We recently received direction from one of our confidential clients that they would be providing us with a standard template for some of their process specific pieces of equipment. The design packages would use these templates to which we would add our scope specific content (i.e. equipment location and pipe routing). The caveat to this being that the go-by package is being provided in CAD and we are a Revit centric Design Firm. The goal was to develop a workflow that would integrate or convert the template CAD content into Revit content to accompany our design in such a way that the client would have to look twice to be able to tell the difference between a Revit or CAD sheet. Challenge Accepted! I'd like to start off by saying that I am not a BIM specialist, technician, coordinator, or whatever your firm is titling that role. I have been dubbed with the honorary title of Mechanical/Process BIM Champion. What the heck does that mean? Great question. What it means is that on top of my day to day official design, leadership, and management titles, I act as inner department BIM lead and solve the discipline specific challenges like the one outlined in this post. In the end, its really my preference to assume this role. I like variety all day, every day, and I love solving BIM puzzles.
So, back to the task at hand. How does one port a bunch of dumb down CAD content into Revit, in such a way that it is easily overwritten when an update is pushed from the client? (And believe me, no matter how much they say it will never change, it will, many times.) Enter Ideate Sticky! A wonderful add in by the folks at Ideate Software. If you haven't played with it, Sticky is a Revit Add-In that basically takes any excel file and format and replicates it in Revit using a header schedule. Though it pained me to take the data out of the database, so to speak, by not creating an equipment family to house all of the parameters to build the schedule in Revit, I believe that I made the most logical and sustainable choice.
The template drawings consisted of 5 major components: title block, equipment schedule, margin notes, equipment schematic, and an area to add our content. By using Sticky and Excel to generate the schedule and margin notes in Revit, it not only substantially removed the human element for error and therefore putting no ownence on us for the client provided content, the content itself would be stored on a network drive allowing it to be linked into several models, and updates could be easily pushed by overwriting the network files thereby pushing the update to any model linking those files.
The rest of the template content was business as usual. We were already using a client based title block family and the equipment schematic portion was linked into the models using a view template to control the lineweights by way of imported categories. I know, I know, why not convert the content or recreate it with native Revit detail lines? By linking the CAD content and controlling it via view template, we are able to push updates in seconds by overwriting the network CAD file with any new versions pushed form the clients. Again, the overarching themes are ease of updates, not taking ownership of the client content, and minimize initial conversion time. The scope specific content is handled the way any design content is in Revit, model it up, annotate a sheet view, toss it on the sheet, done.
When you are a Revit company, working for a CAD driven client, you have to choose your battles....