Discover how to update and manage base files within Revit, a software program utilized for building information modeling. The article illustrates the step-by-step process of updating and managing the CAD files within Revit, including mirroring and duplicating tasks for efficient design adjustments.
Key Insights
- The article walks through the process of updating a base file in Revit, including copying new files, managing links and reloading data.
- It further specializes on managing CAD files, illustrating how to mirror and duplicate designs for efficient placements.
- The article demonstrates practical applications of these features, such as creating and managing parking stall counts, adjusting stall dimensions, and effectively applying tools like the spacebar trick and endpoint shortcut for efficient design process.
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At first glance we can see that there are a couple of things that aren't so great on this base file and that's not a big deal because we can update them pretty easily. And so in this case we can pretend the scenario is that we received a new base file and now we need to update it. And so what I can do is in my file explorer here, if I browse to my class files, I can take the file, the new one that we received which wasn't in our links folder here, I can right click I can copy it and then what I'll do is I'll drop it into my links folder overriding this one.
It's going to ask you to replace, we will do that. And then once it's complete, in other software programs like AutoCAD, you would have gotten a notification in here that it's been updated but Revit does not work that way. And so we can go to our insert tab and then we'll manage links.
And for manage links you can see that I have a CAD file. And a Revit file loaded in. We're looking to mess with the CAD file right now so we want to go to that tab, the CAD formats tab, and then I can select the file and I just simply have to hit reload.
And so I'm going to move this out of the way so we kind of see how this works. When I hit reload and hit okay, it'll update the base and you can see we've already had some changes that are going to help us out quite a bit. Now I can go in here and this is that exact situation I was talking about before, how I don't want to have a stripe here because that's just going to look weird.
So I'm actually going to delete that spot and then I'll use my mirror tool to mirror it across. Now I can go through and I can make sure I have a parking stall at each one of these things so that we can get accurate counts for our parking without having to go through and total each one up. So this is a big upfront effort but it gives us a lot of benefits in the future.
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So the first thing I'll do here is I'll start off by just taking a look at what stalls I have and the majority are going to be eight foot six, which is not a big deal, and then we can go ahead and we can add all of those in. So I'll grab one of the eight foot six types and what's great about this is by using that combination of mirror and the spacebar trick for placement, we can get these in pretty quickly. So I'll just do CS and it seems like copying might be easier but sometimes maybe not, you know, so we can go ahead and place it.
It'll be a little difficult sometimes at these endpoints and that's where that SE trick really comes into play and if you're having a hard time like I am here trying to find it, sometimes it's easier to just abandon the entire thing and place a whole new one. So I can take these ones that we've created, there's about five of them there, and I can mirror it across and then I can do the same thing as I go through across this way. So you can see I've got a big line here and then I've got these rows and then we have an angle change at this point.
So this one is essentially the same as that guy there and I just have to start adding and copying and applying them as we go through. So I'll start with these rows here and I'll just grab that row of five and paste it in just using the copy tool and you can see it worked out really well for us and so I can even grab, you know, the three or so here that are located and it looks like I might have missed one and I sure did. So I want to double check and make sure the parking stall has a line at the head here and so you can always see if you missed one by placing it in there by moving your mouse over it to see if you've gotten all of them.
Okay so I just need to get the rest into this location here and then we can use the mirror tool to fill out this row. So I'll select my parking stalls here, use mirror, got lucky they're all nicely lined up here. So I'm going to check this one because I can see they don't align just to make sure that they are eight foot six and looks like these are nine footers for whatever reason.
Seems like it's just a better a better mix for them to fit and that's not entirely uncommon. So I'll grab one of my nine foot types using create similar and that spacebar trick and I'll just start adding these in and I'm telling you that SE to just snap directly to endpoints, that one's going to be a lifesaver for a process like this one here. And you can see I'm just easily able to go in and punch those in and so here we've got that case where I don't want the stripe on this side so I'll use the CS tool and I'll place it just off to the side and these do have grips which will allow you to flip them and so I can flip it to the other direction and then I'll align it into place.
And again same process just using mirror to flip it to the other side and so when I get to this guy here it looks like these are much shorter so I'll do the dimension on it and these are 16 feet because it's intended to overhang into this planter here and so I can take this type and it's going to be 16 × 8 6 so I'll take just to save myself one process here I'll take my 8 foot 6 type add it in here and that one looks a little short that's okay though and I'll go ahead and do edit type duplicate and it's going to be 8 foot 6 × 16 and this is an existing lot right so we don't have as much flexibility so we are going to end up with some interesting stalls it's a pretty common thing when you're doing this sort of exercise and then I'll copy these across and you can use copy you can use create similar whichever process that works for you is what you're going to want to go with here and just using that again that endpoint shortcut because it's going to have a hard time finding it and then I'll mirror this last one across and then now we've got all the parking from here all the way through these rows and then we just need to get it all the way across this side and then across the back
