Improve copy/monitor workflows

[dan.stine]

The Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) BIM Standards committee recently created a list of Autodesk Revit enhancement and feature requests based on a membership survey. We have shared a prioritized list with Autodesk and are posting them here, on Revit Ideas, to build community support to benefit the lighting design industry.

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Description:

It is very tedious and time consuming to work with and manage copy-monitored elements currently. In reality, coordination is an ongoing process. Enhancements to copy-monitor around phasing would also be very helpful, especially when automating copy-monitor, as existing elements sometimes do not need to be modified, and therefore do not need to be copy-monitored.

[twilkins20]

It seems like the Copy/Monitor workflow recommended by Autodesk is an unrealistic workaround to the needed workflow an Architect would use.  It looks as though this function was designed by and for an engineer and is not functional for the architectural designer.  

First off, here is the recommendation from Autodesk:

To Resolve this issue, 

1. Tab select in the link to copy of the element (such as air terminal) from the link (just a copy, not a monitored copy).
2. Move it to a different location, save the model.
3. In the Mechanical model, reload the Architecture link.
4. Copy\monitor the new element family instance added in step #2
5. Back in the Architecture model, move this new air terminal family to a different location. Save.
6. In the Mechanical model, reload the Architecture link again. You should see the coordination review mini-warning this time, and Move Instance... will be an option for this fixture.

Copy\Monitor should work most reliably in the standard workflow where the fixture(s) exists in a model (and does not have a copy monitor association to another link) and that model is linked in and the fixtures are copy\monitored.

And here is the response from a standard architectural designer:

I had a chance to test this workflow, although it works, it is definitely a different workflow than the normal copy/monitor process an architect would follow. It works, but not in a way that would be useable to coordinate efficiently.

I would need to copy in all of the mech fixtures into our model. Then mechanical would need to copy monitor the items I copied into my model and create the monitor link from their side. This is a lot of extra work in the regular documentation workflow and wouldn’t be practical to use. Mechanical would need to understand every fixture that I copied in from their model. And if we’re talking hundreds of diffusers, hundreds of lights, hundreds of sprinkler heads etc., there’s just no way that they would be able to constantly identify what we needed moved. Autodesk dropped the ball here in understanding the architectural workflow on how the design process happens in real life. Its frustrating because walls, grids, and columns work in the desired workflow, but the items that truly matter are omitted from that array of elements. Hopefully Autodesk can have this addressed in a later update. But I think for now, this won’t work for what we need it to do.

Disappointing and it would create a major slowdown that makes it unusable.