From the course: Revit 2022: Essential Training for MEP

Touring the user interface - Revit MEP Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2022: Essential Training for MEP

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Touring the user interface

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- [Instructor] So let's take a look at the Revit interface. If you're an AutoCAD user, MicroStation, DataCAD, or whatever drafting program you used to use, you're going to have to take a step back, take a deep breath, and learn that you're not in a drafting program anymore. I jumped into my electrical project that I had saved in the previous video. Let's just start from the top. Of course we have the Program button. If you click the R, pretty much every Windows application has this, not a lot of use for that. We can jump back to our home screen if we want. If we click the home screen again, it's going to toggle back to our project. Of course open save. What we're looking at up here is actually called the quick access toolbar. These are icons that you have quick access to if you use them a lot. If we have a bunch up here, we can click the drop-down and we can add other items to it, or we can right-click any icon and add that to the quick access toolbar. That's up to you. My interface this might look a little different than yours based on what I've added, also based on the release of the program, I'm in 2021, and also based on the service pack of that release. For example, if you're watching this video and you've already upgraded to, say, 2021.2, these configurations might be slightly different. We'll have our model title up here, over here. We'll have search. This basically will open up the Autodesk help dialog. You can log in to Autodesk, find apps, or click the drop-down next to the question mark, and we can look items related to this release of the software that you're in. Now down here, of course it's broken up into tabs. Each tab is discipline-specific. Our discipline, of course, is systems. We can insert files. Of course our Annotate, used to be called drafting, and so on down the line. If we go to systems, notice again that this is broken out into what are called panels. Each panel is discipline-specific, and they also have properties that go with it. So if we want to go to our mechanical settings, we could click this Mechanical Settings button right here and we'll open up our settings. We'll dive into this in a future video. Close out of here. Notice that each of these items, if we click Air Terminals, there's no air terminals loaded into this project, why? Because we're in the electrical project. So now, I don't want to load one. Let's jump down to electrical. If you click Device, notice that it will try to put in a device. So in Revit, as we start a command, the interface will change in the aid of the placement of that command. So for example, we don't have any walls in here, but we could place it on a vertical face, regular face or on a work plan. Now, with a command started, notice over here that we have a properties dialog. Click the drop-down here, and we see that we have different types of that actual duplex receptacle. These are called families. If I click off of that, hit Escape a couple of times, scroll down to your Project Browser. What this is, this is your new Windows Explorer. This simply contains views of your model. These views can be deleted, and it won't delete any of the physical model to elements in your model. The problem is, though, if you start to override your graphics, so this dialogue down here is called the view control toolbar, these are actually specific only to the view that you're in. If you change any of these items, it's only going to affect one power, 'cause that just still happens to be the plan that we're in. That brings us to our properties. Right now, our properties are set for the view itself. We can change any of these properties we want, and it only affects one hyphen power, but why is this power? Well, let's go to our visibility graphics, click Edit. All of these items here are turned on or off for power. Notice when I try to bring in an air terminal, air terminals are turned off. Also, air terminals weren't loaded into this template anyway. So as we scroll down, instead of using layers, we turn on and off items in Revit based on objects, not based on layers. I'm going to click Cancel here. One last thing is notice that we have tabs. On Electrical, Lighting, if I go to 1 - Lighting floor plan, I have two tabs now. Go to a ceiling plan, I have three tabs now. These tabs, of course, can be closed out. I love having these tabs. I have a hard time going back to previous versions of Revit that doesn't actually have them. So there you go, that's the Revit interface in a nutshell.

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