We’re baaaaaaaaaaccccccccckkkkkkkk!!
After a brief hiatus, when our office was on project deadline overload, we are going to continue setting up our Revit Project Template. The bare bones of the project template is complete, and has been utilized for a new project we are working on in Toluca Lake (stay tuned). As expected there were some quirks that need to be addressed to make it more functional and efficient. One of the most annoying aspects of the template was the lack of defined wall types. It’s very tempting to use the generic walls, which is what I ended up doing, but this will lead to problems as the project progresses.
Why aren’t my walls joining nicely in elevation? Do we need to fur that wall out in the Kitchen?
Well, probably because you have a generic material trying to attach to a finish assembly… DUH! Changing a generic wall’s thickness after you have already modeled an entire as-built package can be a nightmare! That little warning window pops up in the right hand corner of my monitor, I ignore it, and then when I switch views, I am often looking at a missing or misaligned features and all of my hard alignment work goes out the window! So, today we are going to fix that and add some general assemblies to our template to make sure that the next time we use our handy dandy template we have some basics to start with.
NO MORE GENERIC WALLS!
Walls
Roofs
Using Generic Roof assemblies hasn’t caused too many problems, but while we are imputing typical wall assemblies, we might as well include standard roof assemblies.
Ceilings
Many of our from the ground up projects expose the vaulted roof framing, which is why we like our lighting components to be face-based rather than ceiling based. That said we will include one standard ceiling assembly in the template because we of course use drop ceilings too!
Floors
After using REVIT for a few years, I have come to the conclusion that it is better to have two flooring assembly categories; Structural Floor Assemblies and Finish Floor Assemblies. I found this to be easiest to control the graphics and make changes to the finish floor.
Now, these only represent the most commonly used assemblies in our office. As each project progresses, the BIM user will be able to add assemlies as necessary.
See you next time…