Office starting multi-discipline Revit Project, have a question.

[sfraney]

Hi Guys/Gals,

My office is a starting their first project using Revit MEP. We have electricla, mechanical, and plumbing engineers, as well as our architects all under the same roof. The architectural department has created a model for the MEP people to link up to but my questions is this.

If all three MEP departments are working on this project, do they all work off the SAME Revit MEP file and use worksets? or do they each create their own Revit MEP file, one for electrical, one for plumbing, one for mechanical?


Any guidance here would be great, it would seem to me that making the engineers work from one single Revit MEP file using worksets would make the most sense, again, we are all under the same roof and work for the same company.

[mbeham]

I would suggest doing electrical as its own and mechanical and plumbing as another. With worksets you need to make sure the same systems are on the same worksets. Also you need to remember that if one engineer is working on a system that another one cant touch that system. I would recommend doing a lot of research on the MEP side of how worksets work with systems. Also read up on some of the suggestions on making the central file with the architectural central files in mind and using transfer project standards and not linking directly to the architectural file but a copy of that file.

[abarrette]

mbeham is correct in that you won't be able to work on the same systems even with worksetting. One way around this is to be diligent about creating named systems instead of just letting Revit use default systems.

My personal recommendation is to house all three disciplines in one model and use worksets to separate the disciplines/sub-disciplines. The reasoning behind this is electrical is a crossover discipline needing to supply power to mechanical equipment for instance.

Creating a copy of the Architectural file is recommended to avoid STC issues. It is also useful to open and strip the arch file and transfer project standards in from your template to create your central file for MEP. This eliminates having to create views to match the architectural set. It takes a little bit of setup but saves you pain in the long run.

[dhurtubise]

A quick note about having all MEP in one file. The ability to do that will depend on our moel size. MEP tends to quickly bring a computer to his knee for now.
So start all in one, and when you see signs of slowing down, pull out a discipline, then another one, etc. Don't start documentation before splitting because you will endup in a round of cut&paste.
Like once Steve told me, let the model talk to you but .. LISTEN.

[Cathy Hadley]

Does this mean Steve should now be known as the * Revit Whisperer* ?

Just asking...

[Cathy Hadley]

On the subject of systems and worksets... This one bit us real bad...

We were trying to have one person work on mechanical and myself work on plumbing... no problem I'll set set up the worksets... blah, blah, blah

Oh the big catch here... WORK REMOTELY...

Baically I had to check everything out to him, not just the mechanical workset, but levels & Grids... etc... before he could do any revisions to existing modeling..

But this meant that I could NOT even modify existing plumbing systems.. They seem to live on Shared Levels & Grids ???

I'm going to test this out, but it sounds like our fatal flaw was that the systems were created and let Revit name them? It isn't just that the workset wasn't active when you create it? That is really bothersome ... But a huge lesson learned.