Setting Up Your Revit Project File for Interior Design Consultants

Before starting this class, you're gonna wanna make sure you've downloaded all the files that we've provided for you in the resources tab. That includes this architectural model and a series of families that I've already pulled from different websites, just in case you don't have the ability to do that. And we'll need those to get us through this project.

And so one of the first things that we could do is we could take a look at the file that we're dealing with. And so this is the native architectural file and you can see it's not super complicated. There's not a lot going on here, but this file was assembled by doing a couple of things.

And this is similar to what we've done in previous courses, just at a little bit of a larger scale. And so what we see here is a group that's been created for each of the living units and so they're unique, but then the walls that go through and everything that makes up essentially the shell of the model are part of the base model. And so this, if I make a change, as we've learned in previous courses, it'll get updated throughout the entire project.

So the group's nice to know about, but one of the things that I wanted to talk about in this course is what if we are the consultant to the architect and not necessarily working within their office, then how are we going to interact with this model? And so to do that, we're gonna need our own file, which means we need our own template and our own view settings and all of those things that go along with it. And so what I'm gonna do is we're gonna take a out-of-the-box Revit template. So I'll just go to the file and then new and I'll click project here.

And there's a few different options, but we wanna go ahead and pick the imperial multidiscipline, meaning we're gonna use imperial units like feet and inches and then multidiscipline. And the way Autodesk is this set up now is it's really a template that anybody can use and that's good and bad. It's good because it's very comprehensive, but it's also bad because as you look here in the project browser, you can see it is very comprehensive.

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We have views for like electrical coordination, a ton of different things for architectural and mechanical and plumbing and a lot of sheets and things that we're just not gonna use, right? So anytime we start a project or we start out with a new template, we're gonna wanna set this up so that it's suited for the work that we're doing. So the first thing I'll do here is instead of just leaving it as project one, you can see that's what it's called up here. I'll go ahead and say file, save as, and I'm gonna save it as a project.

And this will be the file that we'll use for the rest of our project here. And I'm gonna go into my BIM 331 Revit for interior design folder here that I've saved to my desktop. And this is gonna be my home base for all my files here.

And I'm just gonna call it BIM 331. And then I'll put my first name and then my last name here so that we can go ahead and use this as our file that's gonna be independent from the opposite architectural one. So I'll go ahead and hit save.

And now I have a file that I can start working with. And you can see in previous courses, we've used the template file as a base and there wasn't as much of this stuff in there on those. So there's a few elements that I just wanna point out so that we're all on the same page here.

So this green box that's around here, this is called a scope box. And this is something that can be very helpful to us for setting up multiple views to have the same boundary. And so if I have many views that are essentially the same size, like the overall floor plans for a multi-level building, I can use the scope box to define that crop region on all of those views.

So they look exactly the same on every project. It's a good thing to use for a lot of different project types. And I like to use it to organize my, say, floor plans, ceiling plans, finish plans, furniture plans, so they all look the same no matter what sheet we're dealing with.

The next thing on here is we have a working section. And all this is, it's just another section that was created, but the difference is this one was created using this working section type. And so the template just has it set up using a different section head and call-out head so that it looks red.

And that's pretty much the only difference there. We won't be using this in our class, so I'm just gonna go ahead and delete it. It's gonna delete that view, so I'll hit OK.

And then I wanna go over to the project browser and really just do some cleanup work because there's a lot of views in here that we're not gonna use. And there are a lot of views that we're gonna use as the basis for our project, but then we're gonna adjust them later. So the first thing I can do, and it's kinda easy to see what we need to remove, but I can go in and I can say, all right, I don't need any of these electrical floor plans.

I don't need any of the electrical power plans or the ceiling plans. Same with the mechanical, plumbing, and structural plans. And I can go through and let's say I grab these two electrical plans.

I can select them and I can hit delete. And I can kinda work my way all the way down, but we've been using Revit for a little bit now, so we know there's gotta be easy way. And when I look at this, I can see there's a schedule, there's a typical, and a working one.

And so if I open that up, the working one here, I can see that I've got some options for different sheet lists and different view lists. So I'm gonna open up the working view list. And I can see that I've got all the views that are in the model.

And that way I can go in and instead of trying to delete them through the project browser, I can actually select the different rows and I can delete the rows from here. And it'll let me know that, hey, you're deleting instances and you're not just deleting it from the schedule, but you're actually deleting it from the model. And we're okay with that.

So I'm gonna hit okay. And then I could do the rest of the MEP files that we don't need here. Because we just wanna clear out these models.

And so I can keep going all the way through until all these ones are gone. And just as a reminder, I'm just pressing, dragging until the ones I don't want are selected and I'll hit delete, this button here up at the top. And essentially we can leave a few of these.

So like these architectural elevations and the ceiling plans and the floor plans, the cover sheet, those things are all fine to keep in here. But you do definitely want to double check and make sure you're not leaving some views behind. Because what we're gonna do is we're gonna use this as the basis for any projects that we do going forward.

So you wanna make sure you take the time now to go in and make sure that you get rid of the views the first time. So you don't propagate a mistake through multiple projects if you're going to use this as a template file. So the next thing that we'll do is we will go ahead and take a look at our views.

And you can see that we've got views here that are set up as a architectural plan, building elevations, architectural ceiling plan. And there's no reason that we can't do the same thing with our interior design sheets. And so what I can do is I can go to this level one architectural.

And if I right click on it, I can go to duplicate view and duplicate with detailing. And it'll create another version of that. And all this is here with this architectural plan, it's just another view type that we have within the model.

So you can see here when I click on the type selector, I've got many different types up here. And these are just created by going to edit type, duplicate, and then I can go in and I can actually tell it what I want this to look like. And so if I were to say interior design, then I can go ahead and hit okay and hit okay again.

And now you can see that I've got one specifically for interior design. And we can take that a little step further. I can rename this.

So instead of architectural, just so we can be consistent here, I can call it interior. And so you can have all of these different categories and you can sort this in a way that works best for your project.