Who Moved My View!!

So you're almost ready to plot your job. You look over your sheets and see that your excellent 3D section or plumbing layout has been "disturbed". Your text and leaders no longer line up with the elements, if they're even in view. Sound's fun, right?

Unfortunately, 3D views cannot be pinned like 2D pictures. Until a few days ago, I'd always figured the best bet is to hope nobody moves your views and label them as such. That's what I told Mike when he came by asking how to do 3D plumbing diagrams that couldn't be messed up.

After a bit of research on the AUGI forums, I came across this gem of a tip.

In a 3D view, right-click the view cube and select "Set Current View as Home" and "Save View". Now mess up your view. Roll it around, turn it upside down, whatever. Right-click the View Cube and select "Go Home". Your view returns right back to where you set it.

Combine this with a view template and you'll always be able to get your view back (provided nobody deleted anything).

Getting Started

Completing a BIM project successfully has just as much to do with how well your team functions and communicates as it does with how well you model. Understanding what each team member's skill level, modeling responsibility (in their mind and in your mind), workflow expectations, and goals will help everyone to come together to produce a better product. To that end, at the onset of a job where more than one discipline will be producing a design model (Revit or otherwise), there needs to be a BIM kick-off meeting.

To help guide that meeting, we've created a BIM kick-off form. It's saved on the server at CADD:\MME Revit Content\MME Library\General\BIM Kick-Off.doc and it's also in the new project subfolders under wordproc\status.

This form isn't the end-all, be-all of BIM guidelines. If you're working with a contractor that will be using the BIM for takeoffs, clash detection, and 4d and 5d simulation, this little form won't begin to cut it. Hopefully, they'll have a more in-depth form that will put everyone on the same page. We've simply created this form as a means to get all the info and expectations up front that we as engineers need to do our jobs with the least amount of headache. There's nothing worse than finding out one week prior to a deadline that the architect or contractor expected all the rebar or duct hangers to be modeled.

Think of this more as a way of getting started on the right foot.

Who, What, When, Where, and Why

BIM is our future as an engineering company. Love it or hate it, Revit is the key tool that is enabling us to move foward into the BIM world, and an unfortunate reality of that is that of proficiency in using this tool has bearing on our future success.

The purpose of this blog is to give the employees in the company who are developing content, learning new ways to use Revit, answering user questions, and in general staying a little ahead of the curve a way to share what we learn to the rest of the company in a manner that can be searched, saved, and referenced in the future.

Some posts may contain a tip or trick we've learned that can help you in your day to day use of Revit. Other posts may simply be informing you of a new steel embed or air handler family that's been created. If a some asks a question or has a problem with Revit that should be shared with everyone, it'll go on here too. We're going to be putting S and MEP info on here, so there should be a little something for everyone. Over time, there will hopefully be a good bit of info on here that you can search through if you have questions.

This won't be a blog that you want or need to read every day. Checking it a couple of times a month or once a week will probably be sufficient to keep you up to date on what's going on.

If you have suggestions of things you feel would be a good topic for a post, please let us know via a comment or company email.