Issues with Documenting Very, Very, *Very* Large Buildings in Revit

[dcunningham]

Hello again,

My colleague (also named Dave) mentioned one of the problems we're encountering with Revit on a large transportation project: (lack of) sloped floors/levels. See the thread "sloping level" from yesterday for additional information.

This is not the only problem we foresee in trying to work in Revit. Any suggestions will be most welcome.

Some background:

• The building is a large transportation facility approximately 4000 feet long. Call it 4.5 million square feet.
• The SD submission had required 250 plan sheets to describe the building at 1/8", with a total of about 1100 sheets for all disciplines in six volumes. I estimate for DD that architecture alone will jump to around 1300 sheets, and the set will be upwards of 5500 sheets in 25 to 30 volumes with all disciplines.
• The building is broken into "sectors" corresponding to the maximum viewport size permitted by the client's titleblock (30x42 paper size). In plan, the building is 18 sectors long, and anywhere from 1 to 5 sectors wide.
• EVERYTHING is tied back to the sector: sheet numbers, room numbers, door numbers, stair, ladder, elevator and escalator numbers, so that everyone has a chance of being able to find stuff later.
• The building slopes at a uniform 1/32" per foot over the entire length to match the grade of the site, so that ground level of the eastern end of the building is a little over 10 feet higher than the western end of the building. The reasons for this are arcane, but have to do with equipment capabilities. All of the subterranean portions of the building are flat.
• Various parts of the project have been underway since 2000, including an underground train station currently under construction. There's a tremendous amount of legacy CAD work to interface with, both stuff internally generated, and by other A/E teams working at the site.
• The client has a 296-page CAD Standards Manual we are required to adhere to. The Manual dictates things such as where our project origin (0,0,0) is located, filenaming conventions, sheet numbering, fonts (we have to use AutoCAD's RomanS for all annotations) using backwards referencing for all section, elevation and detail callouts and titles, and all sheets must be numbered "Sheet xx of yy" and "Volume uu of vv" on the CAD deliverables. (We've actually been able to solve a number of these on our own.)

We're looking for ways to have Revit help us automate some or all of the headaches associated with all of the above, especially when the client just changed their sheet numbering standards on us. Our early experiments have led us so far to the following:

1. Revit is perfect for the area calculations the client needs.
2. Revit is perfect for creating our Finish Schedule.
3. With some effort, we can make Revit work in creating our door schedule.
4. Until we can figure out how to slope an entire building, we don't think we can use Revit wholesale to study building geometry. Isolated studies of key areas may be the most we can hope for here--highly sculpted architectural concrete columns for instance, or boilerplate stuff such as toilet and furniture layouts.
5. Scope boxes seemed like the answer to creating our plan sheets, but it doesn't appear that Revit gives us enough precise control over sizing and placing them in the model or on titleblocks to really be viable for formatting purposes. It looks like building sections that span multiple sheets are going to be a real hassle. For a set this large, some kind of matchline tool and better viewport alignment are critical. Eyeballing it just doesn't work. The number of views in the project browser to necessary to make this work are also causing some concern, but we think we can deal with it.
6. We're still investigating how to make backwards/cross referencing work, i.e., when you're looking at a section tag, you can see both the sheet you're going to, and the one you're coming from. Also, the viewport titles need to have some way of tracking all of the sheets which reference it.
7. We had hoped to use Revit to handle some of our file-management and drawing list needs. We haven't experimented much with this aspect of the software yet, but we're wondering how much control we'll have over the exported filenames. We're hoping to find a way to set up a list of parameters related to which sector of the building you're looking at, and have all sorts of things adjust their numbering accordingly (Sheet name, drawing number, and our version of a key plan which is nothing more than a sector map.)

So, there it is. We're still evaluating the possibilities Revit offers for helping the design and documentation process *for this project*, but we don't pretend to think that we've covered everything. Ideas and suggestions are most welcome.

David

[aaronrumple]

The client has a 296-page CAD Standards Manual we are required to adhere to.

This one will probably kill you in Revit. For so many drawings it could prove to be a management nightmare. You'll need to make sure you can give them the DWG's the way they want before anything else.

The slope is the least of your worries.

[Wes Macaulay]

This project, unless you can link it, will almost certainly blow up in Revit. In particular, if geographic areas of the building can be broken into separate drawing sets, you may have a chance.

File linking behaviour has changed for R9 as well and seeing as that's the version we'll all be using soon, I would wait to see how Revit handles it.

It sounds like it's just too big for Revit, however...

[Scott D Davis]

I would look seriously into getting Autodesk involved. There is the Autodesk Consulting group that has Revit experts that can help you on your project. A project of this size I think they would be interested in helping you with.

[dgreen.49364]

I think that SOM proved with the Freedom Tower that anything can be done in Revit. But they had help from Revit up front.

1000 sheets in Revit will still be 1000 sheets in AutoCAD plus about a million other AutoCAD files to manage. Sounds to me like this project is going to be a nightmare no matter what program(s) you use.

[crarchitect]

Your project sounds fun!

Be sure to create a bullet proof naming convention for your views, sheets, details, etc.

Find a meaningful syntax which relates to your drawing production cycle- it has to be direct and easy to implement or it won't happen. Don't forget to examine your cross functional team data sharing needs, how do you get data from them? Look at your archival data storage strategies. By taking the time now to understand your long term data management needs, you will undoubtedly come up with a practical universal project/family/view/sheet naming strategy.

And then can I have it?

Let me know how that goes for you. But seriously, I see the view creation and organization as an area needing deserving more scrutiny during the day to day life of a project. You are going to have to keep a tight control on the view name syntax in order to maintain high efficiency.
-C

[sbrown]

For the sloping building its not really that hard, you create a level at the top and botom elevations of the base, then mass the building and convert the mass to walls and roofs, then make your floor slope.

[dcunningham]

This project, unless you can link it, will almost certainly blow up in Revit. In particular, if geographic areas of the building can be broken into separate drawing sets, you may have a chance.

The building does lend itself to being broken up in to chunks; we could probably divide it into six or eight pieces without too much difficulty. That's how we've been handling coordination anyway: every two weeks the structural engineer and the MEP guys meet to focus on a specific area, informally referred to as "The Ends", "The Nodes", "The Bar" and "The FIS". The two train stations under the Nodes are somewhat integrated into the Nodes, but there's no conceptual problem with splitting them out too.

David

[dcunningham]

I would look seriously into getting Autodesk involved. There is the Autodesk Consulting group that has Revit experts that can help you on your project. A project of this size I think they would be interested in helping you with.

Scott,

Our IT department has been aware of the issues with the project for a while, and has expressed willingness to help get Autodesk involved. It seems pretty clear to me that the project as a whole will not be done in Revit, but we're still interested in understanding how it can assist our design and production efforts. I think that understanding needs to crystallize first, before we get Autodesk involved.

David

[gbrowne]

Where is this happening? I take it your hiring!

I have no experience of such a large project, but surely to say it would be a nightmare in revit is not the way to look at it. It is just a another challenge. OK, its a huge one, but a good one. Get the factory involved and keep us all up to speed, cos I think we will all benifit from it. The same goes for the freedom tower team, lets hear a bit more about the issues and solutions!!!