Discover the detailed process of Revit Project Management and how CAD Teacher VDCI makes managing different disciplines' files seamless. Learn how to easily import parameters from one file to another, organize files in a certain order and efficiently rename and alter details in these files.
Key Insights
- One can easily import parameters from one file to another by using the insert tab in Revit and choosing 'insert from file'. This saves time as it eliminates the need to create similar parameters in multiple files.
- Revit allows users to efficiently manage multiple disciplines' files by assigning each a discipline order. This ensures that the files are sorted and organised in a certain order, facilitating easier access and understanding of the project.
- Renaming and altering details in these files are made manageable, whether it's changing sheet numbers or removing unnecessary sheets. Communication with consultants is also stressed to maintain project standards across all files.
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.
Hello and welcome to the CAD Teacher VDCI video series for Revit Project Management. So where we left off in the last video was we were adding the discipline order, and we need to go into some of these Revit links and make some of those same changes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to close out of my architectural file.
So to do that quickly, I'll just go ahead and close hidden windows. And I'm going to go ahead and close the last window of the file here. This should open up my recent files window.
And we can go ahead and use either one of these, but I'll start with my structure revised file. And let's go ahead and open that up. Okay, and I need to create a sheet index, but it's not really necessary to reinvent the wheel here because I already created it on the architectural file.
So what I can do is I can go to my insert tab. And I can do insert from file. And then I can do insert views from file.
This is also a great way of pulling door and window schedules from files that you've already fully developed. So just like before, we're going to find that BIM 304 file. And here we go is my arch user file.
Learn Revit
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
It's my local file. So I'll go ahead and click open. And what it's going to do is it's going to populate a list of views that we can actually pull in to this file here.
It might take a minute. Okay, and so I've got two that I can bring in. We've got our sheet list, which is the one we want.
And there's also a room schedule, but we don't really need that one here. We're going to select the sheet list and hit okay. And so what's great about what I just did there is it brings in the sheet list and also the parameters that we created.
So for my structural, what I need to do is we'll just call this all structural. Okay, and you can see it's sorting the same way it did before and everything. Okay, and also the discipline order for all these is going to be 02 because it's going to be the second one in our set.
So I'll go ahead and populate this with both the discipline order and also the discipline. Okay, so now that I've got the whole thing populated, what we can do is we can go ahead and save this file. Close hidden windows again, and then I'll go ahead and close it.
Interesting. Mine didn't go back to recent files. That was strange.
Okay, and then I'm going to go ahead and open up my electrical revised file. Okay, that doesn't seem to be the case. I think it's still trying to close that electrical file.
Okay, so what I ended up doing there to solve that little hiccup was I just closed down Revit and reopened it, and it seems like everything's okay now. So I'm going to go ahead and open up my electrical revised file, and we'll do the same thing with the sheet index. So again, there's no reason to try and reinvent the wheel here, so I'm going to go ahead and do insert, and insert from file, and insert views from file.
So I'll navigate to my BIM 304 folder, and we can pull it from the structural model because it's got the information we need in there as well now. And this is the structural revised file. And for this one, we want to pull in sheet list one.
Okay, sometimes when you're bringing in elements from other files, you'll get this error. It's just letting you know that there's duplicate types and that they're going to use the one that's already there. Okay, and then it just lets you know again that you're getting that same warning.
Okay, so we've got our sheet index ready to go, so I'm going to go ahead and populate this. So our discipline is going to be electrical. Okay, and then our order, let's see, so structural is going to be two.
Then mechanical is going to be three. We'll have plumbing as four, so electrical will be five. So I'll set these all to five.
And then change all these for discipline to be set to electrical. Okay, that looks good, so let's go ahead and save. And let's close out of this file here.
And let's go back to our architectural file. Okay, so you can see now that it's sorting by those sheets that we had created. Looks pretty good.
And I can actually sort this at another level. So you can see right now it's going architectural, electrical, and structural, where I really wanted it to go architectural, structural, mechanical, and plumbing. So I'm going to go back to my sorting and grouping settings.
And I'm going to change my sort by, so instead of starting with discipline, I'll go with discipline order. Then sort by discipline, and then last by sheet number. So what I want to do is right now, because I had already had that checked, I have it checked for a header at discipline order, and that's not what we want.
So I'm going to uncheck that, because we don't want to have the header be 0105 and so on. We want to change that to have the header on discipline. And go ahead and hit okay.
So that looks pretty good. This is in the order that we want. Okay, there's just a couple of sheets that we don't want to see there.
And that would just involve us going into these models and adjusting those values as well. Okay, so let's go ahead and go into our plumbing model and fix those values in there. And keep in mind, because the plumbing and mechanical models are loaded into this file, we have to save and close it down and open up those models so that we don't run into any conflicts.
Okay, so now I've got my mechanical model open, and it looked like there were some extra sheets in here that we didn't want. And also, you know, I didn't really care for the naming or the numbering method here. So I'm going to change that.
This would be something that we would notify the consultant to do, but for the purpose of this class, we'll go ahead and make the change ourself. So I'm going to right-click on the sheet and say Rename. And instead of M101, we're going to change it to M1.1. And we'll do the same thing for 102, change it to 1.2. Okay, and then to get those parameters set correctly, again, we need to go to our Insert tab, Insert from File, and Insert View from File.
So I'm going to navigate to my BIM 304. I'll go to my architectural model right here, click Open. Okay, and we have our sheet list selected already.
Click OK. This is the same error we had with the structural, no big deal. Okay, and so now I'll adjust these two mechanical sheets to have the correct discipline.
And discipline order. Okay, and so I gave those ones discipline order 03 because they'll follow structural. And so I'm going to hit Save.
And close out of this file. Okay, and then we'll do the same thing in the plumbing file as well. Okay, so this is just giving me an error that it can't find some of the links, and this is really common when you're opening consultant files.
We're not too worried about that, so we're going to go ahead and click Ignore and Continue Opening. Okay, so I'm going to scroll down in my project browser and take a look at the sheets that are created. So A102 is not going to be one that plumbing is going to have, so we would notify them and let them know that they need to remove that sheet.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit Delete there to remove that sheet. And then we would also let them know that we'd like them to rename it to match the project standard. Okay, and so then we'll go ahead and import our schedule.
We'll do from the Insert tab, Insert from File, Insert Views from File. Okay, and again I'll pull this from the architectural model. Okay, and since it's only one sheet, it's pretty easy.
We'll just go ahead and call this one Plumbing, and the discipline order is going to be 04 here. Okay, so we'll do a Save and close out of this file, and we'll reopen the architectural file. Okay, so now I have the architectural file open again, and as you can see, because we went through into each one of those links and added the sheets, it is all now in good order.
So the key here was to add the discipline and the discipline order parameters, and you can tell here we really don't need to show these in the index, so I can go ahead and select both of those, and I can right-click and say Hide Columns. Okay, and that's not necessarily the way that we have to do it. If you don't want to go through and modify their model, we can also add placeholder sheets, and so we can do that by clicking under Rows here.
We can click New, and that will actually give me the option to add a placeholder sheet. So instead of A1.3, this might be P1.2, and this is a plumbing sheet, or listed as a plumbing sheet, and let me go ahead and unhide those columns now, and this is a plumbing sheet, so we can actually modify it here because it's really in the architectural file, but it will sort with the plumbing files. See how that works? Because I gave it the same setup here.
And so that could be a way of manually entering it in. I've had it go both ways on projects, and a lot of times it's easier to use the manual input because it's hard to manage a whole other office on how they're doing their labeling. So as you can see, with electrical, we ended up with first floor power plan, first floor lighting plan, second floor power plan, and they used a different setup for second, so that could bother some people.
So I personally like to use the rows method, but it's very convenient if you can get everybody on the same page to type in their own sheet index accordingly.
