This past year has been huge for Revit Template as a business. 2023 was the first full year I was able to put all my attention towards developing quality products without needing to work part time. I have been an architectural designer/Revit user for over 10 years now. As many of you know, setting up quality production tools between projects, nights or weekends is not easy. It is a constant struggle splitting your attention over long periods of time and realizing you dropped the ball on one thing or another. I am so glad that I get to do this and share my experience with all of you. Having wor ..read more

    I recently assisted a customer instructing how to set up color visibility parameters in a detail family. The brief was simple: Three versions, black and white, existing, and color. They all needed to be instance parameters and turn on/off the other attributes if one is checked. Most users might assume this issue will require more complicated formulas to turn on/off the other colors. Not so! This might be a solution if each of the colored areas were different shapes to begin with, or have several other dependent graphic parameters, along with the need to ensure users do not accid ..read more

    While this blog focus’ on leveraging Revit features to provide better data organization and workflows to manage projects, I would like to divert to a different software that has made a world of different in how we manage tasks, organize office standards, and leverage project data. For a while now we have used Notion to centralize our company information so we can close gaps on undocumented standards and lost tasks. Notion is a single whitespace platform that allows users to organize and structure information as they choose. Users can be as broad or specific as necessary while al ..read more

    What is a schedule? A schedule is a format to that easily allows users to centrally locate keyed data with identified subjects. E.g., room, door, or occupancy egress schedule. Schedules are important for quick and efficient documentation in a project. Schedules used to be static and required continuous rechecking to ensure they were up to date with the latest revised drawing. However, once objects became smart and could hold groups of data that could link to dynamic schedules. This allowed for easier and automatic syncing without needing to manually check everything. Even though ..read more

    What is a Revit project template? A Revit project template is Revit file type (.RTE), separate from a project file (.RVT), used as a starting point to standardize project organization, graphic settings, and workflow setups to unify office standards and speed up production time on new projects. Templates ensure all parties involved are on the same page, so anyone can jump in at any time and know how a project should present itself from schematic design to fully issued construction documents. Why are Revit project templates important? Raise your hand if you love wasting time and m ..read more

    Text notes are over relied on as a method of communicating information about drawings, to the point where it clutters drawings, creates repetitive notes, and creates QAQC issues. Solely relying on text notes only exacerbating legibility issues in drawings. This does not even consider modern BIM workflows! Now that firms no longer require hand drafting, we seem to have lost those time saving standards that came from hand drafting entire drawing sets. It has become so easy to quickly add a text note with a leader and duplicate it across multiple plan views because we can quickly r ..read more

Drafting Views How to use drafting view     A typical callout, elevation, or section view shows modeled geometry which a user can modify or add more information to the drawing on top of the existing model that can sync changes with the updated model. Conversely, drafting views are not linked to model geometry which allows the user to generate more detailed drawings that will remain static when a model is updated. In essence, drafting views are separated blank views. This is useful for three reasons: time, experience, and deliverables. Using drafting views increases the speed of draw ..read more

When I work with clients building efficient project templates for their firm, there is always surprised at the amount of items to consider when generating a template. Most firms cobble together a template over the years while working between projects, or it simply evolved into an amorphous mess with each subsequent project. After we nail down what the client actually needs, there inevitably is the question of “We have X number of ongoing projects, how to do we efficiently apply our new standards to existing projects?” Optimistically, standards simply need to be copied over and simply manicure ..read more

Revit Angled Plans As design professionals, we come across a wide range of “uniquely” shaped spaces that questions the sanity of the previous professional. (Funnily enough, it almost always come back to the client overriding the design professional’s decision.) Whatever the case, we need to generate models and present drawings for review no matter how obtuse the plan. Which can be a real drag when the plan orientation isn’t uniform across the board. Take the image below, for example.     The full floor plan can fit on a single sheet given its “unique” shape. The trouble comes when g ..read more

Graphical hatch patterns are a foundational component for conveying material in architectural drawings. Traditionally, graphical patterns were drawn by hand, but over time the development of pattern transfer paper was used to quickly rub repeating graphics onto a large area. This helped speed up the drafting process, but all office drafters had to familiarize themselves with office graphic standards. Once CAD became popular, it was much easier to keep graphics consistent since text files predefined a repeatable pattern that could quickly replace or scale across any drawing. These days it has b ..read more