feature focus
Architecture of our design development submittal. The team asked me on the Monday before a Friday submittal if it was bad that there were now 850 warnings in the main project file; well my answer then, as always was YES. Unfortunately we chose not to fix the warnings that day and continue work, basically crossing our proverbial fingers, hoping for the best. Well the best didn't happen!!! The files crashed 2 days prior to printing, No more save-to-central... very useful. It would have taken 2 people on the team about 1 day to repair the warnings previously but that was "too much time away from production" (the team thought). We ultimately paid and paid a lot more than 16 man-hours. It took about 40 man-hours of down time and loss of work, all things considered. The solution to restore our Central file was to find one of the User Models that hadn't saved the corruption into their file. We backed everything up for paranoia sake and then deleted all other user models and their backup folders. Next we deleted the bad central model, it's backup folders and saved the only good user model as the new central. Not a bad solution, but it was time consuming since we wanted to find the most current possible good file. Twenty one people got to "do other things" for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours while the process was fixed. It was a big file remember, thus... Use the axiom that I do - No warnings ever. In case you're not convinced yet, another team sent a file to a remote team to work on it overnight and their first comment was that Worksets could not be implemented. Hmmm? I immediately looked at the warnings and you guessed it, there were already 172 instances of 2 warnings and not one single model element was built yet! By the way, expand those check boxes lest you underestimate the actual number of issues! Most of the warnings were from free standing, yet unbounded, rooms in the middle of a plan that were predefined per the client’s program, see Figure 1. I simply bordered those rooms in a grid of room separation lines and in the 30 seconds it took me to create those room separations all the warnings related to the rooms magically disappeared. Implementing Worksets then worked again (magically) just as designed. It did take about 15 minutes in all due to the remaining 20 warnings and the amount of existing elements sitting in their template. Still think warnings don't matter? If so please see a Revit-Psychiatrist!
Organize to Realize These items, among others, are very important and I’ll discuss them here: • Project Browser • Content
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Figure 1- Review Warnings Dialog information
Project Browser A good browser organization is key to any organized project. I like to organize the views into classifications such as Generated Views, User Views, Construction Views and then by Family & Type. It is also paramount to create, then use a good naming convention for views and sheets: One method I use looks something like this: For Dependent Parent Views: C P LEVEL P1 (Construction Parent LEVEL P1) For Dependent (Children) Views: C ZONE A LEVEL P1 (Construction Zone A LEVEL P1) Partial naming list: • C Construction • C OA Construction Overall • C P Construction Parent • RCP Construction Reflected Ceiling Plan • RCP OA Construction Reflected Ceiling Plan Overall Some others that would use a similar approach: • FFP Finish Floor Plan • FN Furniture Plan I suggest, as do many, to use ALL CAPS for views that are to go onto sheets and a variation of Sentence or Title Case for all other views. If users adhere to the concept, it is quite simple to see what views are for, what their purpose is. By the way, sheets should have an organization mirroring the desired construction documentation set ordering.
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