The Revit Mindset

More times than not I see new Revit users jump into a project with no direction and no idea what they want to accomplish.  Ask yourself, would you start building a house without a game plan or even a plan at all?  If you answered yes there is probably no hope for you ever understanding why you wouldn’t do that and I am going to say a special prayer for you tonight, but for the sake of us all, I beg you, please keep reading.

What is the Revit Mindset?  Great question!  I have been telling everyone I taught Revit to for years that it’s the ability to clear your mind of any preconceived “knowledge” or “understanding” of Revit and then layout a plan of attack before even beginning a project.  You could spend an entire day simply planning out your direction and needs for the project.  I assure you it will payoff in the days, weeks, or months to come.  For instance, if you going to create a full set of construction documents your path is completely different than someone working on conceptual design for analysis and bid presentations.

If you think about it long enough you can actually start to build in possible changes in the future in the very beginning of the project.  For instance, you know the walls are not necessarily going to be in the location you draw them, but you do know that they will always follow a grid.  Well, put that in from the beginning that way next time a room needs to change in size 14 times in a single day you still spend most of the day relaxing.  The more you know before starting the model the better off your end result will be.  However, most of the time you don’t know everything about a project when you first start, so here are a few quick dos and don’ts for beginning.

Grids and references are your friend! Most of the time buildings have a grid running through them so why not go ahead and lock the walls that should follow that grid to the grid line itself?

Do you really need to lock that?  I have a very simple solution to this problem.  Ask yourself does that object always need to move or be connected to the object you are locking it to?  If you say “no” or “maybe” don’t lock it!  If you said “yes”, then go ahead and give that lock a nice big confident “click”!  Feels good right?

Instead of arbitrarily offsetting things from other levels just add in a level to help you control those objects on a more granular level.  Say you had 25 different walls throughout a ceiling plan that were being shown as a type of soffit in multiple rooms.  Not all of the walls may be the same so offsetting their base 8 feet from the floor or -2 foot from the level above may not be the best.  Instead, add a level that is called Level 1 Soffit Offset (or some fancy name you choose) that way you can tell the wall base to attach to that offset level.  Then when you change the offset levels height in elevation those walls will automatically update.

Dimension strings can do a lot more than give distance.  Dimension strings can actually me used to help you space furniture, or better yet urinals in a restroom.  Never pull out a calculator to divide 8’ 6” by 4 to figure out the spacing, simply dimension from the appropriate reference and hit EQ.  Ta-da!

The Revit mindset is all about forgetting what you thought you knew, refocusing and planning your attack, then learning new and fun ways to use common tools or items to do so much more than you thought they could.  Hope this helps!  Keep your mind open, your wheels turning, and your fingers nimble and you will never have a more enjoyable modeling experience in your life.

I know the last part was corny, but thanks for reading!

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