Stumbling into tips and tricks for the new year

2012 is well underway and crazy busy. I’ve been lax in blogging lately with the holidays and new job. Keeping up with social media is much easier when you work for yourself! I do think I just may have what you need for the coming year. I’ve been lucky enough to work on a project leading some talented people in working with Revit (the first time for a few). Whenever any of us works with a new tool or process, we stumble and learn from those stumbles. And when you stumble and don’t know it, do you learn? In order to keep my team aware of best practices and uses of Revit, I’ve compiled a list of tips and tricks for our weekly BIM meeting. Think of it as a stumble list of sorts that I hope both my team and you (by posting it here) will learn from. Cheers.

GENERAL

• WORKSETS – Make sure you are in the correct workset before you start working.
• DO NOT DELETE an object unless it really is to be removed. Objects should be moved, changed or adjusted but never deleted and replaced. 
• Slow down. Take a moment to review basic parameters before placing objects. 
• Think in 3D. Objects you are placing in plan may have other implications to the rest of the model. 
• Work in multiple views. It will give you better visual clues to objects being modeled. 
• Use model or symbolic lines as little as possible. It is better to place the actual object OR a temporary placeholder object. 
• PICK WALL. When placing boundary lines – whenever possible use pick wall tool. It allows horizontal objects to lock onto walls and adjust with changes in walls. 
• Make sure that components are hosted by LEVELS and not floors. 

ROOMS

• Room are the only objects that if deleted STILL REMAIN in the project 
• When rearranging walls, move rooms and their tags outside the building, make all your adjustments and move them back. 
• Turn ROOM Reference & Interior Fill on in Visibility Graphics to show you where rooms are located and make it easier to move them. 
• When placing rooms & adjusting spaces, locate the room crosshair in the center of the space – tag all tags are placed at the crosshair. 

WALLS

• All walls should have a top and bottom constraint – use offsets to set the height if it is more or less than the level to level heights. 
• When using temporary walls, place location line along the wall that cannot move - wall thickness increases or decreases away from that line. 

SHAFTS

• Shafts should be one per object. Multiple shafts are problematic because if one is moved or deleted, they all are. 
• Use symbolic lines WITHIN the shaft tool to show shaft X.