Saturday, April 7, 2012

Template Mentality

Recently, I visited another firm's office for the monthly Revit User Group meeting, where our host started a new project based on their template. Of course, I paid close attention to their setup in the hope to pick up a thing or two, and one of the things that struck me as odd was that they only had a single plan view set up. This lead to a conversation on template setup and mentality during the break, and it turned out we have complete opposite template mentalities.

Their thought was that for every new project, it's pretty easy to create new views, whereas our mentality has always been to set-up just about everything so no guess work is needed and no time is wasted setting up view after view, changing view names & title on sheet, adjusting phases, applying view templates, checking settings... and wondering how it was done last time. Out of the box, our project template has every type of plan view, for each phase and level with a consistent setup that every body is familiar with. All that's left is to get started on the model.


Some people may say it's just too many views, or not all are needed. That may be true, but it's actually a lot faster & easier to delete those unneeded views than it is to create those you do need, which is a philosophy carried throughout our whole template.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, Additive Projects take more time with more opportunity for errors and less consistency than do subtractive templates like yours is.

    2 or so other items (other than the brutally obvious) to think about pre-building (if you haven't already) :-)
    Rooms, Room Key Styles for each project type
    Masses (to go with rooms for 3D bubble diagrams

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  2. It's important to remember that any template remains an additive one even if it's also a subtractive one. No template can ever be the solution for all projects, but the time we spent on setting up the template (continuously) is gained back during every project where we make minor tweaks.

    Thanks for commenting J.

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