Thursday, November 04, 2010

Revit Design Adventures: Kitchen Reno 3


First Iteration
Three Things you MUST Do First

So now we have the client sketches, their design ideas and address. They have let us know when they would like to start renovating. We have set some expectations as to what they will get from us and when. We are ready to start our model!

You really want to start drawing walls now! but first...
We need to set up the following:

Location
Project North
Phases

Why do we NEED to do this first? Simple answer is because it's a pain to do these things once the model is in place. Let's start with Location.

Location
This tool is found in the ribbon under Manage-Project Location-Location. Set the address as if you were searching for it in Google Maps. Setting the location will be useful for solar, shadow and energy calculations. If you are starting with an AutoCAD survey I would recommend you read this post I did a while back.
(http://revit.blogspot.com/2010/03/coordinates-base-points-surveys-linking.html)

Project North
This tool is found in the ribbon under Manage-Project Location-Position-Rotate True North. Make sure that you do this in a Site view with the Orientation set to True North (found in View Properties). In the Kitchen Reno project we have simply rotated the True North based upon an image from Google Maps.

Phases
Even if you think that you will never use Phases, set this up. The default phases are Existing and New Construction. The default current phase is New Construction. This can cause problems if you have modeled half of your existing building without knowing that it was put on a phase called 'New Construction'. Make a few phases, more than think you will need. Use simple names like Phase 1 or Phase 2. Fill out a brief description if needed. Get rid of the phase called New Construction, this will only confuse things. Above is a picture of the phases of this project.

In this building only Existing and Phase 1 are used. Things are both built and demolished in Phase 1. We will talk more about Phases in later posts...



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