Large Campus Projects

[Anonymous]

Looking for some advice on a large project,

The project is actually a hotel with all the guestrooms and amenity buildings spread out over all the site as different buildings (Total of 120 buildings).  I'm curious what else others might have to offer from their experience on similar projects.  

Issues:

1. I don't think we'll want all the sheets to come out of the models as sheet management would be difficult and assembling the construction packages would then be very tedious.  We could link them into another file to produce sheets (Annotation file)?  
2. There are obviously redundancies in the guestroom types and all the housekeeping buildings, but we'll only want to model it once.  How would you guys handle the site plan - place different instances of the model in a linked model? Groups and all in one model?

There are a lot of variables for a project like this but I'm trying not to be too wordy, I can provide more information if needed. I'm struggling to wrap my head around the whole thing.  Any suggestions would be helpful!

[chrisplyler]

I personally prefer to have each unique, stand-alone building/structure as it's own file.

Also have one master Site file containing survey and topo.

Link building/structure files into site file as necessary. Orient and position them there. Publish coordinates for each of them back to their individual files.

In this way every building can be modeled with regard only to Plan North and its Project Base Point. If a building is used more than once, just link another instance of it into the site file, and publish ANOTHER set of site coordinates back to it again. Each building file can contain multiple shared coordinate sets, as long as they have unique names. Like so...

1st Instance, Main Hotel, Site Name

1st Instance, Out Building A, Site Name

2nd Instance, Out Building A, Site Name

3rd Instance, Out Building A, Site Name

1st Instance, Out Building B, Site Name

2nd Instance, Out Building B, Site Name

Then, if you ever have to repeat the buildings on a different site as the client grows, make a new site plan, and link in those same buildings like...

1st Instance, Out Building B, Site Name B

2nd Instance, Out Building B, Site Name B

Now that single file for Out Building B by now has five different sets of shared coordinates published to it. It remembers them all, and find its place if it's ever reloaded into one of the site files, and can have positional references (like elevations values and stuff) reference any one of them.

[Anonymous]

Hi chrisplyer

Thank you for your response.  That seems to be very beneficial for this project, I didn't know a model could have multiple shared coordinates sets.  My only question is how would you handle generating the sheets assuming that not all the buildings would be their own construction package?

[chrisplyler]

1st, Model with an eye towards the logic of contracting the whole thing. Keep site development work in the site file. Including all the Civil type contacts that would be let out, such as dirtwork, utilities, etc. Model the plumbing that will be done by a plumber hired on a particular building within that building model...typically the division from building plumber to site utility contractor is at 5' outside the building envelope. Just an example of the type of thing to keep in mind.

2nd, all the Civil and Utility and Grading drawings sheets and stuff like that can come out of the site file. Each building file will have its own sheets / construction documents for that building...Architectural, Structural, Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, etc...on a per-building-file basis. Each building is its own project.

Now some trades will need a copy of the Civil set just for coordination purposes. It's easy enough to take a PDF of the civil stuff and a PDF of the building stuff and combine them into one set to send out in those cases.

[Anonymous]

I'm just not sure each building file will have its own sheets / construction documents for that building on a per-building-file basis.  We will probably want to group the buildings into CP packages as opposed to having a large amount of CP-packages = CP1 (Floorplans-Elevations-Details), CP2 (Floorplans-Elevations-Details) and so on.  With this many buildings we would end up in the teens somewhere and some of them might be small, all the guestroom types as different cp packages, housekeeping buildings, etc... 

[chrisplyler]

Sure...you can do it in whatever way seems most organized to you.

It might make sense to have a separate file for common sheets, such as note sheets, symbol sheets, specification sheets, standard detail sheets, or whatever that could be the same for every building, and only include them once when combining multiple buildings into one contract set, but have the easy ability to include them with any package of buildings.

Suppose you package buildings 1, 2, 3 and 4, and you also package buildings 5 through 12. You could combine the PDF output for each of the buildings in both packages and then add the common sheet set to each package also.

[Anonymous]

How would you go about referencing typical details, section, etc. in each model without duplicating every detail for each building model you have?

I have worked on campus type project in the past and have tried out a multitude of different modeling scenarios for these types of projects. 

The first is linking individual models into one master model and creating all the sheets required as well as detailing within the master model. The issue I ran into is having annotative work such as dimensions be deleted if something is removed from the "base" models. A way around that was to annotate in the base model and then link the view in the master. It was a huge pain working between "base" and "master" models as you had to duplicate each view in both models and continually reload as changes were made.

The second method was to model everything in one file. The biggest issue here was not being able to have multiple grids and levels with the same names. The only way around this that I could find was to place levels and grids into design options and overriding the views to display the design option that I needed.

Any ideas?

[ToanDN]

You can paste some Unicode character in Grid or Level names to make they to appear having the same number.

[chrisplyler]

1a. Referencing typical details in a separate file that is dedicated just to all the common stuff: Link the common-stuff file into each building file, and then follow the instruction here: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/EN... Or...

1b. You might want to establish a consistent Sheet numbering, such that the file of common stuff uses the right Sheet numbers and each of the building files has dummy sheets (that you never print) with dummy views on them that match that common file. It's a little extra time in each building file to set this up, but certainly a lot less than detailing them out completely every time. Then, when you combine a building set with the common-stuff set, all the references will LOOK right even though they aren't.

2.  Putting 120 buildings and site stuff all into one file is going to be a giant headache in my opinion.

[mmcintosh-ral]

Hi, 
I'm interested in looking at the link you posted, but am not getting it to work today. 

I did find this instruction, "Dummy Callouts for referencing sheets in linked files"-

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/getting-started/caas/screencast/Main/Details/2...

if you remember, was that what you were pointing to, or another article?

thanks in advance for any info

[chrisplyler]

Sorry, I don't remember.

[mmcintosh-ral]

thanks for getting back to me so quickly-

and thanks for your detailed posts on this and other threads- I've found them very helpful.

[mmarren]

understanding that Each building file will have its own sheets / construction documents for that building... how do you put together a single drawing list? how do you share details' sheets? - Ric