Learn how to effectively manage and navigate files for an intricate interior design project using Revit. This article provides insight into creating and managing views, avoiding unnecessary file duplication, and setting up callouts and floor plans for a specific project.
Key Insights:
- The article discusses the importance of managing files in Revit, particularly in the context of an interior design project. It demonstrates how to reopen and manage a central model, avoiding unnecessary file duplication that might consume hard drive space.
- Through the example of creating views for an interior design project, the guide underscores the significance of setting up callouts and floor plans. It highlights tips for editing and naming views for easy referencing later on.
- The piece also suggests creating distinct categories such as furniture and finish plans and emphasizes maintaining relevant naming conventions for ease of understanding and finding views.
This lesson is a preview from our Revit for Interior Design Course Online (includes software) and Interior Design Professional Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Now that we're ready to get started creating our views specifically for our interior design project, what I want to do is I'm going to reopen that file. And so if you didn't close it, that's not a big deal, but this is just something I wanted to run through in case you did close the file and you're coming back, say at like another session that you were running through the videos here. And so if you go into your Revit and you can see your recent files are here.
If I click on this one, what it's going to do, it's going to let me know that I'm opening a central model. And then by doing this, it's going to go ahead and create a local copy of it. And that's that structure that we were looking at, where this is how central and local models work.
Each individual user is going to work in a local model that references that central. So I'll go ahead and hit OK. And it's going to open that file.
I've already done this before. So I'm going to go ahead and say overwrite the existing copy because I just don't need to have 100 copies of the same file. If you use the second one, it's just going to create a new one every time you open it.
And you don't want to do that because you'll just run out of hard drive space real quick. So I'm going to go ahead and say overwrite existing copy. And it'll pop open our file back to where we left off.
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And now we can get started on creating the views and the different categories of views that we're going to use specifically for this project. So you can see we've already got the floor plans and for architectural plan, and we got the ones for interior design. And so since this portion of the project is going to focus on this living unit here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in on it.
And I'm going to go to the View tab, Callout, and I'll create a callout that just surrounds this view here like that. And then I never like to leave these bubbles in the middle of the plan for a number of reasons, but most importantly, you can't see it. And if you can't see it, it's going to be hard to find for somebody who needs to reference that view.
So I'll pull it out to say here. And now that callout was created and it's now in our project browser. And so when you look at your project browser, you can kind of see that there isn't anything immediately for that floor plan.
And so if we start hunting for it, you can see if I expand open the floor plans architectural plan, it created this level one interior callout one, and it's automatically got stored under architectural plan. And that's fine. But what we can do is we can go ahead and we can say edit type.
And then I'll go to duplicate. And then I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to call this finish plan. And this will give us a category for finish plans and hit OK.
And so now that we have finished plans here, I can go ahead and rename this. And you always want to rename things that make sense. Meaning you don't want to get too creative with the names because then if somebody comes in later and they try to find a view that you've created, they may not be able to find it because the naming convention is too hard to decipher.
So in this case, this is the one bedroom unit. So I'm going to go ahead and say one BD unit and then finish plan. And so now we have a finish plan that we can work on.
And what I'll do is I'll change the scale here to three eighths of an inch equals a foot. And that'll be a big enough scale that we could work on it from this level of detail, really be able to show our flooring patterns and have callouts and tags within the plan without it being too cluttered on top of itself. And so then I'll take the crop region that I have here and I'll start to bring it in pretty close to the edge of the walls because I don't really need to see any of this stuff on the outside since this will be more of like a typical living unit situation that gets applied to multiple different projects or multiple different portions of the project.
And this will be the start of my finish plan view. And so what I can do now is since I'm going to use essentially the same thing for our furniture plan is I could right click duplicate view and duplicate with detailing and it'll just create another one. And then I can do the same process that we went through just a second ago where we do the edit type duplicate and then I can just call this furniture plan and hit OK.
And I want you to notice that here it says view template applied to new views and it's set to architectural plan. So it's going to do the same thing that it did before where it's going to drop this into here. If we hit OK.
Now we have our furniture plan because we made that new type. And if we were to look at some of the things that were assigned to it so we can say no view template, no scope box, none of those things. But we do want to go in and rename the view so that it matches our standard here.
So this one's instead of finish we're going to go ahead and make it furniture. And now we've got a furniture plan and a finish plan that we can use as the basis for the views that we're going to create for this project.
