Revit Templates; New Users Beware

As an author of five Revit textbooks I receive many questions from instructors about issues students are having with Revit. One common issue relates to which Revit template a project is started from. I want to share a few tips related to Revit templates...

The first obstacle is the default template selected, when New Project is clicked, is the one that should NEVER be used! The main problem with this template is there are several phases created (see image below) which relate to construction sequencing and this is not how design firms use phases. Plus, to use this template would require a good working knowledge of how phases work--which is not usually the case with new users to Revit.

Phases in Construction-Default.rte

To highlight the challenge with phasing in the construction template, notice the phase setting for the Level 1 floor plan in the image below--it is set to Project Completion. With this setting everything created before this phase will appear in this view (except items set to be demolished).

Now here is were things get tricky... the image below shows the phase setting for the Level 1 ceiling plan. This has a phase setting of A10 - Substructure. So anything drawn in the Level 1 floor plan will not appear in this ceiling plan because all of those elements happen in the future. Revit can never show future stuff in a view.

One last issue with this template is it has a demo phase. Revit manages the demolition phase automatically, so there should never be a demolition phase as it creates several graphics related issues--in the current model AND in consultant models, such as MEP and Structural.

With demolition and MEP in mind, this is a good opportunity to plug my upcoming RTC Australia 2016 session this May on Remodels and Alternates in Revit MEP (DJS: this was last year - 2016). This will be a back-to-back two lab session! Most of the lab will be directly in Revit, but we will also send a little time in Revizto.

Ok, back to the topic at hand; the best way to deal with this issue is to remove this template from the list of options, here's how...

Selecting Options from the Application Menu (Big "R") opens this dialog:

Notice that templates can be added, deleted and re-positioned (the default list is not alphabetical to begin with). TIP: While we are here, notice the default location for user files (highlighted with yellow). This can be re-pathed away from the Documents folder to segregate Revit files.

There is a lot more to say about templates, including the fact that some firms - like mine - don't even use them at all, but I will save those for future posts.

Two related Autodesk University classes I did related to Revit templates:
Revit MEP Templates (with Plamen Hristov)
The Best Revit Template is Not a Template

Oringinal post from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/revit-templates-new-users-beware-daniel-stine