What are the steps to developing a template?

[3dway]

I got three days of Revit training at another office then did about three projects part way through design development.

I'm at the point now where I think I can model just about anything that I need to and it will be close to good practice; definately not best practice.

I recently moved to a new office and they are planning on implementing Revit. I'm the only one with any Revit experience, so naturally there is a certain expectation that I will help to lead the implementation.

If I try to set up a template, what are the steps?

-create a titleblock - done
-set object styles
-lay down a wall naming standard, family naming/making convention
-make a basic number of walls, window, door families to keep in a minimalist template
-set up a few default views

Any sources of information would be appreciated.

Thanks,

[ambera]

After taking our first project through Construction Documents we took all the annotation symbols that we HAD to modify in order to meet our office standards and inserted them into our template file (replacing out of the box annotation).

[twiceroadsfool]

Theres a ton of behind the scenes stuff you dont tend to see right away:

1. ALL of the annotation families.
2. ALL of the lineweight settings / object styles
3. Deciding WHAT content you want in (more... or less.... two diff schools of thought... And thats a HUGE issue, in my opinion.
4. View templates, view properties for stand views. Level of detail? Scale? Overrides? VG settings, etc.
5. (pet peeve of mine) setting the door tags / window tags to not show as AAAEEEDDD### when you insert the first one (place a door, tag it, number it A0, or something)
6. Text styles- Making sure you only have what you want in there
7. Dimension styles AND project units- Are they configured to mess up your project- er, round?


Its not a ton, what i find nags at me is the stuff like configuring different "Section head and tail" configs, cuz theyre like "groups" in the annotation menu, not just the annotation families.

Plus, a ton of great templates are floating around here already... Id check some of them out and adapt as necessary. If i remember ill post mine at home tonight, along with my personal standards for naming conventions, etc.

[martin.grandbois]

Hi 3Dway,
What we've included in our standard are pretty simple since we tried to use lineweight OOTB from Revit. Also, we included minimal families required in a project. All exception are added on a needed basis.

So this way, we ensure that we do not move foward with a ton of useless families in our project.

Aaron,
If you have a naming standard for views and family, i would also be interested into it. That's one thing that i'm looking for to add to our template. I've searched trough several post but didn't found anything interresting.

[twiceroadsfool]

Ill put up what i have for standards (across the board), tonight if i remember...

Just realize what i post will be from my HOME use,and is strictly what *I* personally think the files and standards should have. They DO fall short in some ways...

[ITABWODI]

Thanks for the tips everyone. Our office is working on setting up project templates now, and you reminded me of some good items to include. What about shared parameters and/or additional project parameters common to most projects? Does anyone include those? Thanks!

[davidcobi]

On our first attempt (some years ago) our template was full of garbage we didn't use, stuff we imported from other users templates when we were still exploring Revit.

On our second attempt, after gaining significant experience and user feedback, we started with a blank template (none) and built up what we knew we needed a little bit at a time. As we learned a tool we developed a standard for that tool and incorporated it into our primary template. We ended up going through every single loaded family and project setting, establishing default settings for each.

Some settings/content evolve over the life of a project. Keep an eye on who's doing what and why and you'll have feedback for future template modifications.

Our template evolved with an emphasis on keeping it a lean & clean machine.

[jcoe]

One thing you might want to consider from a management side is have the Revit content and templates you are developing on a dedicated server or server partition with read only access - except for yourself. You definitely do not want others "playing" around with the template files and Revit content - especially if they are not familiar with the software.

In my experience, after your first one or two office projects, you will find yourself rebuilding your template taking into considerations best practices and lessens learned. As mentioned by others, creating an office template, building content and launching these standards is no small feat. I typically start with the easy (text, dims...) and work my way up (callout tags, browser customization...).

Also, do not make these decisions alone. Ask some of the more seasoned staff members for their opinion. Having them involved in the decision making process usually goes a long way, expecially when confronted with the nay-sayers.

Good Luck!

[DO-PRE]

I’m going through this now. We started our first project in Revit a couple months ago and just submitted SD's. I am now going back and updating the template before DD starts. We actually started with the OTB standards; I would create, update and modify everything on the fly but keep a list of items I changed. I burnt a lot of hours during SD creating this stuff but we will recover most of the time on the back end. Next project will feel like a vacation. Things we changed:

Dim. styles
Annotations symbols and text styles
Included wall types for modeling and for the wall type legend
Setup sheets that include all formatted schedules (doors, windows, finish, sheet index)
Custom browser setup (more levels to organize)
Naming conventions for views, walls, families (if we modify a standard OTB element we place a # symbol infront of, this brings it to the top of the list, got that from someone on AUGI and it works great)

I wish I had all this in place before we started, the only thing that really happens on a per project basis is creating model families (we do a lot of custom work.)

[twiceroadsfool]

Guys-

If you want to download and play with it, mine is available on the following site:

http://www.studiosyracuse.com/revitcontent.html

Have a ball :)

[andrewjohnson97]

I've attached a template checklist I made a while back. It outlines some of the areas you may want to spend time developing. Hopefully it will help somebody start off on the right foot.

Andy