drawing)?1) We use a custom template
2) We do a variety of work from K-12 to Senior Living to Industrial

Our template was designed to incorporate as many standards as possible....Views, Phasing, Sheets, Standard wall types, Standard annotations, Schedules etc....The only thing we removed from the template were any/ all loadable families that Revit would allow asided from what we use as our standard.

3) How are you getting 8meg template files? Our template file is 60megs. And I thought I eliminated a lot of baggage. What is interesting though is when I save a project, the file size is reduced to almost half.

[cosmickingpin]

1. I would imagine everybody has some sort of custom template.
2. We use ours for Interiors, Existing Buildings/Rehab, Commercial, Retail, Institutional, Industrial, just about everything really. Trying to maintain multiple templates for various projects types can be impractical. Instead we opted for shortcuts to families and schedule views associated with each sector.
3. That keeps us rather light @ 7megs. But now we are facing developing an MEP template, We already and RB and RS online, so now that's three templates to maintain, still better than 27, but still a task each quarter.

[twiceroadsfool]

Wow, you must have a ton in that template, lol... Ours sits at about 16 MB now, and i think it needs to be thinned out a LOT...

[carlosb.101393]

We do residential, mostly remodeling, I deleted almost all of the out of the box contents template, I just add the families we use the most to the template, right now ours is at 9 megs.

[tonyisenhoff]

What do you do when a new version ships?

Use your template and update with what's new? (How do you know exactly what's new?)

Use the out of the box template and incorporate your customization into it?

[Wes Macaulay]

Good heavens. Ours is under 2Mb. We don't have anything other than construction assemblies in it, tho -- any custom windows or doors other than standard items you have to load yourself. This template is then the default when Revit opens or you hit the new project button.

[twiceroadsfool]

Good heavens. Ours is under 2Mb. We don't have anything other than construction assemblies in it, tho -- any custom windows or doors other than standard items you have to load yourself. This template is then the default when Revit opens or you hit the new project button.

Thats how i want ours to be... Aside from jobs that are client specific, and there are multiples... Like store fitouts, then id just want the typical partition types in there.

[The Sweg]

1.) We use a custom template.

2.) Residential only.

3.) Ours is around 40 mb. however, it's that way on purpose. I have all of our sheets already set up with the schedules placed where I want them, our walls, windows and doors are already loaded, because we use the same stuff house after house. When we're done with a project, we purge and usually end up with around 20mb.

[david.kingham]

I just checked mine, it was sitting at 23mb, I decided to compact it just for fun and it dropped to 8mb!

[DanielleAnderson]

Okay - this gives me a better idea of where ours is at. I haven't been too involved in the template creation, I just happened to take a look at it the other day, and it is fairly bare-bones (includes fairly basic wall types, titleblocks, doors, etc.) and it is about 8 megs, which seemed like a huge way to start out a project. You guys with 60 meg templates must have one heck of an infrastructure to support those kind of base file sizes.

Now - next question: have you all found templates are better when they are extremely bare-bones-basic or when they contain everything and then you purge out all the unused stuff at a future date?

We are thinking that we will need a few templates since we do different projects like medical vs. multi-fam, mixed-use, etc. Thoughts on the number of templates needed would be welcomed as well.

[dsw98]

1.) We use a custom template.

2.) Residential only.

3.) Ours is around 40 mb. however, it's that way on purpose. I have all of our sheets already set up with the schedules placed where I want them, our walls, windows and doors are already loaded, because we use the same stuff house after house. When we're done with a project, we purge and usually end up with around 20mb.


We are the same here. Mine is over 45, but it's pretty loaded with stuff we will generally use on most projects.

[Wes Macaulay]

What do you do when a new version ships?

Use your template and update with what's new? (How do you know exactly what's new?)

Use the out of the box template and incorporate your customization into it?I've been carrying forward our templates since R8.

The only times I did edit the OOTB templates with a new version (and edit them to the office standard) was when I wanted to get new version functionality into them, and I didn't know if carrying forward my old templates would allow this to happen. When railings changed in Revit 6 you needed the railings from an R6 template to get the new features; I could have just copied a railing over from OOTB templates to my office template, but I went the other way round, erring on the side of caution. I now err on the side of convenience :-P

[brd]

1- Custom template
2- Medical and senior living
3- 17 megabytes (plus or minus)

We also weighed our template down with a lot of the trivial sheets that are the same for each set. We have schedules and legends set up on pages such as the door schedule and cover sheets, a full keynotes page set up, and a few preset sheets for floor plans and ID sheets. I've also tried to pre-load most of the annotations and general families, that way we don't have to worry about the wrong families being loaded.

On that last note, I have a question for everyone else... how do you guys handle the maintenance of the your family and detail components library? Because the OOTB Imperial Library is pretty vague, we created out own Imperial Library and try our hardes to make sure only families from that folder are loaded. Our library is set to read-only and there are two people who can saving privelages in that file? However I can't seem to keep people from bypassing the office standard and saving new families to their desktop and loading them into their files. Does anybody else have that problem? If so, how much verbal abuse and physical threats does it take to get them to stop (I would love to know)?

[patricks]

Our template is around 8 MB. It is custom with our titleblocks on it, and some of the main sheets and standard details already in place.

We have been just doing a project upgrade on our template file each time a new version came out. However, since 9 was so different in so many ways, I re-made our template file from scratch in version 9. It took a LONG time (2-3 days) but I think it's better in the end than a file that has been in use and just updated for the past 3-4 years.

[dgreen.49364]

We do large commercial and entertainment. Our template is 3 MB. How do get 40 MB or 70 MB into a template file? That's not a template, that's a high rise!

[Sweetshelby]

1) Template
2) Mostly Clubhouses, Multi-family & Residential
3) Ours is 9MB

I have set up standard sheets at 24X36 and 30X42 with our custom titleblocks. There are a few sheets started with door & window schedules, Cover sheet, annotation sheet and a few others. We have all typical wall styles already set up (then can be purged later). Then a few general doors, windows and some typical furniture to get a project started. We also have the materials and filled regions set up as well as some typical detail components loaded. Pretty basic but enough to start a project and run with it.

[whittendesigns]

How big are your templates?That's kinda a personal question isn't it? LOL

Custom
Residential
7mb

[dbaldacchino]

Template (in progress) about 8MB.

There are 2 philosophies: barebones with all-generic content and load content on an as-needed basis (no sheet set-ups etc) or a heavier template with 80% of what is required to document, sheet setups, general notes, legends, etc. I'm for the latter because I want to focus more on design development, rather than setting up sheets and brining in content and general notes. Also, I'd rather take a stab at placing an actual wall rather than a generic wall (same for doors, etc). My philosoohy is....why use a wall (or other component) for which there is a 100% chance it'll have to change? I'd rather take an educated guess, as long as you don't let these educated decisions hinder your overall process.

[davidcobi]

There are a few templates here you can look at:

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=39977

[DanielleAnderson]

That's kinda a personal question isn't it? LOL




I was waiting for that joke to pop up... ;)

[Calvn_Swing]

Now - next question: have you all found templates are better when they are extremely bare-bones-basic or when they contain everything and then you purge out all the unused stuff at a future date?

We are thinking that we will need a few templates since we do different projects like medical vs. multi-fam, mixed-use, etc. Thoughts on the number of templates needed would be welcomed as well.


Personally, I prefer the combination of a well developed content library and a bare bones template. Then again, I'm the person managing all this, so it makes it much easier on me. My policy at the moment is that I'll maintain a bare-bones template and all the standard content. Since we do have specialized groups in our office (healthcare, theaters, etc...) I'm trying to identify people in each group who can essentially be "Revit Managers" for those groups. These people will be charged with developing and maintaining any content (including templates) for their groups.

We are in the early stages of adoption, so we lack the ability to make a larger template file with our own custom stuff, and the OOTB stuff is simply insufficient for our purposes. If we only did one building type - like the residential fellow a few posts ago - and had consistent content for every job - we'd load all that stuff into the template of course. So, I may change my opinion over time as we develop a lot more custom content. But for now, plain jane is the way to go for templates, and we are pimping out our other content instead.

Point being, I doubt there is a "correct" answer. The questions is which solution best fits your firm?

Good luck!

[jcoe]

After reading everyone's responses, I went back to look at my template file to figure out why it is at 65megs when everyone else seems to average 8megs. What I realized is that we have been upgrading the same file since release 7. So I went back and rebuilt the template file like others have done and managed to reduce the size to 6megs. I am not sure why there is such a drastic difference in file size especially since the content of the two template files is the same.

Could anyone explain why the file size increased with the upgrades and if we can expect the same behavior with future releases?

[david.kingham]

If you do a save as and select compact it should bring the file size back down without rebuilding it. I had the same problem, all the purging and deleting in the world wouldn't bring the size down, only compacting will get rid of the leftover info

[Sweetshelby]

Whenever there is a major release (like from 8.1 to 9.0) I usually take the out of box template and then transfer project standards from our template. That way I get any new information that may be added to the template. I just have to reset a few random things and thats it.

[cadmgr.107947]

Like Wes..I've been carrying our templates since R8.
answers from first question:
1-Custom templates for residential multi family/single family - town homes.
2- Template for High Rise and Template for Low Rise (different sheet logo and levels).
3- High Rise size: 4.2 Mb - Low-Rise: 3 Mb.
The templates are low because as others we load in our separate office library we load as needed.
The contents are generally Titleblocks, annotations, several schedules, phasing and design options.

[BIM BAM BOOM]

Like Wes..I've been carrying our templates since R8.
answers from first question:
1-Custom templates for residential multi family/single family - town homes.
2- Template for High Rise and Template for Low Rise (different sheet logo and levels).
3- High Rise size: 4.2 Mb - Low-Rise: 3 Mb.
The templates are low because as others we load from our separate office library as needed.
The contents are generally Title blocks, annotations, several schedules, phasing and design options.

So the answer is as low as possible with a central library using NCS (National CAD Standard - waiting for the NBIMS )as much as possible -CSI divisions. Several templates with specific projects - only 2 templates for our firm that are used mainly for 4 to 6 types of projects.
Thanks,

[hand471037]

1. barely custom. very bare bones.
2. we use a ton of custom family templates however. all our stuff is complex custom work that is then produced via CNC. So we've set up custom generic model, furniture, and other family templates with things like units presets, dims, sections, scales, and more so that when we need to model up a new bit of something it's fast.
3. Our templates are tiny.

[affdesco]

Very Custom residential template. 7.8mb. I am heavy on duplicate views for working vs. printing. all view templates, tons of parameters and filters. And schedules... probably 80 schedules including master version, take off versions and print versions. All sheets are pre built.
Each project only requires tweaking the parameters, filters and stuff. The deliverable is great... and nothing ever better than the scheduled takeoff deliveries we use.