Does it matter where the project origin is located?

[Marcus.Isacsson]

Hi fellow Reviters!

I have a short question: Does it matter where the origin in Revit is located? (note: Not project base point).

At our office we always try to have the origin located pretty far away from the project, about 100 meters x- and y-axis in the lower left corner
(so that the project is located north-east of the origin).

But does that really matter? A project base point and survey point can always be moved and by creating new locations we can make IFC and DWG files export to pretty much wherever we want. Right?

Right now I have a project where the origin is located in the middle of the project. Could this lead to problems for exports/imports somehow?
Errors in other softwares maybe?

[Sahay_R]

I don't think so. Not unless a specific base point or more importantly, survey point,  has been specified by your Civil consultants. In that case you can move your base point and survey point accordingly.

[chrisplyler]

Just don't put your project extents miles away from the origin. Causes geometry nightmares. A hundred meters doesn't matter.

[Marcus.Isacsson]

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@rsahayUZMK9 wrote:

I don't think so. Not unless a specific base point or more importantly, survey point,  has been specified by your Civil consultants. In that case you can move your base point and survey point accordingly.

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Thanks for your reply.
Yes, the project base point and survey point can be moved but the Revit origin will always stay the same. At least as I understand it.
But I guess that doesn't matter much, unless you import other Revit files with the option origin to origin. Right?
But if origin to origin creates problems I guess you could choose to import project base point to project base point or by shared coordinates instead.

We have some coordinators sometimes "forcing" us to move the project so that it is located north east to the origin (startup location).
Guess they're wrong in that matter since it doesn't matter, or does it?

[Marcus.Isacsson]

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@chrisplyler wrote:

Just don't put your project extents miles away from the origin. Causes geometry nightmares. A hundred meters doesn't matter.

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Yes, this seems to be more important than the location of the origin (startup location). If I don't remember it wrong I think we had some issues where Tekla Structures users couldn't import our files. The exported files with shared coordinates didn't work at all and our internal coordinates also were too far off also creating troubles (easy to fix though).

[Marcus.Isacsson]

It seems that this can matter. If different Revit files have different locations of the origin then IFC-imports will get the wrong coordinates since it seems to always use origin to origin when inserted. Maybe thats also the case when some other softwares export an IFC that is imported into Revit?