BUILD ON YOUR OWN SKILLS It is good to leverage what you know and to get help for what you don’t know, but your goal is to become the go-to person for Revit in your office. Therefore, you need to build your skills over time. Of course, excelling at anything requires time. Just like you don’t start playing Mozart sonatas the first year you take piano lessons, it is rare that you will learn everything there is to know about shared parameters while working on your first project in Revit. In that first project you may not even know that such a thing exists. But if you start creating schedules and tags you need to learn them inside and out. Or, for another schedule example, you might start with a simple Air Terminal Schedule with just a few fields and minor formatting, but you can build up to creating more complex schedules such as this Space Airflow Check (Figure 5) that includes conditional formatting and embedded schedules (MEP only).
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Figure 5
CONCLUSION Finally, a great place to learn Revit from any direction is creating families. I don’t recommend trying to learn how to do this when you are working on a major project that needs to get out the door. As a matter of fact, not everyone needs to know how to build a family. But if your job calls for this then you can apply the steps covered in this article. You already know how to draw reference lines and add dimensions, so leverage that knowledge as you create the parametric framework of a family. You use type and instance parameters when you insert elements, but if you aren’t sure how to create new ones, ask a co-worker who has experience creating families. You finally built your first family and it works! Now build some more. Each one you do will shed light on how it is done and how to make them better. You can learn Revit no matter which direction you are coming from. Leverage what you know, get help for what you don’t know, and build on your skills over time. November 2012
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Martha Hollowell is an Instructional Designer with ASCENT – Center for Technical Knowledge. Every year she writes and updates training courseware for Revit Architecture, MEP, and Structure that is used by trainers around the world. After practicing in the architectural world for a number of years using AutoCAD and earlier versions of AutoCAD Architecture, she has been a trainer and writer for Autodesk products for almost 20 years. Visit the company blog at www.ascented.com where she posts new articles regularly.
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