Creating a new project from a template - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, let's talk about project templates. A project template is just a starting point for a project, so it can have any settings or configurations that you find useful for one project to the next. So it's a great way to enforce office standards or to set up different types of buildings that maybe need varying setups. So we're going to look at a few different out of the box templates here in this video and I encourage you to explore others if you wish. So the ones that we're going to look at, I'm just going to focus on a few of the different aspects that you want to be looking for in templates. So the way you access a template is when you're creating a new project. What happens is that when you actually create a new project, what it's really doing is a Save As from the template. So let's click the New button here under Models and then depending on your installation options at the time you installed Revit. You'll see a different list here than what I have. So I'm going to start with the most basic template that I have installed which is the Imperial Architectural Template here. This is like a stripped down bare bones template. It's kind of a default US Imperial version. And I'll click OK here. And when that starts, you can see I get this really simple screen that appears here. Now if you don't have access to this particular template, I've actually provided the templates I'm going to show you here with the exercise file, so you're welcome to open it from there instead. Okay, so this opens up into level one floor plan and we have these square elevation symbols right here. And you know, it's North, South, East and West. And if I open up one of those elevations and kind of zoom in here, this template is in imperial units and there's just simply two levels, level one and level two. There's really nothing else in this template. It doesn't have any other kinds of views, it doesn't have any sheets, it's got very few families, it's a bare bones, stripped down starter template. So what I'm going to do is go to the File menu here and close it. And then if it asked me to save, I'll say no, in this case, it didn't ask me. So let's click New a second time. And this time, I'm going to use a metric template just to show you the difference. So I'm going to open up that list again. And if I wanted the equivalent template that I just showed you only in metric units, it's this one right here, Metric Architectural Template. Now I don't see any need to actually show you that one, because it's really the same. It's just got the four elevation symbols two levels, it's bare bones, it's stripped down, you're welcome to look at it on your own if you want. Let's look at this one instead, the Metric Construction Template, so I'll choose that one from the list. Click OK. That'll create a new project from that template. And you can already see a slight difference here, the shape of the elevation symbols are now circular instead of square. So some folks like the circular symbols better than the square ones, so that's a really simple change here. But if you look over here at the Views on the Project Browser, you're going to to see that there are a few more floor plans than we had in the previous template. And the reason for that is, if I go ahead and open up one of these elevations, I'll just do South again is that there are now more levels. So you can see that we have several levels here. And of course, the numbers are in metric units this time. So another feature of templates is, it establishes what units you're working in for a given project, you can see that very clearly now. And then of course, each one of these levels corresponds to one of these floor plans. But if you scroll down a little bit further, there is a schedules and quantities branch which was empty in the previous template, but now you can see a plus sign next to it here. And if we expand that, notice that there are several schedule views already saved here in this template. Now, most of these have something to do with quantification. So notice, they all say quantities in the name, and I'm going to locate this one here called door quantities, double click and open that up. It becomes bold, it opens up a new tab here and you can see that I have this door quantities schedule. Now at the moment it's empty, because my project doesn't contain any doors. It's showing me several columns here of the kinds of information that it will tell me about the doors when I begin adding them. So let's do that. Let's come over here to level one, and add some doors. Now if you go to the door tool, you get this little circle with the line through it because you can't just place a door in Revit. What you need to do is have a host for it first, a wall host. So I'm going to click the Modify tool to cancel, go to the Wall tool, click anywhere to start drawing the wall, anywhere to end it, I don't care how long it is, click the Modify tool to cancel. Now that I have a wall host, I can go back to my Door tool and begin placing doors along that wall. So you can place as many as you want. I'm just going to do three, go ahead and zoom in on them to show you what they look like. So there's three really simple doors here in this file. If I click back over here to door quantities, notice now that I have a line item in this schedule that lists out the fact that I have three doors. Now all three of those doors are the same at the moment, which is why they're all grouping together under a single line item. If I come back to level one, click anywhere to deselect, select one of the doors doesn't matter which one, open up the type selector and choose some other size. So I'm going to pick the smallest size here, notice the door gets a little smaller. But more importantly, when I come back here to door quantities, I now have two line items. The first two unchanged ones are listed here and the one that I just changed is listed below it. So if you imagine that quantification is an important feature of our projects, then starting with a template like this could be really valuable to the team because they don't have to build all of these schedules. Every time they want to gain those quantities. They just simply open up this project, start adding geometry and all of that geometry will instantly populate all of these schedules in real time. Very powerful feature. Now, let's close this one. File. Close. No need to save. I'll click No and let's do one more. So I'm going to go to the new command again. And this time, the one that I want is not already populated on the list here. So I'll click the Browse button instead. Now this takes me to the English Imperial folder, because that's my default installation here in my US Imperial installation, but yours might start in a different folder. If I go up one step, you can see that you can install all these different languages in jurisdictions if you wish. So if you want to explore any of those other templates, you're welcome to do so. But I'm going to stay in the English Imperial folder and show you this commercial default one next. So I'm going to open that up, click OK. We're back to the simple rectangular elevation symbols this time, but if I zoom in here, notice they've got numbers in them. So this is elevation two on sheet A five. And this one is elevation one on sheet A four. Now if we scroll down over here, past the schedules, past the views, we'll find the sheets branch right here and then notice there sheet A four. Which if I expand it contains the North and South elevation, sheet A five which I expand it contains East and West. So I'm going to open one of these sheets, I'll do A four. And now I'm looking at two view ports, one here for the South elevation, one here for the North elevation. And if you zoom in a little bit, you can see those titles beneath them. Now, once again, there's no geometry in here, so it's a little difficult to really appreciate what we've got. But if I go back to the level one floor plan, let's just zoom out a little bit here. I'll go to the Wall tool again. This time I'll use the rectangle option. Draw a box doesn't matter how big it is, cancel the command, add a door. I'll just put a door on the North elevation doesn't matter where. Now I'm going to go back to that elevations sheet. And you can see that new model, that really simple box model, appears automatically in both elevations but only the South elevation is showing the door. Because that door is south facing. So if you look over here at the sheets branch, you can see there are several sheets available here and you can open any of them if you wish and this model will be reflected there. So the team now can start building the model, working on the project and not have to worry about all the standard sheets, all those standard sheets are already ready to go and instantly grabbing the changes as they occur in real time. So by showing you a few of the out of the box templates, I'm just giving you some idea of the kinds of things you can expect to see with a project template and you can see there's quite a bit of variation. So depending on which project template you started with, that can have a huge impact on what's available to the project team as they move forward. Now your office might have its own custom template, which varies completely from any of the ones that I've shown you. So I encourage you to not only explore the ones that are out of the box and kind of get a better sense of how templates work. But also talk to the folks back at your firm and find out what they have available and explore that one as well.