Join Paul F. Aubin for an in-depth discussion in this video Understanding project settings, part of Revit Architecture 2011 Essential Training.
Even if you start your project with a template, there are still many project settings that you want to take a quick look at and verify before you get started doing any serious work. So let's just review the steps of creating a template. We're going to go to the Application menu. Click New > Project. I'm going to Browse for a template, and I'll start with the Commercial-Default. Now, most of the settings that are overall and apply globally to the entire project can be found in the Manage tab. Let's go ahead and start with the Project Units. The unit should already be set to the most common unit that you use in whatever region you happen to live in.
So in my case, I've installed the US Imperial version, and so most of the units are set in US imperial Units like feet and inches. Typically, that's probably going to be acceptable, the default settings, but you might want to verify them just to make sure that the actual unit you're interested in is set or perhaps the level of precision. You can see here that there are quite a few choices. The default in my case is Feet and fractional inches, but I could change it to Decimal feet, or Fractional inches, or even Millimeters, or Centimeters. I can also change the level of precision.
So perhaps I'm not interested in rounding down to the nearest 32nd of an inch. I might only be interested in the nearest 8th of an inch. I can make that change here. I can even tell it to suppress the zero feet in front of group units, so when it says 0 feet 6 inches I can ask Revit to basically show just 6 inches without the 0 feet. And I'll leave that turned off. Go ahead and click OK here. Under the other settings, we have similar lists of choices. So for area, we can see that we can choose between Square feet, or Square meters, or Square inches.
And again, we have decimal precision, so if you want to go to 2 decimal places on your square foot calculations. And we can even tell it what symbol to use at the end of square feet. So we can use SF, or we could ft2 whatever setting is more appropriate for your Office standards. You can take a look at Volume, Angle, Slope; they all have similar types of choices. You can also indicate for Revit which decimal symbol you'd like to use, whether you want to use the period, or the comma, depending on what region you're in.
I should point out that all of these settings, if you're an architect these are probably the only one you need to worry about, they're listed in here in the Common Discipline. There are other units settings for other disciplines like Structural and Engineering. And if I just choose those real quick, you can see that there is quite a few options in here to look at. So if you're structural engineer, you might want to go through those various choices. If you're an Electrical engineer, likewise. In my case, I'm just going to keep myself focused in the architectural, so I'm going to go ahead and click OK. So that's one set settings that you want to just do a quick verification on and make sure. Even if you typically work in feet and inches, you might be doing a project overseas, and that project has to be in metric units, so you might want to take a look at some of those settings before you get started.
The next thing I'd like to look at is Project Information. Now, this is a pretty straightforward text dialog box, so each of the parameters in here is just a text field, like the Project Issue Date. So if we're going to issue this project at the end of the summer, we could go ahead and put in a date for this. And I'll just go ahead and make up a date for now. We'll say this is going to be August 30th of 2010. We could say that this is Design Development, who the Owner is.
What's the Project Name? Keep these fairly generic right now and the Project Number. We can even click here and type in the Project Address. This is actually the street address that will show up on the title block. So this might be 123 Main Street, so forth and so on. In addition to this information, even though you have project address, that's just textual information that feeds the title block. We can actually indicate for Revit our actual geographic location where we are in the world.
And we do that with a different command right here; this is the Location button. So we're going to go ahead and click on that. And this will open up the Location Weather and Site dialog. This is actually tied into Google Map so as you can see. So it's using the Internet Location Service, or Internet Mapping Service, as it says here. And you're able to actually type in your actual address. So I'm going to put in Carpinteria, California, and you can see it actually started to guess for me. And I guess there is only one Carpinteria out there. And when I click Search, it will take me from Boston, which is the default from the mother ship - that's actually where Autodesk is located for Revit - and takes me over here to Carpinteria, California, and it defaults to the Satellite View.
But I can easily change that, I actually guess this is the Terrain View. I can easily change that to the Map, or I could go to the Satellite photo, or could do some sort of a Hybrid View, whichever view that you like. Now, maybe I'm nearby Carpinteria. I don't actually want to be right there. I can actually click the little indicator and drag it to another location. So if the address that you plug in doesn't get you exactly where you need to go, you can go ahead and move it around. I'm just kind of leave it in downtown area there.
The more accurate you make that, the better off will be if you later export your model to any kind of building analysis software. Your mechanical engineers, if they need to do load calculations for ventilation and heating conditions, knowing the actual location gives them the data they need so that they can do proper calculations, and so on. So these are just a few of the overall project settings that you might want to take a look at. I do want to point out that there are quite a few other settings available in Revit. So as you get a little bit more experience, you'll definitely want to start exploring some of these.
Some of those settings you'd want to actually save in your template file, so that you get to use them over and over again. Others you'd want to set project-by-project. So in this lesson, we've looked at a few of those basic overall settings. Make sure you've given them a look before you get started doing your project work. And get those things configured appropriately for the project and the location you're in.
- Introducing building information modeling (BIM)
- Adding levels, grids, and columns to set up a project
- Creating building layouts with walls, doors and windows
- Modifying wall types and properties
- Working with DWG files and CAD inserts
- Adding rooms
- Adding filled and masking regions and detailing
- Generate schedules and reports
- Understanding families
- Using reference planes, parameters and constraints
- Outputting files, including DWF and PDF files