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Thread: Revit Group experiment

  1. #1
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    Default Revit Group experiment

    Hi all,

    We are experimenting with groups on a recent healthcare project. Please see attached PDF showing group strategy/structure. For instance, we would have a hospital building that would comprise of 4 wards. So the idea is to have a ward group and insert it four times. How a ward group is structured is explained here. One of our experienced revit users came up with this structure. I am not sure about this group structure. I think it is an overkill. For instance, it makes sense to have a bedroom group but then to have ceiling, walls etc as seperate sub groups within bedroom group is overkill. But i may be wrong. can you please share your experience with groups and its strategy for a typical building? Does it affect file size or Does it make file clunky? etc.

    Thansk in anticipation of your help.

    Regards
    Attached Files Attached Files

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    Default Re: Revit Group experiment

    We try to stay away from having walls in groups after trying it out on a hotel project. There are issues when adding the group to a level of a different height, and there were also many annoying wall-join issues. And no matter how careful we thought we were being, we ended up with multiple copies of each group that Revit created.

    We also found using nested families instead of groups of furniture kept the file size down (and reduced it considerably in cases where I went through the model to switch the groups out later) It's not any more difficult to edit a family than a group, and you can easily copy reference planes from your project to the new family to define the room boundary.

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    Default Re: Revit Group experiment

    Thanks for reply.

    I agree with you that family is better than group. But for system families like walls, ceilings, floors, door etc. we can not create a nested family of a room, or can we????

    What we are trying to do here is to have a room group which has walls, ceilings, floor, doors, windows etc. set out. So you repeat it for no. of rooms. This room group then becomes nested in a BEDS group, which in turn is nested in WARD group.

    Thanks in anticipation.

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    Default Re: Revit Group experiment

    That is exactly what we started for our hotel. (Although we just modeled the interior walls/ doors and placed the groups into the empty shell) We got rid of the ceilings from the groups almost immediately. We ended up having to remake more than half of them anyway.

    The walls were frustrating as well. They wouldn't clean up with the others nicely and sometimes you would copy the group and the door to the new unit would disappear, creating the group 'King Suite 2'. (A few times this didn't get noticed until much later when someone else needed to make a change and there were 5 copies of most of the groups)

    There were also all sorts of issues with wall height from level to level. We ended up taking the walls out of the groups by the end as well. Then we changed all the furniture and plumbing to nested families since the file size was huge and it took forever to edit anything. (We added a new line category in the family outlining the room size so we could quickly see if any of the rooms were not right)

    I would suggest a trial-run of your proposed system in it's own file to start with. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to troubleshoot something that can get this complicated with a deadline staring you down.

    Also, where are you in design? If you are still in design developement and will be moving these rooms around a lot, I would suggest making the groups just a 2d plan to begin with. These will be much quicker to move around to make sure everything fits and then you can add walls, doors and other families once the plan is more or less finalized.

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    Default Re: Revit Group experiment

    Thank you very much for your kind and quick response. I would agree with you on overall group strategy. We are at early design development phase.
    Personally, I am nervous about using groups in such a nested (complicated?) way (as shown in pdf).

    I would also see what others say on this.

    Thanks in anticipaiton.

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    Default Re: Revit Group experiment

    Would other people share their experience on this, please? OR provide any suggestions in this matter please. I am very nervous about using groups in such a compicated manner but users insist on grouping everything/anything they can. they dont see problems.

    We have a fairly flat buldings here. Most of them are single story with multiple wards in a building with repeating layout in wards, mostly. We have 7 detached buildings on this site. Each building would have 3-4 wards in it. The way I see is model one ward and group it and repeat it for number of times as needed. But whats the benefit of having a ward group with nested ceiling, walls etc groups seperately within it? Please see PDF attached in the first post. I see this as a potential catalyst for problems down the line, like wall join problems, file size problems, groups management problems etc.

    Thanks in anticipation of your help.

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    Default Re: Revit Group experiment

    For initial design layout - use linked files rather than groups. I typically start buy creating a group and then before I copy it around, I convert it to a linked file. I then do all my design in that mode. Things don't clean up, but performance is more like using family. Also doing design updates is faster since you can just open the group and work just on that one unit.

    Later we can convert back to groups to get walls to clean up. Things seem to go a bit smoother when they are all merged in at once.

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    Default Re: Revit Group experiment

    Aaron,
    Do you only use your links in SD and DD and then then bind into groups for CDs?
    We've used the linked file structure a lot after running into many of the same problems with groups that the OP had. However, most of our projects are large mulit-family projects with townhome/individual buildings so we kept each unit type a separate file and building a separate file all the way through CD's.

    I'd love the idea of binding the links in CDs so we could have everything be live but I'm not sure Revit can handle that. 25 buildings with 3-4 units each means a LOT of coordination of standards and Transfering Project Standards is not exactly a foolproof method.

    To the original point of the thread though, we've found that when we have an element that is repeating a lot, say a unit plan - or a bedroom in your situation - but needs to be in a group or a link, that linking is the way to go. We too have not been able to solve the groups multiplying themselves and it's just annoying when you have 9 copies of the same thing. You could create each of your bedroom pieces as a link and then bring them into a ward file and bring all the wards together into a master file. It allows you to place an move pieces around easily.

    With this linked file structure we get around the problem of having multiple types of the same wall in the different filesby creating a single catalog file for the project that we then modify all components and standards in and then publish everything from that file to all the others using transfer standards or loading in families and overwriting. It works out failry well, if you can get all of your team members to use the catalog.

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    Default Re: Revit Group experiment

    Thanks very much Aaron and Kreed. Linking seems the way to go for this. We are in early SD/DD stage. But the argument i get from the users is that if we go down the linking route then if they want to amend the layout, they have to open link file seperately whereas group is within the file and you can quickly go into edit group mode and make changes.
    My another query in the original post is the level or nesting in the group. As you can see in the attached pdf, the users want to group upto 4 level of nesting. So for example, (level 1) WARD layout group <-- (level 2) BEDS group <-- (level 3) BEDROOM group <-- (level 4) CEILING group, WALLS group, ENSUITE WALLS group, FURN group.

    So If we have a BEDROOM group then is there any benefits to have WALLS, CEILINGS, FURN, ENSUITE WALLS etc. groups within it? Users insist on this type of nesting within BEDROOM group but I dont see any benefit in doing this (unless i am missing something here) and can see that this can lead to unnecessary problems down the line.

    Thanks in anticipation.

    regards

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    Default Re: Revit Group experiment

    Quote Originally Posted by rahul.shah View Post
    So If we have a BEDROOM group then is there any benefits to have WALLS, CEILINGS, FURN, ENSUITE WALLS etc. groups within it? Users insist on this type of nesting within BEDROOM group but I dont see any benefit in doing this (unless i am missing something here) and can see that this can lead to unnecessary problems down the line.
    There is some benefit in that you can keep a consistent group for each of those and reload them as each component changes.We've done a few projects like that where we have a specific kitchen module that is in every unit type and remains a group that is loaded and reloaded when it changes. It does aid in the consistency, if there are very few users working on this part.

    What we've found is that once you get multiple people working with these components they change just a little bit and the users get frustrated and make a new group type or ungroup it all together. If you have very standard groups, as I imagine you would in healthcare buildings, the users may be right.

    I once tried making a family for this type of interior component but couldn't get actual walls in the family. All in all, grouping standard components works fine - just be very strict about who edits them and make sure the entire team updates the components when they change.

    I think a good approach would be to use linked files down to the Bedroom level and then leave the ceilings, walls, furniture components as groups.

    Kevin

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