How to Lose Your Job with Revit

MATT DILLON: OK, I've got one o'clock. We ready to get started? OK. Good afternoon, everybody. How was lunch?

AUDIENCE: Good.

MATT DILLON: Really?

AUDIENCE: They cook better than I do.

MATT DILLON: You actually found a place to sit and eat it?

AUDIENCE: Yep.

MATT DILLON: Good for you. All right. For those who don't know me, my name is Matt Dillon. I'm the core services director at Applied Software. What that means is that I manage a group of six people in various parts of the country that do consulting and implementation and training for Revit, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, little bit of Navisworks, and 3ds Max. Again, I'm with Applied Software. Our headquarters is in Atlanta, Georgia, but I actually work from our San Antonio, Texas, office, which is the upstairs loft in my house.

So prior to that, about three years ago, I was with a company called Inceptia, which before that DC CADD. Some of you may have known me from those days. In today's business climate, all the resellers are kind of coming together. It's like the Borg. So we got acquired about three years ago, and my boss decided to retire. And I didn't want to run the business. So there you go.

My background is architecture, so that really doesn't impact this class. I'm going to be talking about a lot of generic things. But I'd like to just go around the room, get a feel for who I'm talking to. How many architects do we have in here? OK, little over half. How many MEP engineers? OK. How many structural engineers? OK. So everything I'm going to cover today talk applies to everybody. And how many other, like interior designers, et cetera? OK, that's fine. Everything I'm going to talk about kind of applies to all y'all, but I got something special for MEP engineers in a little bit.

How many of you all have been using Revit for a year or less? Good. So I'll catch you before you develop too many bad habits, or at least show you the bad habits you want to develop if you want to move on. How many of you have been using Revit for five years or more? OK. So hopefully a lot of what I'm going to be showing you here won't be news. But we'll see.

So my goal here is really not to show you how to lose your job with Revit. My goal here is maybe show you how to keep your job. Actually, I don't think you got to lose your job if you do any of these things. But you're sure making things a lot harder on yourselves and for others if you're not doing some of the things you should be doing that I'll be showing you, or doing some of the things that you shouldn't be doing that I'll be showing you.

We're going to break this up into four main sections. We're going to talk about, , for lack of a better phrase model corruption and data loss. Now, some of the things that I'm going to show you here may not really lead to data loss, but they definitely are causing problems with either you or other people that are using your model downstream, or both. We're going to talk about file size and management issues, and how to maximize performance, some view management techniques that hopefully those you've been using Revit for five years or more are already doing, but we'll see. Those of you that have been using Revit for a year or less probably, maybe you'll get something out of that for sure. There's a lot of things with work sharing and work sets that we see people doing that could be causing them problems, or not doing that they should be doing to avoid problems. So we'll do a special section on that.

So let's talk about model corruption and data loss first. I don't do a whole lot of support anymore since I've been moved more into management, but I still talk to the guys that do support. I've done a lot of product support in the past. And a lot of times-- so pop quiz. Does anybody know what that guy is right there? Anybody know where that's coming from?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: That is the Desktop Connector, which I'm going to kill because it irritates the crap out of me. You'll sit there and transfer files for over-- I don't even know what it's doing. So I don't need it. Bye bye. That has nothing to do with this class, by the way. Desktop Connector's a good thing. It's just that particular aspect of it irritates me.

So there's a couple of things, when someone sends us a file to look at that a lot of times maybe running slowly, especially, and they really can't figure out why, there's a couple of things we go look for immediately. And one of those is drawing files imported into the project. In general it's considered bad practice to import drawing files. Now, I realize that you do sometimes need to reference drawing, geometry. You can link the drawing file in if you can. That's a much better option.

There are times when you really don't have any choice but to import the AutoCAD file. But if you do that, try not to leave it in your project. Don't leave it as AutoCAD geometry. Convert it to Revit geometry, and then get rid of all the references to the AutoCAD geometry. And if you link it instead of import, it's a lot easier to do that. I'm going to go through a lecture slides here to show you what I'm talking about.

For God's sake, don't explode them. That just makes it worse. So it's like bringing in a block and then exploding it. The problem is you've got non-native Revit geometry here that Revit is trying to manage and display and so forth. That eats up extra resources. So if you have a lot of drawing files in your project-- like, how many of you all do all your details in AutoCAD then import them into Revit?

Yeah, that's slowing down your project. So you want to try to get away from that. Even if you link them, you're slowing things down. But at least when you link something, you can unload it when you don't need it and it's no longer taken up resources. If you then explode the imported file, now you've got all kinds of little AutoCAD bits scattered all over your project.

And how many of you were over in the class I taught yesterday on-- god, what was it-- detailing, right? And I kept saying about how kind of OCD I am about AutoCAD files. I want to wear rubber gloves and a biohazard suit anytime I'm using them. I want to keep that AutoCAD data as separate from my Revit project as possible. I've just seen too many instances where it can cause problems. Everything from corruption to just seriously slowing down the file. So if you can, link the drawing instead.

I'm not saying don't use AutoCAD drawings. That's ridiculous. You're going to have to for a lot of things. There's lots of reasons to do it. But in most cases, you can link them instead. Yes, that's still going to slow things down if you do a lot of it, but you can unload those links when you don't need them. And it's not bringing any AutoCAD stuff into your project. It's a reference. And once you remove that link or unload it, it's like it was never there. It's much safer.

I'm going to run through a little exercise here. So a big reason why a lot of people bring in AutoCAD files is because they've got a detail in AutoCAD that they want to use. Maybe this is a standard detail I mean AutoCAD-- how many of you all have huge libraries of standard details in AutoCAD? You'd like to use them in Revit, and I just told you don't bring them in to Revit.

Well, what you want to do is convert them to Revit details. And there's a couple of ways I've seen shown on how to do this. I'm going to show you the way that I don't like first. It works, but I'll explain why I don't like it as I go. I've imported this AutoCAD file in. This is not a link. And so when I select it, you'll notice I had the option to explode it. And I'll just do the partial explode. That won't be so bad, right?

So now, instead of one AutoCAD object in my project, I've got a bunch of little tiny AutoCAD objects. So for example, if I pick that line there, it's on a line style here called heavy in parentheses with a little one on there. That's an AutoCAD line style. That's not a Revit line style. That was created from the layer that that line was on.

And so for every layer that I brought in, any lines that are on those layers in AutoCAD created a brand new line style in Revit, which is not part of my Revit standards. And so I've started to pollute my project with all of these little bits of things that six months from now I won't even know where they came from. What are they? What are these text types?

So if I pick on the text, same thing. I've got this AutoCAD text type, text type that came from an AutoCAD text style. It's not Revit. I mean, yes, Revit can work with this. But it's not one of my standard text types. So I'll have all these weird text types. Where'd these come from? If you're somebody that really believes in standards, you don't want that stuff floating around in your projects for people to be accidentally using, especially this one because it really looks bad.

But if I want to proceed a little further, what I can do is convert this stuff to AutoCAD geometry. I can basically do a window selection and filter out everything but the lines. So all of my detail lines here, which are on these weird AutoCAD or AutoCAD line styles, I'll go ahead and select those and put them all on-- whoops. I missed something here. Hang on. Really? I should be able to-- well, see? Already I've run into a reason not to do that. That's OK. I'll just grab--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Well, what I'm trying to do, and I've done this a bazillion times-- so this is what happens when you do it in front of people and you're not paying attention. OK, I've got nothing but lines. OK. I'll just do it this way. So I'm going to grab those lines and put them on--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Yeah. Maybe so. Let me undo it and just do a full explode, although I shouldn't have to do that. OK. Let's try it this way. No, that's not it. Really? I've got a filled region in here that it's picking up for some reason. I think that's the problem. And it's not even showing it to me in the filter, which is interesting. So let me go and filter out what I know I don't need, and then I'll filter out the filled region, which is that guy, I think. There we go. And it's still not going to work. OK.

Well, I'll just do an abbreviated version. I'm going to grab these lines here and convert them to-- oh, you know what? I think it was working all along, guys. This is what happens when you've taught three classes in the last 24 hours. So let me do it again. Take out the filled region. And actually, I might be able to do it here. Yeah, I'm good. I just wasn't looking in the right place.

So I'm going to move these all to-- god, which one is it? Which one of these are my Revit line styles which one of these my AutoCADs? You have to know. Well, I know that my Revit line styles are all thin line. So now I've converted all of the line work here to at least Revit thin lines, and then I can go through and change some of them maybe to a wider line style for graphic purposes. But again, I want to make sure I stick to my Revit line styles, so you better know which ones they are. I'm not going to do all of these. Don't worry.

The next thing I want to do is take care of this filled region. That filled region, it also came in with its own filled region based on the AutoCAD hatch pattern that it was imported. So this is not a Revit fill pattern that's being used here. So going to change this one and I'm going to create a new one. I'll just call it sand with weird capitalization, and change the fill pattern to an AutoCAD fill pattern-- or a Revit fill pattern, excuse me.

So now I've gotten rid of the AutoCAD fill pattern, replaced it with a Revit fill pattern. That's good. I also need to take all of this text and convert it to Revit text, which is easy enough to do. I'll just change it to 3/32 Arial, not that one. There we go.

So that's better. But these aren't real leaders, so I need to get rid of those. And that's a little bit more of a challenge because I've got to be kind of selective here. So I'm not going to do everything here in the interest of time. I think you're getting the idea. And then I can come in here and replace the leaders on the text with real leaders, et cetera, and convert the details. So it really doesn't take long unless you're fumbling around like I was there at the beginning.

It really doesn't take long to do this. I've got a little bit more work to do on this, but let's just pretend for argument's sake that I'm done. Well, if I'm done, that means that if I was to get rid of all of this stuff, delete it, just, again, for exercise purposes I've gotten rid of all my AutoCAD geometry. I've got all kinds of little AutoCAD bits still floating around in this drawing-- or in this project.

If I go up to the Manage ribbon and I click on Purge Unused, and I'll check None. And I'll go down here to my text. Well, there's those two text types that came in with the AutoCAD file. But again, I have to be able to recognize those or going to be afraid to purge them.

And what about all those line styles? They're not in here. You can't find your line styles in the purge tool. You can't find your filled regions in the purge tool. I have to go elsewhere for those. So if I go to Additional Settings and I go to Line Styles, well, again, which ones are the AutoCAD line styles and which ones are the Revit line styles? I have to know. And not all of them are real obvious. Like, I think that's an AutoCAD line style as well. So I have to actually manually select all of those and delete them.

I still have the filled region out there. And if you'll notice, if I go down here in my Project Browser under Families and I go to Detail Items, you will see your filled region types. Here's your filled region family and here your filled region types. And notice there is that roof detail 2 fill region type that I did that I substituted for another one earlier, or substituted another one for. So I want to get rid of that. I have to manually delete it.

So even though I've got Purge, I still have to go all these other places to get rid of all those little AutoCAD bits. And even when I've done that, if I go in here and say I want to do another filled region, and I go look at my region types, look at that one. That one's not even showing up in the project browser. I don't know where that is. It's been referenced by something somewhere.

But this is what happens. You'll be very diligent about being very careful to convert everything to Revit stuff, and then you'll be diligent about trying to purge everything out, and there will probably still be some things left over that you just cannot find. I've got a customer right now it has a Revit template that's got so much AutoCAD stuff in there they can't find that they're thinking about just redoing the template from scratch. That's why whenever I deal with AutoCAD geometry, I think of it as the plague. Just biohazard suit, keep it segregated from your project as much as possible.

If you're going to bring in an AutoCAD detail and convert it to a Revit standard detail, if you want to use the method I just showed you, what I would suggest you do-- don't do it in your project. Start a dummy project. Do it in the dummy project. Once you've got all that stuff stripped out, take that drafting view that's in your dummy project and use the Insert Views from File Tool to move that into a standard Detail Library project.

Does everybody know the Insert Views From File? You may not. Don't be afraid to raise your hand. OK. So I'm assuming everybody knows that tool. So you can take a drafting view-- OK, don't be shy. That's why you're here.

So the Insert Views From File is right here on the Insert tab, Insert From File-- which I'm in a drafting view or in a-- yeah, I'm in a drafting view. You can't do it in a drafting view. But you can have a Revit project that has nothing in it but drafting views with your 2D details. And if I go to the Insert tab and click Insert From File, Insert Views From a file, I can go find any Revit project. It'll read that project and it'll show me all of the drafting views in that project. And I just pick the ones I want and copy them over.

So I've done this detail in a dummy project. I've got my standard Detail Library over here that I've started, just another Revit project. Open that up and pull that drafting view over from this project to my standard Detail Library, and that will leave all the AutoCAD stuff behind, as long as I've made sure I've converted everything. Make sure you didn't miss anything, otherwise you just polluted that standard Detail Library with some little AutoCAD bit.

And that's why I'm a bigger fan, even though it may seem like it's going to take longer-- I would argue it probably won't. I'm a bigger fan of doing it this way. Back to my original detail, I'm going to get rid of it. I didn't mean to import it. If you have an unexploded imported detail, here's the best way to get rid of it. Just go up here to Delete Layers, Check All. After selecting it, click OK, it's gone. There's nothing that you need to purge. You might want to go check, but typically there's nothing you need to purge from that. All that stuff that was with it has been removed from the project.

And now I'm going to leak it in instead of importing. So I'll go up here to the Insert tab, click on Link CAD. Here's the file. And the very first thing I'll do here before I start tracing is I'll go to my Visibility Graphic Overrides, go to Imported Categories, just set all these layers here, just make them all a really ugly green because I want to see what's been traced and what hasn't.

So I'm leaving this as a link, and now I'm just going to go to the Annotate ribbon. I'll start with detail lines. And I usually start with just everything is thin lines and use my buddy the Tab key with the Pick Lines tool. So I'm using Pick Lines here, my buddy the Tab key because with that you can select entire chains of lines. Don't worry I'm not going to do the whole thing. You'll get the idea.

This really doesn't take that long, though. Just go ahead and pick the lines that you need to convert or trace over. And then for the filled region, I'm literally going to do a brand new filled region on top of it. I'm literally tracing over on top everything. I'll replace the text. I'll put the arrow heads on their.

That may seem like it's going to take longer than converting. I don't think it really does. In most cases, it takes maybe about the same amount of time when it's all said and done. And then once I've got the detail all traced, all I have to do is go up here to the Manage or the Insert ribbon and choose Manage Links, CAD Formats, and remove that CAD link. And it was never there. There's nothing to purge because it was never there.

To me, that's a lot safer. And even if it takes longer to trace than it does to do the conversion, I get that back by not having to go through there and weed out all that stuff that I still need to purge at the end. So I would strongly suggest you consider that. So that's one. Be glad, by the way. I usually preach for an hour on that, so I gave you all a break.

So here's the second thing we look for is warnings. Y'all have all gotten these. Right? You get that little yellow box down on the bottom. And I actually read a book several years ago by somebody who's published a book on how to learn Revit. And they actually said, yeah, when you get those little yellow boxes, you can ignore those. Don't ignore them, OK?

These may be benign. They all seem benign because you get these little yellow boxes. And if you do anything, as soon as you pick somewhere else, they disappear and Revit let's just keep going. So it's like, that one must not have been anything. So they may be benign, they may not. What Revit is really telling you here is, hey, you've got a potential problem here. Go and keep working, but you really need to come back and try to resolve this at some point.

The reason why this is a big issue, and which is why one of the things we check right off the bat with a slow file-- and the symptom of this is when you pick an object to edit it and you get the little circle of death that spins for seems like forever? Five seconds seems like forever, right? But it might spin for even longer than that before you can edit anything. Every time you pick something, if that little circle's spinning, go check your warnings. You might be surprised.

I've seen cases where that little circle will spin for, like, 30 seconds. And I'll go check how many warnings they have in the project. The worst case I've ever seen was 7,500 and some odd warnings. And I flat out told the guy, I said, dude, you're better off just starting over with this. You can't fix this. It's going to take you longer to get rid of these warnings and get this back to a manageable level of performance than it would be just to start over and do it right the first time. That was an extreme case.

Let me show you an example of that. This file does have some warnings in it. The reason why it takes so long is if you have objects that have warnings on them, like this guy here, if I select that, notice up here on the ribbon it tells you, look, hey, this guy has warnings associated with it.

Well, in order to do that, every time you pick an object Revit actually scans that warning database. If you've got 100 warnings, it scans it pretty quick. You don't even notice it. If you've got 1,000 warnings, it's starting to slow down. And I guarantee if you have 7,000 warnings, you'll notice. It'll be painful. You'll want to shoot yourself.

So we'll look at what those warnings are in just a second, but here's how it usually happens. I'm just going to create a wall. I'm going to do a foundation wall. And I get the warning. Now, for those of you that can't read-- by that I mean you're too far in the back. I didn't mean you can't read. I didn't mean that the way it sounded.

It's basically Revit playing Captain Obvious here. Is saying, you can't see what you just created. So thanks, Revit. The fact that I can't see what I just created wouldn't be a clue that I can't see it. So that's really just saying that. Well, none of the creative elements are visible, blah, blah, blah. Well, is that important or not? Is that benign or not?

If you need more information, you can click on this little button right here to expand the warning dialog. And then if I expand this out, I'll actually see the objects involved with that warning. And if I click on one of those objects, if it's visible in the current view, it'll be highlighted in orange. Of course, the warning was it isn't visible in the current view. So I'll click on Show and it'll try to find a view that it is visible in, and there it is.

So now I've got the object. And if I select it, I'm looking up here on the ribbon and I don't see anything that says Show Related Warnings. That was a benign message. There's nothing wrong with that wall. It's a foundation wall. It started at the current level and went down because it was a structural object. In my View Range for typical architectural view stops at the current level, that's all. It was outside of my View Range. So that one's benign. I don't need to worry about it.

Let's go back to my level 1 plan. But I do have warnings. You'll notice on the Manage ribbon there is a Warnings tool right here. Now, in a perfect world, that Warnings button should be gray. That should be your goal, no unresolved warnings in the project, zero defects. How many of you all think you'll ever do a project we have zero unresolved warnings at the end? Got one brave soul here. It's pretty rare. I don't know if I've ever seen a project that has zero. There's going to be some things that pop up where you're just going to go, tough Revit, deal with it,

That's OK. Just strive for zero. If you can resolve it, resolve it. If you can't resolve it, don't lose sleep over. But if you can, resolve it. And I'll show you some ways of resolving here in a second.

So if you do see this, go take a look. So I'll click on Review Warnings, and I'll expand this out. And notice it's showing me what it's talking about here. Those are highlighted in yellow. It's telling me the warning. Worst case, again, I could do the Show here to go find it.

Insert conflicts with joined wall. What the heck does that mean? I love the way Revit doesn't speak in any language known to man. But we can see the objects that are affected. So now that I know which objects are affected-- by the way, two warnings, that's nothing.

But again, I'm going to resolve these. If I can resolve it, I'm going to do it now. I'm not going to wait till I have time because we never have time. And then three months from now and things are slow and I've got to go back and resolve those warnings, now I've got 1,500 warnings I got to weed through, and that's going to take a while. It's better to resolve them when they happen. As hard as that may seem to be, it's better to do it when they happen.

So I've determined these are not benign because they're showing up. I'll click that wall there. And again, the warning was that insert conflicts with joined wall. In English-- sorry, I don't know any other languages other than really bad Spanish. But in English, what that means is that wall is trying to clean up with that wall, and the window's in the way.

OK. Does this ever happen in real life, that condition? Yeah, I mean, you don't want it to, but it happens. And who's Revit to tell me that I can't do this? I'm the one this the architect, not Revit. It didn't go to school. So I'm going to right click on this little bubble right here, this little blue dot, and just tell it stop joining. Disallow Join, and then I can just pull this thing back to the beginning of the wall. But it's no longer trying to join to the wall, no warnings. So that warning has been resolved. If I go back to Manage Warnings, it's gone.

Over here, Revit's actually giving the clue. If I click on one of these walls, basically it's saying, hey, if you're trying to embed one of these walls in the other, use the Cut Geometry tool. So I'll try that. So I've got a wall inside of another wall. So I'm going to go up here to the Modify ribbon, click Cut Geometry, pick the big wall, pick the wall I'm trying to embed in it, no more warnings. Warnings are now gray.

So again, that should be your goal, realizing, of course, you're probably not going to get there. I really harp on this when I do training, when I teach. And I had a customer recently-- we did a full implementation for them, and part of that was training. And I really harped on this.

And we got to the end of their first pilot project, and I went up and said, OK, show me how many warnings you have. And he was all, oh, man, I'm sorry. We've got, like, 15 warnings. I said, dude, you've only got 15 warnings? That's awesome.

100 warnings is not uncommon. But if you get up above, say, 500, I'd start to worry. The easiest way to stay below 500 is deal with them when they come up.

The big question is, when you're seeing the warnings, what the heck do they mean and how do I fix them? As you get more experienced with Revit, you'll begin to predict when the warnings are going to appear and what they're going to be. You'll know, yeah, this is going to cause that warning. But if you're fairly new to Revit, I don't know what it's talking about.

So all you've got to do-- the internet is a wonderful place, usually, if you stay off of Facebook. Y'all ever see that graph on Facebook, the red circle? It's a pie chart of what happens in a political argument on Facebook. Green is you change your mind. Blue is they change their mind. And red is nobody changes their mind, but everybody's pissed, and the whole circle's red.

But if you just Google this guy right here, Revit, how to understand and address warnings. Just Google that. Just write that down. That's your Google search. And it will take you to-- the first link you'll see will take you to this tech dock on the Autodesk web page with several other links to different articles written by different people on these warnings, what they mean, how to fix them. It's a whole library of pretty much every warning you ever saw pop up in Revit. I think this is in the handout. I'm not sure. I don't remember.

So this one's pretty simple. Again, how many architects in here? I'm going to pick on you guys for just a minute. How many MEP engineers? You guys are going to relate to this.

So here's a situation where the architect has a 2 by 4 acoustical ceiling. It needs to change to a 2 by 2 acoustical ceiling, and what they do is a delete this and recreate it with the correct type. And the MEP engineer has light fixtures in their model that are hosted into this ceiling. So guess what happens to those light fixtures? They don't get deleted, thankfully. But they're not hosted anymore, they're orphaned. Which means if the architect also moves the ceiling up 6 inches, what happens to the light fixtures? They just stay there. Right? This ever happen to anybody? Yeah.

All you gotta do is don't delete the ceiling. Just change the type. If you just simply change it from that type to that type, it's still the same Revit element, still has the same Revit element ID. The MEP fixtures are still going to be hosted to that same face.

And it's easier for you. Wouldn't you all agree that doing this is easier than resketching the whole thing? So a big deal is if you're going to modify something, modify it. Don't delete it and replace it unless you've got no other choice. That one's pretty simple.

OK, here's a big one. Before I start, let me just say Shared Coordinates is one of those topics we can keep simple, or we can make it really complicated and spend the rest of the day in here talking about shared coordinates. I would rather not do that. OK? I'm going to keep it simple. I'm lazy.

But let me show you a really common scenario again. And again, sorry architects, but I'm picking on you again. So I'm going to get out of this file. And I'm going to start a brand new MEP file once my circle stops thrashing here.

MEP engineers, tell me if this has ever happened to you. I'm going to use the mechanical template. And the very first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to link that architectural model that my architect just sent me into my project because that's really where it starts. So I'm going to go over here to Link Revit, and I'm going to choose Building Bogus, which should tell you something.

I'm going to bring it in origin to origin. That's typically where I start. And nothing. And I'll double click, do a Zoom Extents. Now, I got lucky here. I did a Zoom Extents, and if you look way over here, there's a little green box. That's a scope box. If I didn't have that, if I did this Zoom Extents, probably nothing would happen. What's happened here is my project is down here somewhere. You can't even see the elevation markers anymore because they're so small. The Revit project is way the heck up in here in La La Land. I have another word for that, but I can't say it in mixed company.

If I go to an elevation view, here's my MEP levels here. Here's the architectural project and its levels, which are kind of hard to see, but they're actually up higher than these as well. Has this ever happened to an MEP engineer? We won't even talk about what you guys have to do to deal with this. But you've got about a day's worth of work ahead of you to get it all set up, right?

I'll show you what the problem is or how it happens. And if you're an architect that has done this before, and you're thinking, oh, I'm a bad person, don't feel bad. They don't make it real clear what you're supposed to do here. I'm going to open up that architectural model.

And in this particular model, you'll notice down here I've got these two little blue icons. One is my project base point, one is my survey point. And they're both in the exact same place, which is where they are by default in Revit. If you turn these on-- they're invisibility graphic overrides under Sight. Turn on the survey point in the project point. You'll see where they are. And if you're using something based on the default template, they're not quite in the middle where those elevation markers are. They're just off to the side, a little bit to the right. I don't know how that happened, but that's where it is. That's your origin.

And one of the things that you might do in the course of a project is bring in a civil survey CAD file. That's got all your site information on it. And the civil survey CAD file has the coordinate system, usually based on a benchmark or something. That's sacred, right?

You don't want to mess with that. So you bring in the civil survey file. It's way the heck up here. It's even pinned. That should be a sign. Ooh, I don't want to move that. So what do you do? You move your project up to there, and you go through all kinds of hoops to do that, don't you? It's a pain in the butt to move everything in your project over to there. And then the MEP engineer has to do it, the structural engineer has to do it. I'm going to show you an easier way to deal with this.

I want to point something out on the PowerPoint slide before I do, a couple of things. Do-- don't move your Revit project. Keep it where it is. Do move the civil survey CAD file. Oh my god, what are you doing in the coordinate system? Then acquire coordinates. This is the key right here to everything-- acquire and publish coordinates. I'm going to go through the whole exercise here in a minute.

And also, if you have multiple buildings, have a master site model and have your building projects as separate projects, and link them into the master site. I even do that if I have a single building. My site model is always separate from the building model.

So keeping that in mind, I'm going to start at the very beginning. I don't have time. What time is this class over?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: OK. So I'm going to start a-- no, I'm going to open a file. I've got a site model here that I've begun. And in this model here, notice again there's my there's my origin, right there in its default location. Project base point, survey base point or in the same place. You'll notice I have one planned site and no more other plans, and I only have one level in this project. If I go to an elevation view, you'll see the level-- I just call it sea level and I leave it at zero.

Now, there's multiple ways of doing this, by the way. Don't think this is the only approach. Like I said, we could talk about shared coordinates all day long. But this is kind of the way I work with it. So I'm going to go back to the site plan. The very first thing I want to do is I'm going to bring in that CAD file. I'm going to import it.

That's good. I'm glad somebody was listening. I'm going to link it. So there's my site contours. I'm going to bring it in origin to origin, so Revit's 000 will be AutoCAD's 000. And if I double click to do a Zoom Extents, their it is way up there. By the way, my View Range here for my site plan has a cut plane that's at about 5,000 feet, so I can accommodate pretty much any elevation without having to change that.

So I'm going to pick the CAD file, unpin it, and just move it down here to where my base point is. So there's my building footprint there. So I'm going to kind of get that in the middle. And then I'm going to repin that because I don't want to move it again.

All right. So now I've totally destroy the civil survey coordinate system, haven't I? No, I haven't. I've just moved it. And if I go to the Manage ribbon and click on Coordinates, Acquire Coordinates. Remember, I'm starting with the civil survey coordinate system. That's the coordinate system I want to carry through this whole process. I'm going to acquire the coordinates of that file that I can link in, bringing them into my current project. Looks like nothing happened.

Oh, wait a minute. Look at that. Little triangle went away, and the triangle is down here with the AutoCAD 000 was all along. And so if I look at my project base point, it says, yeah, for project purposes I'm your origin, but I'm really you know some distance away from the real origin, the benchmark that the surveyor established. So I'm still tied into that survey civil survey coordinate system. If I use any of the dimension tools it use spot coordinates or something, they're going to reference-- or can reference the original base point or the original benchmark.

Is that a little easier than trying to move your project to accommodate civil file? Just move the civil file. OK, so I've got that. The next thing I'm going to do is bring in my building model. That's already been started. I've just done a basic building shell, nothing fancy, and I'm going to bring that in now and place it on the site. So I'm going to link the Revit project. And here's my building. I'm going to bring it in, origin to origin, at first. And it drops right into place right there.

Oops, and I forgot one thing. Before I go to further with-- the buildings there. We'll leave it there for a minute. I want to go ahead and create a topo surface for this. So if you'll bear with me for just a minute, I'm going to go in and create a topo surface from that import.

Once I've done that and got a couple of references created here, I'm going to go ahead and trace the property line real quick. Property line-- where is it? There we go. And just do a couple a little reference plays to identify this corner of the building where it really needs to be on the site. So I'm going to do two reference planes-- one there and one-- I'll use this tool. It'll be a little bit better. There.

So once I've done that, I really don't need the site plan anymore, the original site plan. So I'm just going to go up here to the Manage Links dialogue and unload it. I may need it again later or I might get an update or something, so I'm going to keep it referenced, but I'm going to unload it until I need it again.

Now let's get this building position where it really needs to be on the site. I have no idea what that little circle's doing, but it's starting to make me mad. Oh, come on. Really? So I'm just going to use the Align tool. So on the Modify ribbon, I'll use the aligned tool to line the building up where it's going to be in plan.

There we go. So that's where it needs to be in plan. And then in elevation, I'm actually going to create another level. I've identified where I want the finished floor of this building to be. So I'm just going to create a level at that location without creating any plans. I don't need a plan for this I'm just using this level as a datum. And so I'm going to go in here and give it a name. I'll call this building 1, finished floor, and give it the actual elevation, which I think was to 224.5. Then use the Align tool to line up my architectural project with that level.