Creating a new project from a template - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, I want to talk about creating new projects from templates. Now, templates just provide a starting point for a project, So it performs a save as at the time when you create the project and so your new project will be an unnamed project based on the template. So the more settings and configurations that are pre-built into that template, the more useful of a starting point that can become for the project team. So here on the recent files screen, under Models, I'm going to click the New button to create my first project based on a template. Now I'll accept the default here, Architectural Template and click OK. Your default might be something different but I just want to start with this one as sort of a baseline just to kind of show you, this is a bare bones template that ships with the product. Two things I want to point out. The view that's opened is level one floor plan, there are these square elevation symbols here, they have these small little triangular elevation markers next to them. So we've got west, north, east, and south. If you look over here on the Project Browser, you'll see each of the views that corresponds to each of those symbols. The other thing I want to point out is that the project browser is very sparse, we've got a couple of floor plans a couple of ceiling plans, a few elevations, and that's it. There are no schedules, there are no sheets, and there's very limited families. If I double-click the south elevation and take a look and zoom in over here, there's just those two levels, it's a really, really simple bare bones template. Now my default happens to be imperial units but you can set the default to any template you like, so let's look at a metric template next. So I'm going to do Control + W and close that file, it shouldn't ask you to save, but if you're following along and the file does ask you to save you can just simply say, no. Now I'll click New again, and because my defaults are set to imperial, what I'll do this time is click the Browse button. Now you'll also want to click the Browse button if you don't see the same templates as me and you want to access them from a different location. Now you can browse to anywhere on your hard drive and I've provided the templates that I'm going to show you in the exercise files, so you're welcome to browse to that location to find them. In my case, I'll just simply go up one folder and go into the US metric folder next. Now you could see that I had several other folders there as well, so I've plenty of templates to choose from. So here there are several templates available, and this one right here default metric is the metric equivalent of the one that I just showed you. So the only thing different about it is that it's in millimeters instead of feet. Alright, so let's use this one instead which is a little bit different. Construction default metric. So this one has more of a construction focus. So I'll click Open and then OK. And when it opens the obvious thing that we'll see on the view that opens is that the elevation markers are now circular instead of square, but that's a minor thing. But if you look at the Project Browser, you can already see that we've got several more floor plans. Now we still have the same four elevations, and if I open up one of those elevations like the south elevation, this starts to explain why we have more floor plans because as you can see there are more levels here. So in addition to level one and two, we've got levels for the foundations and the footings and so on. So that accounts for several of the additional floor plans. But actually the most interesting feature of this template is under Schedules. So if you expand the schedules here, what you're going to see is this file has several schedules actually, and most of the names say quantities in the name. So the focus of these schedules is about quantifying the elements within your model. So I've got this one here called Door Quantities and I'll open that up by double clicking it. Now it looks kind of like a spreadsheet. So a schedule is just a tabular view of the model that lists out the elements that it finds as opposed to drawing them. And what you're going to see here is several different bits of information that it can report of each of those elements. Now, at the moment we're not seeing anything because if we click back to level one floor plan there is no geometry in this model, so there are no doors. So let's add a couple. So to do that, you have to first add a wall because doors are what we call hosted elements. So click the Wall button and just create a wall of any length, I don't care how long or where you put it. I'll click the Modify tool to cancel out of that. Then I'll go over to the Door tool and notice that you can't place a door freestanding in space, that's why we needed to draw a wall first, but if you highlight the wall you should be able to click two or three times to add a few doors, and then I'll click the Modify tool again to cancel out. So now I'll just zoom in a little bit here and you can see that we've got those three doors right there. Alright, now I'll click back to Door Quantities and notice that we have a single line item here with a count of three. So that is showing us that it instantly reacted to the fact that we've added those three doors, and this schedule is showing us those three doors and it's grouping them by type, in this case the single flush doors. So if we go back to the level one floor plan and suppose we take one of those doors and I don't care which one you pick and go over here to the type selector, you'll notice that there are several sizes available. So what I'll do is choose the smallest size on the list and you'll see that door gets slightly smaller there in the floor plan, but if you click back over here to Door Quantities the more interesting thing is that we now have two line items, we've got a quantity two for the original two that were unchanged and a quantity one for the one that we just made smaller. So as you make changes to your model both adding and removing or changing elements all of those things will be reflected in real time on these quantity schedules. So when you consider all the various schedules that were in here, that can be a very, very powerful tool. So by including these schedules ahead of time in a template the project team starts with a leg up because they've got all of this information at their fingertips immediately from day one as they start building their model. Alright, let me show you one more template now. So I'm going to do Control + W again. Now this time it's going to ask me to save because I've made changes so I'll just click No here, there's no need for me to save that. So let's click New one more time, click Browse again, so that I can go back to my metric folder. And the one that I want is not actually here in the metric folder, it's commercial default. So what I'm actually going to do is go to my imperial folder and I've provided a copy of this in the exercise files, this one's called commercial default. Now, the reason I want to use commercial default this time is because this one has some sheets in it already. Now you can see there are some floor plans here, if I open up one of the elevations, we do see some different elevations here as we did before corresponding to those floor plans. But more importantly, if we zoom in on the symbols, notice that this one says A4 and one, and then this one says A5 and two. And if you looked at all of them you're going to see similar kinds of indicators. Well, A4 and A5 are referring to sheets and one and two are referring to detailed numbers on those sheets. So if we look down here at the sheets branch, you'll see that this template starts with several predefined sheets. And we've seen those two elevation symbols correspond to A4 and A5, well, the north and south elevations are on the A4 sheet. So if I double click the A4 sheet, you'll see that I've got a view port here for the south elevation and another one here for the North elevation, and they're already placed on this title block ready for presentation in either PDF or printed form. Well, let's go back to level one and to make this a little bit more interesting and understandable, let's add some geometry here as well. So back to the Wall command. This time I'm going to do a rectangle and just draw a box of any size and shape, I don't care how big or small. Click the Modify tool to cancel out of there and just add a single door in the south wall and then click the Modify tool again. So again, don't worry about how big it is or where it's located, all I want you to do is just create that quick, simple model so that when you click back to the elevation sheet you'll now see some geometry here, and it will be a little bit more understandable what the value of having these pre-configured sheets are. Notice that the south elevation is immediately reacting to the fact that it shows a door now, the North elevation does not show a door and what's happening is as the project team is adding geometry and making modifications to this project the sheets are keeping up in real time. So whether you have a project template that has a collection of sheets or a bunch of schedules, or several levels, or several views and floor plans, or all of the above, the more useful settings and configurations that are built into that project template, the more valuable it becomes to project teams that use that template. So chances are the firm that you work for has an office standard Revit template that they've pre-configured so that it matches the kind of work that your firm does. So definitely talk to the folks back at your office and find out where your office standard template is and what the correct one you're supposed to use is but otherwise familiarize yourself with some of the potential of templates using the out of the box ones or the ones that your office provides and you'll see that the better a template that you start with the more of a leg up each of your Revit projects will have.