Building Model questions

[sethridge]

I am a newbie to revit so bear with me folks :-)
When you are working on medium to large sized projects do you break your building model up into seperate models and link them together or do you build one single model? In other words would you create a shell model and then link it in to a new file to add interior walls? I feel comfortable modeling in Revit now but I am still a bit up in the air about what advanced users consider proper and efficient workflow in this program.

Thanks as always!

[twiceroadsfool]

The opinions on this vary greatly, but GENERALLY it goes something like this:

On small projects, you can put it all in one model.

As projects get larger, if it gets to be too much to handle, you can mitigate the issues by breaking the model up in to Worksets, and selectively opening/working on them.

If the project is getting STILL too big, you can start to use Linked Models, with seperate files for buildings, or for portions of a building. It isnt seamless, and there are different *rules* for playing with the different methods, but thats the gist of it.

At what size, what size project team, and how complex of a building, do you make those distinctions, is something that widely varies from office to office...

[sethridge]

The opinions on this vary greatly, but GENERALLY it goes something like this:

On small projects, you can put it all in one model.

As projects get larger, if it gets to be too much to handle, you can mitigate the issues by breaking the model up in to Worksets, and selectively opening/working on them.

If the project is getting STILL too big, you can start to use Linked Models, with seperate files for buildings, or for portions of a building. It isnt seamless, and there are different *rules* for playing with the different methods, but thats the gist of it.

At what size, what size project team, and how complex of a building, do you make those distinctions, is something that widely varies from office to office...

Ok I understand now that worksets can be used in different ways. So would I go ahead and set up these worksets at the beginning of the project if I know the scale of it could be large enough down the line to warrant this process?

[twiceroadsfool]

You can do it now, but worth mentioning (and emphasizing) is that you can also do it LATER.

Once you enable worksets, there is no going back. That means dealing with a central file, local copies, relinquishing, organizing, and maintaining.

You can leave it as an unworksetted model for now, and workset it later when it becomes necessary. Opinions vary on WHEN you should workset it, in the project lifecycle. On projects where i KNOW certain variables are under control, and i am CERTAIN the project is headed in a particular direction, ill set up my worksets and/or file links right away, much to the chagrin of many Revit implementation specialists. My reason being i didnt want to *change the rules* on a project team, midway through the project.

But, you can certainly wait. Waiting gives you the benefit of having a cleaner, easier to manage file until it becomes necessary to workset it. Of course, if you need multiple users in there at any given point in time, youre going to workset it anyway, so this discussion goes out the window...