I was pleasantly surprised to find that my schedule opened up and I was able to attend this months South Coast Revit User Group meeting. There were two topics:
- Schedules
- Content Management (Libraries)
One of the nice thing about attending SCRUG is you get a look at how others are using the features of Revit. Since I have an older version installed at both work and home, it gives me a chance to see the future. Autodesk added some features to schedules over the years. There are many features built into every software and Revit is no exception. The difficulty with any software company is finding a way for users to discover new functionality. SCRUG is one way for users to find the new or old features.
Schedules
Carla covered some schedule basics, however, though basic, these features are very powerful.
group parameters vs ungrouped - nice for appearance
Combining key schedules with schedules allows one to push content from a key schedule to another schedule. For example you have a set pallet of finishes based on the room function. Categories like office, breakroom, hall, storage and so on. You may only have 3-4 pallets, but dozens of rooms. To manually add the individual finishes to each line in the schedule could easily add hours of time. Using a key schedule you could pick your pallets and then select them from a drop down in the room finish schedule. One example was shown by adding code occupancy calculations to a room schedule. The number of persons can be calculated from the area by applying the occupant load factor.
"Insert from file" when you load a schedule, it will bring in the associated key schedules automatically!
Schedules can be used to manage objects in the project - everything in the project. Sheets, views, levels, or anything. Since you may have schedules that will not appear in the printed set you can have multiple schedules for sorting or finding items. One anecdote was that a wall type was created and used that was not part of the company standard - and with a schedule it was easily found, located, and corrected.
View template may be created and applied to schedules - you can easily get all the schedules in a project to use the same font, and lines. One best practice is to name your schedule fonts with the name "schedule" in it.
Content Management
Why should we manage content? For company consistency, which translates to quality and it saves time.
Manage your parameters - using the same parameter across families and projects means less duplicated work, and more profitability.
Document the shared parameters! - write down what was created, why it was created, what it does and where it goes.
Have an office standard template for projects and for families.
When you want to "hard code" parameters into a template - start with a .rft, convert to a .rfa then convert to a .rft. Done.
Idea for families - use an embedded mass family for clearances - use the same object subcategory across all families so you can globally turn them all on or off in views.
Many manufactures provide BIM content. Colby Windows, Kawneer to name a few. Beware the content! Much of it is not created with the design professional in mind. Always test it in a sample project. The last thing you want is for a piece of content to break your project.
FYI - Autodesk Seek has added a badging/rating system for content.
Best practices for creating content:
- Use reference lines and reference planes. Choose carefully which references are strong, weak or not a reference. The implications affect where you can align or dimension and how easy it is to pick and click.
- Materials - use parameters in families and manage the materials in the project
- Test content in test projects
Organizing your content:
- Name/sort by CSI number - makes for easier keynoting and spec coordination
- Sort directories: 00-startup files, 01-support files, 02-model content, 03-annotate content, ...
- startup - templates
- support - share parameter files
- model - 3d families
- annotate - 2d families
- Keep track of what you decided and why
- Make compromises, don't change how you operate so often that you can't get/keep everyone on board
Several vendors offer content search, creation, duplication and organizing solutions, Robocopy, Autodesk Vault, Dropbox, Peersync, DFS Replicate, Buzzsaw, ...
