Creating your own template - Revit LT Tutorial

- In this movie we'll discuss an alternative option to creating your own template file. You can start completely from scratch, so rather than starting with an existing template and modifying it, you can build it without any template at all. There are naturally trade offs to each approach, and, so, in this movie I would like to explore what it looks like when you create a file from scratch, and, then, talk about an alternative where we can maybe combine both approaches. So, if you want to create a template from scratch, you could start right here on the Recent Files screen, the sort of intro screen that comes up from REVIT, and click your New link right here. Now, what you would do in this case is you would open up this list right here that shows you the loaded templates, and you would just, simply, choose none. Now, you can create a new project, or you can create a project template directly, so what's the difference? If I create a project, I'm actually creating a RVT file, so it will actually think of itself as a REVIT project file. Now, later, you can do a Save As and take that project file and turn it into a template, so it's not like you have to get this right here, and then you're stuck if you don't, but if you want to go right to an RTE and create the RTE directly, you can do it here. I tend to prefer making it as a project first and then, later, doing the Save As. That's just my preference. Now, because I'm starting completely from scratch without any template what so ever, it will ask me what unit system I plan to use. Now, I'm going to choose imperial, but you're more than welcome to choose metric, if that's your preferred measurement system. So, when this loads, we want to look at a few of the things we explored when we looked at some of the provided templates. The first thing we'll notice is, looking right at the view window, there are no elevation markers on screen. Now, the reason for that is if I come over here to views, and I expand out, all I have is a level one floor plan and a level one elevation, so there are no views, basically, at all in this project. You have to have at least one view, so that's why we have the level one floor plan, but other than that there really isn't anything else here. If I expand families, the only categories you're going to see here are system families There are no component families loaded into this template. For example, if I click the Door tool, it will tell me that there are no door families loaded, do you want to load one now? So, there is literally nothing in this file, so if you want complete control, and you want to control absolutely everything that comes in to your office standard template then this is the way to go. You start from scratch. There are certainly those who prefer this method. The only caveat I would give you is it's a lot more work to set up this template, so on the plus side you get exactly what you want. It's clean, it's lean, there isn't a lot of extra stuff in here that you didn't expect, but, on the downside, it's a lot more work to do the setup. So, let's talk about a third option. The two extremes we're looking at right now is we can use an out of the box template or we could start from scratch, but there certainly is a somewhere in between, so what if you started either from scratch or with the template and then borrowed elements from some of the other places? And what would that look like? So, let me show a really simple example of what that would look like, so I'm here in the scratch starting point, but I could go to the Application menu, the big R menu, go to New, and choose Project, and I'll just, simply, choose the Architectural template for this example. Now, let's say I want to have some of the wall types that are in the architectural template over in my scratch file. Now, you can use the Control and the Tab keys to switch between the two files because right now, if we look at switch windows, you can see that I have Project Four and Project Five loaded. Your numbers might vary, but Project Four is my from scratch template and Project Five is the one that I just created, so I can either switch here, or I can do Control Tab to switch back over to the other one. Now, if I go to the Wall command here in the scratch template, notice that there is only one wall type in this file. Just wall one, that's it. There is no other wall types in here. I'm going to go cancel out of there. I'll Control Tab back over to the standard, default architectural template, click the Wall tool, and we have several wall types that are already in here, so let's say that in my template I want to be able to start with this interior partition, five inch, two hour wall, and I'll just draw a simple wall with that, and let's say I also wanted to be able to have this four and seven eighths inch wall, so I'll just click a few of these. Now, I'll zoom in, and all I've done is just drawn a couple walls. I want to take both of these walls and select them, Control C to copy them to my clipboard, Control Tab to switch over to the other file, and then find the Control V to paste them in. Now, REVIT will alert us that it's going to duplicate some hatch patterns and some materials, it always does this, but I'll just, simply, click O.K. here. Click a point on screen to place my copy, and then up here I can click finish, so at this point if I go to the Wall command, I've now added in those two wall types that were previously not here, so the hybrid approach would involve your opening more than one project and, or, template at the same time, and then just, simply, doing a series of copies and pastes to borrow the elements you want from one and bringing them over to the other, and, so, over time it would start to fill out the intermediate one, and then, of course, when you save it as your template it will start with all of those components, so it's a really simple approach, but it allows you to have a little bit more control over the kinds of things that you're going to want to include there, and, so, ultimately, what you're really going to want to do is, as you do this investigation between what's provided out of the box and what you can do from scratch and they hybrid in between, you're going to want to start building out a checklist. You're going to want to kind of list out all the items that you want your template to include, and you're just going to use this checklist to keep you on track. Now, if you have access to the exercise files, I've provided a sample of what this checklist might look like. It's nothing more than a list, you can even do it by hand, but it's just something to keep you on track, so you know what you need to provide, and what you still need to provide, and what's been done already.