Friday, May 25, 2012

Why Copy/Monitor Grids/Levels

A little tip for a commonly and sometimes overlooked step, and the repercussions it can have down the road.  This was something I always did when starting a new project, but as my experience working with different teams has developed, I have learned that not everyone does it.

At the beginning of your project, one of the first steps I always recommend and make my teams do (that is when I am in charge of a model) is to copy/monitor my grids and levels. (along with acquire coordinates from the linked model, but that is another post all together which I believe I have commented on in the past)


When linking back in the consultants models to my model, there is always the issue of the annotation objects showing up, that is the levels and grids.  Usually in your elevations, building sections, etc., you want to move these to be at a certain area in each drawing just to clean it up.  You can click on your own annotation objects and move the, but you can't do anything to any of the annotation objects inside a linked model.

One of the ways around this is to have your consultants copy/monitor the grids levels from your model into theirs after they link it in.  On the structural side this could require some coordination and discussion about who 'owns' the grids.

If they copy/monitor, than instead of them being separate annotation objects which just so happen to have the same names and locations, they are more instances of the same object.  This means when you drag the ends of your lines, it also moves the ones in the consultants models so that you don't have the issue of them being in slightly different places.

As with anything in Revit, this is also subject to my '3 way' rule. There are other ways to control the annotation objects in linked models.  Filters, worksets, individually in each view, but I have found that usually when linking in a consultants Revit model for the first time there is considerable time spent going to each view and turning on and off annotation objects to get them to look how we want them.  You can use view templates to help this process out, but you still have to apply them to each view (this has apparently been changed in 2013, although I haven't gotten my hands on the software yet to verify)