Small careful moves gets you big gains in Revit & Football

Here is this week’s round of tips and tricks.  Most of these are things I came across while cleaning up the model.   Not all of them are big moves like a hail mary pass.  But more like the Giants yesterday – a lot of small steps to win big!  Sorry I couldn’t resist – my family and I are big Giants fans.  Hmmmm was that like saying BIM Model?

WORKSETS – Just like checking your mirrors before driving – check that you are in proper workset.  Even better is to setup workset “open with” option so that you must select the workset(s) you wish to work in.  While Revit does not have layers, worksets can act in the same way affecting graphics.  More importantly, you can divide the model into subsets, allowing you to open what you need and save on CPU & RAM usage

SYNCHRONIZE – Always synchronize before leaving your desk for the night, lunch, bathroom breaks, more coffee, or any other reason you expect to be away from your desk.  This will relinquish your ownership of any object that you may have touched and others may need to work with.  Your teammates will thank you for it!! If (and yes it happens at times) Revit crashes – save the recovery file.  Open up the recovery file and synchronize as you still had ownership of objects.

ROOMS – If you delete a room from the model – it’s still in the project.  Don’t use a NEW room in its place.  Look through the list of room names in the drop down window in the options bar.  They are all the unplaced rooms that were deleted.  You can simply put the room back where it belongs without creating another one.  If you wish to delete them permanently, make a room schedule and select “isolate” to see all your unplaced rooms. You can delete them from here.

WALLS – Make sure that exterior shell, shaft, and shear walls that are multi-stories high are a single wall multi-stories high as much as possible.   It is easier to manage changes as well as better reflects construction methods.

SHEETS – If you are setting up sheets for uses other than the drawing set, group them separately using a shared parameter.  Make sure that you uncheck the “show in index” box so that they do not show up on your sheet index.