We have been doing a few residential subdivisions in the past year. There have been a few hurdles that we are trying to overcome with Revit with regards to room options and elevation options.
For example, we have a subdivision that has seven plans. Each plan has a miniumum of 1 floor plan option (ie, 3rd bedroom or office option) as well as 3 elevation styles per plan (ie, Craftsman, Ranch, Northern European.
Plan options that occur at the interior are no problem. Once we have to make changes to the exterior, things can become somewhat tricky. We have decided to pick a "style" such as Craftsman for each plan as the standard plan that shows in the main floor plan where most of the keynotes and dimensions are. The same goes with the elevations that go with that style. Luckily, all the plans in this project are single story, so when it comes to the roofs, there is a design option for each roof style. Any walls or roofs above the first floor plate go into that option. It all seems explanatory except for when you have an option that adds additional square footage and changes the roof configuration. What we've had to do in that case is create more option sets for those little changes.
We also have been using filters to deal with exterior elements that relate to a particular style such as trim. We created a filter called "STYLE" and objects are filtered out of views with that filter. The only problem is that it doesn't work for all objects such as wall sweeps, so those have to be hidden individually sometimes. Another downfall of design options is that you cannot join geometry between option sets, boo. Then you have to hide lines where walls join between options.
We toyed with groups, but once a wall from one group is in the same place as a wall in another, you get all sorts of cleanup issues.
Looking for any other solutions that may be out there such as linking files, etc...
