Explore a detailed walkthrough of organizing spaces in a Revit MEP project, including cleaning up unnecessary spaces, and adjusting space tags for optimal project organization. Further, delve into the concept of work-sharing, enabling multiple individuals to collaborate on a Revit project simultaneously, as part of VDCI's course content.
Key Insights
- Effective management of a Revit MEP project involves not only creating spaces and establishing naming and numbering systems, but also ensuring a clean project structure by removing unnecessary spaces and properly organizing space tags.
- Work-sharing is a vital element in a Revit project, allowing multiple individuals to work on different elements of the project simultaneously. This collaborative process revolves around a central file serving as a master file, with individual users creating local copies that sync with the central file.
- While establishing work-sharing, firms often use "worksets" to assign specific elements or systems to different team members. However, the method of breaking up worksets can vary from firm to firm. Once a central file is created for work-sharing, it should not be moved to avoid complications.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Welcome back to the VDCI course information for the Revit MEP courses. We've gone ahead and started a new project based on a template in the previous videos. We've LinkedIn the Architectural model as a background, and we've also created spaces and established the space naming and numbering. And we've also cleaned up additional spaces that we didn't need to have.
One thing you'll want to make sure you do is—if I look at this—you know, you may notice that some of the space tags are off. Maybe take a minute to evaluate your drawings. Notice that, hey, this corridor here—I want to go ahead and take this guy up here. I'm going to go ahead and bring this guy down here just to start to organize this a little bit.
Just one of those kinds of things I like to do. Also, under the Second Floor Plan, I think there were a couple of extra spaces here that maybe weren't in the right locations. We would alert the Designer and the Architect to that.
But I guess these are going to go here in these corridors. The one thing I've noticed, though, is that maybe this is just one big space. So what I'm going to do is hover over the tag, grab that Corridor 1, and drag it over here to this space.
Boom. I also need to move the tag, bring it over, and uncheck Leader. And if I do the same with this one, I'm going to hover over the tag, hit TAB, and that's actually going to help me select the space.
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I could select the space just like that if I wanted to. But I found that hovering over the tag and hitting TAB actually allows me to select the space—or room—a little bit easier. That works for both rooms and spaces.
I'm going to drag this one over—like up here. Now this one's going to give me an error because there are multiple spaces in the same enclosed region. I'm just going to hit OK.
I'm not going to worry about it. It's an error—not a big deal. I'm going to take this, get this tag, and take the Leader off of it.
And really, from what I can tell is happening on the First Floor—right—you see this line here? There's a defined line right there. That's a Room Separator that the Design team has put in there to separate this corridor—the North Corridor—from the South Corridor.
For whatever reason, it just didn't happen on this side. So what I'm going to end up doing is going over to my Analyze tab. I'm going to create a Space Separator just to get this right.
And I'm going to go ahead and put it at the top of this door, the bottom of that door, going straight across. So I'll hit this room-bounding element. Now I've defined this as a space.
And this is a space. We did a little additional cleanup. Obviously, alert the Design team to that so they know they need to fix their model. So in this video, I'm going to go ahead and save. Make sure we save after that.
In this video, you don't really need to do anything. I just want to talk to you a little bit about the concept of worksharing. In a classroom environment, it doesn't work out very well.
But let's talk about it. And let's see how to set things up so that you understand the concept. And you'll know what we're talking about when you hear the term “worksharing.”
So very traditionally in a Revit project, there are multiple people working in the file at one time. In the days of AutoCAD or hand drafting, there were multiple files, and only one person could be in those files at one time. Well, with the advent of Revit and the idea of BIM, there are multiple people collaborating on this file and working on it. You know, there might be someone working on the First Floor, someone on the Second Floor, someone in the gym, someone in the cafeteria, and so on.
We want to allow that to happen. Now, since this file is not currently workshared, only one person can be in the file at a time. We're going to workshare so that multiple people can work on it. And really, what we're going to do is establish what we call a central file within Revit, which is kind of a master file.
Then each individual user will create local copies that get saved to their My Documents folder so they can sync the changes they're working on to the master file. At the same time that sync is happening, they're pulling changes from other people into their local file—if that makes sense. So where you would set this up as a central file would be under Collaborate.
Here is the Collaborate button. How items are organized under Collaborate—it's going to ask you, do you want to do this within your network or in the cloud? And again, you don't need to do this right now. We're just going through the process to show you and expose you to this. But you could share within your network or in the cloud. For our purposes, we're just going to be within our network, so I'd hit OK.
And that's going to create what we call established worksets. Now, down at the bottom, you'll see here I have something like Workset1. If I open up my Worksets dialog, I can establish different worksets.
Now, worksets are ways that the team can lock specific elements down, in a sense. Each user can borrow elements from a workset, or they can check out a full workset. Sometimes firms—specifically MEP firms—will break up different systems into different worksets.
So I have one person working on supply air, another person working on return air, another on outside air. I have someone working on refrigerant piping or sanitary sewer lines or water lines, right? Every firm kind of does it their own way. So make sure to talk with your firm and ask, “Hey, how do you guys establish worksets? How do you use those? How do you want me to use those?” You can see that I currently have a couple of worksets checked out. We could create a new workset, delete, rename—all that kind of stuff.
You can also make sure that they're visible in all views or turned off in a view. I'm going to go ahead and hit OK. I'm not going to worry about creating anything new.
Now I've established worksharing, but I need to save this file as a central model. So what I'm going to do is go to File, and then I'm going to go to File > Save As. I like to see the dialog when I do this, so I'm going to Save As Project.
I'm in my BIM 321 folder. I'm just going to rename this file to be mechanical_central. Under Options, you'll see that I have a maximum backups of 20. Then under Worksharing, check “Make this a central model after save.”
So I'm going to go ahead and hit OK. I now have mechanical_central. So I know that this is a central file. There is no way in Windows to determine if a Revit file is a central model or not a central model—if that makes sense.
So I put the name “central” at the end so I can know that, hey, that is the central model. I'm going to hit Save. It is saving that file and creating the backups as I go through and do that.
Then what I'm going to go ahead and do here is—I don't want to work in the central. So once I've established the central file, I'm going to go ahead and close all inactive windows. I'm going to close this Mechanical file and go from there.
Now I'm going to go back in and open. If I hit Open, it's going to take me to the same location. I'm going to select the central file here.
Then you'll see this button that says Create New Local. I hit Open. And now I have created a local copy of that central model that I can sync to.
I know that it's a local copy because my username will be appended at the end. Everything else is good. I could save this.
And there it goes. Again, you don't need to worry about doing that. We're just talking about the concept of worksharing and how it all works.
Hopefully this has been informative on the idea of worksharing and how to establish it. The one thing to remember is that once that central file is set, you do not want to move it. Anytime you move or copy or do anything with your central file, you're going to have to re-save it as a central model in that new location and recreate new locals off that central file.
Great. See you in the videos.
