Just in case last week's post didn't convince you why you should copy/monitor grids from linked models instead of just creating your own, here is another reason.
Early on, usually after a kickoff meeting and you have a preliminary agreement with the strucutral engineer on the placement of the structural grids, one of you will find that you need to move/add one. It may be because the design is changing, or it may be because after preliminary number crunching the structural engineer discovers that they need to add additional structure. Further code analysis may indicate that additional structure be added on either side of a firewall, or the floor plan changes significantly. Whatever the reason may be, the point is that the grids may change either in quantity, location or both.
If grids are copy/monitored, when these changes occure, the other will be notified. When the architect moves the grid over 6" to accomodate something in the design, the monitor tool within Revit will notify the structural engineer of the grid's movement upon his reloading of the new architectural model, and visa versa.
This process seems a lot better than the alternative, loading in a consultant's model and then disovering only after working in it for a few hours that the location of a gridline has changed.
One of my best practices is to always include a list of changes when I send out a new model. The list may not be 100% complete with all minor changes, but anything major that would affect any of the consultants I include in the list so they are at least aware and will be looking for it. Moving a structural grid would be included in this list.
This is just another way we can harness the power of Revit to do the work for us and pay attention to the important things. Afterall, the grid doesn't exist in several different instances in real life. The grid exists once, so why are we creating several independent, unique and non-related versions of it? Why not create one grid with an instance in everyone's model?
The copy/monitor tool can be used for a lot of other great things too such as checking walls, but maybe we can cover that in the future.
