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

Creating a new project from a template - Revit Tutorial

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

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Creating a new project from a template

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- [Instructor] This video I want to talk about creating a new project from a template. A template gives us a good starting point for a new project, and it can be preconfigured with as many different settings and variations as you like for the kind of work that you do. Now, the software installs with some basic templates to get you started, and you can see those here on the recent file screen, listed right here. Now, if you watch the previous video on the options dialogue, then you recall that we were actually able to customize that list, and if your office has your own custom Revit template, you can actually add it to that list, so that it's available as a single click. Now, I'm going to click this architectural template link right here, and that will create a brand new project based on that template. Now, what a template does, is it essentially does a save as. So if you look at the top of my screen here, you'll see that the name of the project that it created is called Project1. And it actually hasn't named the project yet, so the first time I save it would actually prompt me to do a save as and give it a name at that time. Now, this is by far the simplest template that's included with the software. This is meant to just get you into the software and allow you to start creating stuff. But there really isn't much here in the way of setup. So if we look over at the project browser, I've got a couple floor plans, couple ceiling plans, and a few elevations. There aren't any legends, there aren't any schedules, there aren't any sheets, and of course there are some families, every project's got some families. This is a very, very basic template and it serves the purpose of just getting you started. Now, I'm going to close this one, so I'll go to the file menu and I'll choose close, and I'm not going to save that. Now, the next template I want to look at is the construction template. So I also have a link for that here, but let's say it wasn't on the list. Then you have to ways you can get to the other templates that are in your system. You can go to the file menu, highlight new, and then choose project. And then here, you'll also see a dropdown list, which mirrors this one, but you can use this browse button right here to get to any other templates that you have installed on your system. Now, it goes to my default folder, in this case US Imperial, but you could browse out to any folder you like. Here is the construction default, that's the same one that's listed right there, I'll click open, and OK. Now, I'm still looking at a similar blank screen, I'm now in Project2 because it's the second project I've created in the session, and if you look over at my project browser, you're going to see that there are a couple more floor plans than there were in the previous one. So that's one small change. There are several 3D views, that's another change, and the same elevations, but what is really significantly different about this template than the other one is here on the schedules and quantities branch. So if I expand that, you're going to see that there are several schedules available in this project. Now, to really understand the value of those schedules, we really need to have some geometry. Now, I don't want to get too carried away with building geometry in this video, we're going to talk about that more in detail later. But let's start by just adding a simple wall. So click on the wall tool button in the architecture tab, and just click two points on screen, it doesn't matter how long you make it. And I'm going to go ahead and roll my wheel to zoom in a little bit on that, and then I'll click the door button right next to the wall button, and I don't care, again, what settings you choose for the doors, so we're just going to accept all the defaults, and just highlight the wall and click one, two, three times. And again, it doesn't matter where you place those doors. All I wanted to do was just get some doors in this file. Now, there's a schedule here called qa Door Quantities. Now, it's name is Door Quantities, so, as that name implies, if you double click it, it should tell you what the quantity of doors that we have is and you can see it right there. There's three doors. Now, notice I have single line item, because all three of those doors are the same. So I've got two tabs open now, Quantities and Level 1, if I click back to Level 1, the first thing you'll see is, because I clicked in the field of the schedule, it actually highlights all three of those doors, and I can click anywhere to deselect them, then I'm going to select just one of those doors, and it doesn't matter which one, and change it to a different size. And I don't care which size you choose. I'm going to choose the 32 inch size there. Now if I click back to the Door Quantities tab, notice that I have two line items. So the intent of this schedule is to give you a quantity of each different kind of door that you're using in your project. And if I'm a contractor and I'm interested in things like the quantities and the take-offs, that could be valuable information to have. So you can see that that's clearly the focus of this template because we just did the door schedule, but there are dozens of other schedules that have similar functions here, in this template. So I'm going to close this one without saving, as well, and the keyboard shortcut to close a project is Control + W. So, when it asks me if I want to save, I'll just say no. So I'm going to make one more template. And, again, we could go to the file menu, new project, or this new link right here would get me to the same place, the new project dialogue, and then I'll click the browse button, and this time I want to choose the commercial default template. Now that one is not listed on the standard templates, there, so we have to browse to it, or you can go to the options dialogue and add it to the list if you plan to use it frequently. I'll click OK to create a project based on that template. That gives me Project3. Now, initially, the Level 1 floor plan that opens looks similar to the other ones. If you look over here on the project browser, there are a few more floor plans in this file. But you'll notice here that this symbol looks a little different, so if I just sort of put my mouse near it and zoom in, there's actually some text in here. So this one says two on A5. And then if I zoom in over here, this is one on A5. And then here we have one on A4, and then, finally, this one is two on A4. So what each of those symbols is, is one of your elevations. And if we scroll down here on the project browser, that's our East, North, West and South elevations. Now, what's different about this template is, that it has a large collection of sheets already. And here sheet A4, and here's sheet A5. And if I expand each of these, you'll see that your North, South, East and West elevations are already placed on these sheets. So I'm going to open up the A4 sheet, and you'll see that there's a view port here for the first elevation and view port here for the second one. Now, to make this a little more understandable, just like we did in the previous template, it might be nice to have some geometry. So I'm going to click back to Level 1, go to the wall command. Again, I'm not to concerned about the specifics of the wall command, but let's switch to a rectangle command this time, and just draw a box of any size, click the modify tool to cancel, and then just go ahead and add a door in the lower wall just for orientation purposes. Now, if I click back here to the A4 sheet, notice that we're looking at the two long elevations, the North and South elevations, and you can see that the South elevation has the door in it, and the North elevation does not. If we open up sheet A5, you could see that we're seeing the two short elevations now, East and West. I hope this quick exploration gives you some idea of what the potential and the power of a Revit project template is. There's really no limit on what you can include in a project template. There's all sorts of possibilities from standard families in geometry, to standard sheets and views and different schedules and all the things that we saw. There's a pretty good chance that if you work in a firm that they've already got a custom, standard Revit template for the firm's work, so just ask somebody there how to access that template because that's most likely the one that you'd be using in projects within the firm.

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