BIM and Revit Consulting, Implementation, and Support Services
Autodesk revit super template

Imagine a world where you start a project by opening a file, and then just start to work in either 2d or 3d, whatever way you are most comfortable. Rather than spending time setting up files, you just start drawing walls, doors, and windows. Maybe you know enough information to be fairly specific; 'this is going to be a 2x4 ACT ceiling at 7'-6" AFF,' in another location you may want to be more generic, and use a placeholder of a 5" thick wall and select the actual wall later. In either case, as you draw in your one view, several other sheets are being drawn in the background, your schedules are automatically being populated, and you simply have to select where to cut your elevations and sections and place them on the indicated sheet. Standard detail sheets are already setup and either already populated with details or ready for your firm's standard details to be dragged and dropped from a library. When you actually decide that 5" wall is going to be a 2 hour rated wall with a specific UL rating, you simply highlight the wall in question, and select the proper wall from a drop down list. Your wall tags, dimensions, schedules, and detail references all update with the proper information. Even the square footage and volume of the rooms the wall was bounding update to reflect the slight change in wall thickness. When you finished your schematic planning, a large portion of your CD set is already well on its way to being completed in the background. The best part, you did all of this without the need to reference a 'Revit Manual,' and you didn't need to think about layers and file naming conventions. This is the power of a Revit Super Template, and unlike many other promises of BIM, a firm having the expertise and willingness to put in the time and energy to create such a template, can start benefiting in productivity increases today.

It's important to differentiate between a Revit Template and a Revit Super Template. Little of the industry has grasped the concept of a Revit Super Template. Instead, they setup their templates with the little information that existed in an AutoCAD template, which then took several hours or days to actually setup a project. To get any consistency in firm documentation, this often needed to be done by someone who knew the CAD Manual by memory and still referenced it through the process. In addition to the CAD Manual if there was to be any consistency between projects, they also must reference or understand your firm's documentation standards. This process is not fool proofed and built into the Revit Super Template.

Do note, that it is important that these templates remain a living document and are updated or enhanced additionally over their life with each project that your firm engages and each new version of Revit. The level to which your firm already has their documentation standards ironed out directly affects the time associated with this task.

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