Revit Design Adventures: Kitchen Reno 4

First Iteration
Three Things you MUST Do Second
Now that we have Location, Project North and Phases set up let's get going on the next three things. We are just about ready to draw a wall, the suspense is killing us! Just take a few minutes and set up:

1. Levels, Grids and Reference Planes
2. Simple Material
3. Simple Wall, Floor etc styles.
(Or can be named System Families. For a Family naming explanation see this post)
Levels, Grids and Reference Planes
Always make the Levels first. Even if you're going to leave the levels as is you should be aware of their height. In the case of the kitchen reno project we simply changed Level 2 to be an even 10'-0" for now.

Next we make some Reference Planes defining left, right, front and back. Always name the Reference Planes. This is found under their properties. Start drawing your grid If you know what it is going to be.

Simple Material
Phil Read gave the inaugural address at the Ontario Revit Users Group. He showed us a lot of crazy stuff but one thing that stood out was the following tip. Make a generic white material and apply it to everything (walls, floors, window and door frames etc.) This can help us and the client to focus on the major design issues instead of floor colours.
Simple Wall, Floor etc stylesLet's avoid defining things too much when naming Families. Adding materials and sizes to names of styles in Revit ends up creating more work and inconsistencies.
Create an exterior wall type: EW-1, thickness is set to the overall wall thickness, material is 'white'.
Create an interior wall partition type: IP-1, thickness to overall wall thickness, material is white. Make a floor and roof in a similar fashion.

Now we can start drawing walls, right? Well, a couple of other things to do that will save us some time is setting up our outline Sheet Set and a View Template (which is blacked-out walls, floors, ceilings and roofs plus no floor surface patterns). Clean and simple. Once we do this, our building comes together in minutes. So far we've spent about an hour setting up and modeling the main part of the building.

Next post: Drawing Walls, Finally!
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