From the course: Revit 2019: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial)

Creating Revit links - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2019: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial)

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Creating Revit links

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- [Instructor] In this video, I'm demonstrate linking Revit to Revit. There are a few scenarios where you'd want to link one Revit project to another. The most common would be when you're coordinating with another discipline. If I'm the architect and I have an architectural model, maybe I want to do a link to bring in the structural information or bring in the mechanical or electrical information. In those scenarios each of the disciplines would work in their own file and then we would use links to be able to coordinate between them. The other really common scenario is the one that I'm going to demonstrate here, and that's what happens when you have more than one building on the same site, like a campus situation. Let's say that I have this office building here but there's a small outbuilding that I want to add into the project and I don't want to work on that directly in the same project file. What I would do is create a second project file for the outbuilding. Then, using linking, I'd be able to link them to one another for coordination purposes. To get started, what I'll do is I'll simply go to the insert tab and I'll click the link Revit button. That will display a browse window. I'm going to choose this really simple, little building here called shed. The only option that we have to configure is where do you want to put it. You have a few different positioning options. Honestly, for this example it doesn't really matter which one we choose because we're going to move it anyway. You can choose really whatever one is convenient, center center, origin origin. If you are linking in the first scenario that I talked about where we were linking architecture to structure and structure to MEP, and that kind of thing, then most likely you're going to choose origin to origin because that will line everything up correctly with one another across the various disciplines. In this scenario, because the outbuilding is in a different location anyway, it doesn't really matter what I choose. I'll go ahead and accept the default there. Of course, the outbuilding comes in right on top of the office building, which is what I was talking about. That's probably not the best location for it. Now you can just simply just move that linked building to its proper location. Somebody on the project team knows where that location is and then you can just simply use the move command to achieve that. In this case, I'm just going to click my move command, pick the building up anywhere, and just kind of put it wherever I want it to go. If you're only able to go in horizontal or vertical directions, you might have constrained move direction turned on. Notice that that would only allow you to go horizontally or vertically. If you uncheck constrain, you should be able to move it at any angle you like. Let's say that that outbuilding is off and to the right. You're welcome to move it a specific number of units if you prefer. Now we have that file linked in here and there's a couple different places where you can see that you have a linked Revit file. One place is right on the project browser. If I scroll down in the project browser, you'll see that there's a Revit links branch. When I expand that, you'll see the shed file is listed there and there's a small blue arrow next to it indicating that the file is currently loaded. The other place where you can see that you have a linked Revit file is in the manage links dialogues. If I go there, here's our shed file, and you can see that the status is currently loaded. All right, now let's say that somebody's going to continue working on the shed building and they want to make some changes. One thing that you need to know about linked Revit files is you can't work on both buildings simultaneously in the same session of Revit. In other words, if I wanted to work on both the office building and the shed at the same time I wouldn't be able to do it, but if myself and another user were each working independently on one of the buildings, that would be fine. User A can be working on the shed and user B can be working on the office building and there won't be any issue. Here, if I try to open the shed building, it will alert me that you're not able to do that and it will suggest unloading the link before I proceed. If I answer yes here, then it's going to warn me again, "Are you absolutely sure?" I'll say okay. What it will do is it will actually unload the shed file from the office building. If we switch back to the office building right here, you can see that the shed has disappeared. Then when you look down here under Revit links, notice that there's a red X there indicating that it's now currently unloaded. If you went to manage links and you select it, it would say not loaded. If you tried to reload it right now, it wouldn't let you because you currently have it open in the same session. All right, let's make some change that will be somewhat obvious here. Suppose I take the front door there and change that to a double door. Then maybe take this window right here and copy it to create a second window. Both of those changes should be fairly obvious when we reload it in. Now I'm going to go to the file menu and choose close. It will ask me if I want to save it. I'll say yes. Then back here, in my original project, I can right click the shed right here and choose reload or I could go to the manage links, select it, and choose reload. Either way, when it loads back in, if we zoom in over here, you can see there are now three windows on the south elevation and it now has a double door. That's the basic workflow to working with linked Revit projects. You simply link the two together, position them where they need to go. Then, from then on, if somebody makes changes to a file that you have linked, you'll be able to capture those changes with a reload. I should also say, if we close the office building and then later reopen it, it will always grab the latest version of the Revit shed file. If we close the office building and somebody continued to work on the shed, the next time we close the office building will automatically get the latest version of the shed without having to reload it separately.

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