Learn how to efficiently set up a project in Revit, from opening up a template file to creating a series of sheets for the project. Discover different methods to create sheets and how to properly name and organize them for a smooth workflow.
Key Insights
- The article offers a step-by-step guide to setting up a Revit project, starting by opening a template file from a project-specific folder, naming it accordingly, and then creating the necessary sheets.
- Two methods are introduced to create sheets: directly from the view tab or by using placeholder sheets via the sheet index. The latter is beneficial as it allows for sheets to be planned out and named in advance without creating them immediately.
- The creation of a sheet index is also detailed, allowing users to track important details such as sheet number, name, and revision. It's recommended to save your work frequently to avoid redoing any steps.
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Now that we're ready to start our project, what I'd like to do is open up that start file that we created for you as part of the dataset, and then we're going to do the next two steps that I always do when I start a project. So I'm going to go to open, and I'm going to navigate to my BIM 301 folder, and what I've done for myself is I've created a shortcut, and so I'll go to navigate there, but when you get to this point where you're looking at the actual dataset that we provided, you can go to tools, and then you can add the current folder to places. Mine's already there, so it's all shown out with it being gray, but when you do that, it'll pop in an icon here, so you can always refer back to it.
Once I have that set up, I can click on the BIM 301 start and click open. Now that I have the file open, what I can do is I can save it as an appropriate file name, so essentially I've opened up a template file. In this case, it was a Revit project file, but we can use it the same way we would if it were a template.
So I can go to file, save as, project, and I'm going to want to save it in that same folder that we're using, but instead of start, I want to put my first and my last name, just like you see here, and that'll be the file that we're going to use for the remainder of the class. Now that I have the file ready to go, the next thing I want to do is I want to create many sheets that I'm going to use for this project, and so we are going to be creating a lot of sheets in this project, and they will be filled out as we go through. If I were to go ahead and create a few sheets, this is called creating a cartoon set, and so we can do this a couple of different ways.
So the first way we could do it is by just creating sheets from the view tab and going to sheet, and then it's as simple as picking the title block we want to use and hitting okay, and this will create my first sheet. The next thing I would do here is I would go in and rename it, so this will be my title sheet, and it's going to be,000, and I'll give it the name title sheet. Another method we could use is by creating placeholder sheets, and to do that, we would need to have our sheet index created already, and that's not a big deal because it's just a simple schedule that we can create.
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To create the sheet index, what we're going to want to do is we'll go to schedules, and then we're going to look for something called sheet list, and from here, we can just pick the items that we want to have part of our sheet index, so some of the things that are common are going to be our sheet number, and remember this is in order from top down, so whatever is first is going to be the first column that we have on our left-hand side, so I typically like to see the number first, and you notice how I did the name first on accident there, and that's not a big deal because we can always adjust the order with this button here, so I can push number up, and then so I have number, name, and then I also like to track the revision, so I can go ahead and I can find current revision, and then I'd also like to have the revision description on here as well, and that way, we can see when these sheets were issued, whether they're part of the midterm or the final, and then I can hit okay, and now you can see we have our title sheet, and since none of these have been issued with a revision, it'll show up as a blank right now, and if we wanted to add sheets as part of what we call placeholder sheets, I can simply go in and insert these data rows here, and this is a good way to have the placeholders for our sheets, but not necessarily the sheets created, because when we look, by creating a sheet, it's going to show up here and here in the schedule, but if I do a placeholder sheet, it's only going to show up in the schedule, so back to the schedule here, if I were to insert a data row, you can see it pops in for my next sheet, and so this is going to be my first floor demolition plan, and if you notice when I created that sheet, we went from,000 to A0001, and one of the things I want to do, since we are going to have some kind of long titles, is I'm just going to expand this out a bit so we can see what we're doing, and we'll just continue on through, so I'm going to create new data row and a new data row, and that gives me up to A003, and then I can do it again, but this one I'm going to rename to A201, because that's going to be my first floor plan for A201, and then I can do A202 and A203 to represent my second floor and my roof plan here, and we'll come back and rename these, but it's just easy to create many them right off the bat, because we don't have to think about it too much, so then the next one is going to be A204, but we're going to want to rename that one to A301, and then I'll do another data row, this will be A401, another one that's going to be A501, and if you notice here, no new sheets are being created, but we are filling out a schedule here, and you'll see we'll have the option to create those sheets as we go through, so now that I've finished with 501, I'll do one more, and this is going to be A901, and that gives me all the sheets that I need, so we just have to go back in and give them their appropriate name, so this is going to be our second floor demolition plan, then we'll have our roof demolition plan, then we have our first floor plan, second floor plan, our roof plan, our reflected ceiling plan, building elevations, building sections, and then lastly, our sheet for renderings, okay, and then we'll just double check that to make sure we didn't make any weird typos, because, you know, that's what we do sometimes, and it looks pretty good, and then we'll go ahead and get started with modeling our building in the next video here, so before you do that, remember every time we do something that we don't want to redo, we want to make sure we hit the save button.
