Monday, April 25, 2011

Revit Design Adventures: The Right Foot (2)



Okay, before you go and accuse me of plagiarising myself, let me explain. I am going to be documenting the process of this 'Flapping Roof' project. The previous post explains a little about our exciting next adventure. That being said, I want to revisit some of the things I consider to be very important to the success of our project. In two previous posts we discussed the things that you must do before you start drawing walls. I'm going to consolidate these into one post for this project.



Template
Project Base Point
Project North
Location
Levels, Grids and Reference Planes
Simple Material
Simple Wall, Floor etc styles.
Clean and Link AutoCAD

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



Template
Choose the correct template for the units that you will be using for the project; metric or imperial.

Project Base Point
You can find this in the Site Plan view of the default template. It's a blue circle, ignore the blue triangle. Do not move either of these icons. Simply note that the blue circle, the Project Base Point is 0,0,0 and can never be changed or moved. When and if you export to AutoCAD the Project Base Point will line up with the 0,0,0 of AutoCAD. Draw, name and pin some Reference Planes at this point. As you can see in the image above I forgot about this and didn't adjust the linked dwg or my model. It didn't hurt us but I should have known better.

Project North
Once you have found the Project Base Point, click on it. You will notice that you can change the Angle to True North. Make sure that you do this in a Site view with the Orientation set to True North (found in View Properties). There was a north arrow in our as-built dwg where we measured the angle to true north.

Location
The location tool defines where your Project Base Point is located on Earth. 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)

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. This project did not call for the use of phases.

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 this case we had an as-built section in dwg that we could match to.

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 styles
Let'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.


Here are the original posts...


Things you must do first...


Previous Post in Series: Revit Design Adventures: The Flapping Roof (1)
Next Post in Series: Revit Design Adventures: As Built CAD, Exciting!(3)



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