Large Resort Project Questions

We are starting on a large project. Hotel resort, 10 story hotel right in the middle of a low rise building of approximately 100,000 s.f. The high rise and the low riser portions are being drawn by two different offices, in two different cities...part of the same company. We are trying to figure out the best way to approach this. Should we go with two separate models and link each others model? Should we do a single model central file scenario, across the WAN?

Our structural and MEP consultants will also be using Revit, so that seems to me to throw more questions into the mix.

This is the largest project we've taken on with Revit and I would like to feel comfortable with the approach we take before we get deep into it and then think...oh $%#&, we should have done it this way...

How should we go about this and what do we need to keep our eyes open for?

Many thanks.

I have a similar issue with 2 projects right now.
The first will be 650k sf. 4 stories, plus penthouse and sloping roof. Lots of curves and not rectangular bays.
The second is a 9 story tower about 500k sf between 4 existing 4 story buildings.
My question for both is how do I get them to run? I'm having issues with just trying to open the files, muchless move anything in them.
Thanks in advance.
I'm running a 3.4 GHz P 4 with 2 gigs of Ram with and Nvidia GeForce 6800 GS.
I know it's a little weak, but it shouldn't cause me that much of an issue

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Originally Posted by david_peterson

I'm running a 3.4 GHz P 4 with 2 gigs of Ram with and Nvidia GeForce 6800 GS.I know it's a little weak, but it shouldn't cause me that much of an issue

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Unless you want to spend a lot of time making tea that spec is seriously not anywhere near enough to efficiently model that project. Min is Core2Duo 2.2Ghz, 4G ram, ideally 10K harddrives, a good v.card (personally I'd go for Quadros) and a fast network. If you're adventurous consider Vista 64bit otherwise XP 64bit should be seriously considered over 32bit.

Guy

Things are slow here. I'm going to re-post this on the General forum.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by GuyR

Unless you want to spend a lot of time making tea that spec is seriously not anywhere near enough to efficiently model that project. Min is Core2Duo 2.2Ghz, 4G ram, ideally 10K harddrives, a good v.card (personally I'd go for Quadros) and a fast network. If you're adventurous consider Vista 64bit otherwise XP 64bit should be seriously considered over 32bit.

Guy

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Thanks for the heads up on the system. I know it's under powered, but I'm wondering why the 4 gigs of Ram. There seems to be some differing thoughts on this. According to the MS website, XP Pro supports up to 4 gigs. However it also says that it will only use 2 gigs of vitural. So I don't get it. If I Pay for 4 gigs of Ram, will I even be able to use it?
Thanks

There are some general tips for large projects.

Get all the RAM and CPU horsepower you can. That would be a 2.8Ghz Core 2 CPU these days. Quad cores don't matter unless you're rendering. If you don't think 4Gb on a 32-bit machine is going to work for you, get a 64-bit XP box with 8Gb -- we have proof on this forum that the extra RAM is helping people get the work done on very large projects.

Reduce the number of objects. File size is not so much an issue as object count. Consider making uberfamilies -- like a kitchen family that has all the appliances and casework and plumbing families built (that's a thread in itself!). Even in detailing, the fewer objects you have, the better.

Reduce the number of relationships. Every wall join, every locked alignment, every implied alignment -- these all impede the performance of a project. The automation of Revit comes with a price -- though for me the price of NOT having that automation is higher. We disable wall joins on wall ends of groups that contact walls outside the group. This makes for considerable gains in performance. Disabling wall joins does improve performance. Also: the new slab tool can kill performance. On one project we have, a large slab using the new slab tool effectively killed performance once we joined geometry of walls and other objects to the slab. At that point, we would turn off the slab's workset to make life livable until we needed to print. Joining geometry is a relationship that can come with a high price.

Linking can certainly improve performance, but remember that it has limitations: you cannot use the Linework tool on linked files; you can only link plan and RCP views; and so on.

It would be great if we did not have to employ linked files in Revit -- it's a real pain. But that's life at the moment.

I've been looking at an alternative to steelhead devices over a WAN. I'll post the links to the AVAILL site below. It seems like a simpler and cheaper option and may eliminate the need to break up the project into too many linked files. I can't comment on the performance as we have not yet bought into the system since the project we will need it for has been given the red light. Please update the post if you or anybody else happens to pursue this option.

http://www.availl.com/wafs/
http://www.techworld.com/files/white...eets%20CDP.pdf

Thanks for the input everybody. Here is how the projects sits now...we have the low rise and the high rise. Two different offices. My office will be doing the high rise. Our portion of the project begins at level 3...where the tower breaks free at roof level, if that makes sense. Both portions, high rise and low rise, will be part of one package.

I am thinking that the best way to manage this is for the two offices to link each others portion into their model. Since we are doing the high rise, we'll link the low rise into our project and vise versa.

If anyone has any more input...keep it coming.

We've currently got 2+ million square feet split up into the following:
Core file (includes slabs)
Shell
B, 1, & 2 amenity floors
3~8 office floors
Atrium and Atrium Roof system
Topo
and a few other miscellanious links.
We share these over the wan using Riverbed.
Half of the files are copied from our partner firm at midnight to our primary server joining the other half of the files as our partner firm does not allow us access to their servers and we do the same.
3 of the staff on this project work from 500+/- miles away accessing the central file which they copy via a simple script every morning. infact everybody on the project uses the same script which adds the users name and date to the file which is useful when problems arise and making sure the staff is opening the right file. We use Worksets to manage the loading of the links and organizing the files.
Some of the annoyances we have are delays due to the editing rights verification revit does.
We are not using Revit MEP or Revit Structure on this project yet but we do have the structure built in Revit.
We use Snagit to help coordinate between the offices.
Our workstations are fast Xeons with Win64, & 6Gb Ram with 22" or 24" monitors