Revit Templates
Working within an unrefined template in Revit can be exhausting. Instead of ‘crushing billable’ hours, you find yourself updating profile families, duplicating system families… It is almost like… BIM management!
If you have tried implementing BIM and found yourself asking someone: ‘Why is this taking so long?’, it is likely due to the fact that there is some upfront work that must be done and which you were not told about. Given that there are many BIM tools, developing a template with robust, pre-developed libraries for your quick use is key to consistency and efficiency. Also, as Revit is such a highly customizable solution, a template can be designed to connect more effectively with other software or tools and to eliminate opportunities for human error.
LIMINALSTAR specializes in analyzing a client’s specific need(s) and addressing the ‘low hanging fruit’ with a customized template. While more complex workflow challenges might require additional input or user interaction, a custom template with a purpose-driven project browser, established View Templates, and View Filters can make a substantial difference in your production and analysis processes.
Family Libraries and Warehouses
A good template will improve the appearance of your document sets and make navigating a project through its stages easier. However, content is a huge challenge when it comes to implementing BIM. Indeed, family creation and editing are specific BIM skillsets that few people take the time to gain. It is important to understand that learning the fundamentals of family creation makes using Revit a significantly smoother experience.
As an everyday BIM user, you inevitably need to create or modify families to suit your needs. LIMINALSTAR offers family library creation services to help augment your process and keep your overhead low for upfront investments. Having inexperienced staff take on this responsibility can lead to bad data circulating from one project to another. It is, therefore, wise to adopt content management practices and hire staff who can implement them!
Autodesk Construction Cloud integration
LIMINALSTAR offers training and support on integration of the Autodesk Construction Cloud for design and engineering firms looking to enhance their online collaboration processes. The evolution of BIM360 has brought much nuance and flexibility to this powerful tool, but a bit of training can go a long way in making the difference between months of trial and error or a smooth transition into cloud collaboration. Whether you’re working on small projects, or multi-model projects requiring several disciplines, the Autodesk Construction Cloud and it’s licenses are an excellent way to drive more value from your existing Autodesk licenses, and provide more flexibility for your users based on their specific daily tasks. For more information on how to implement an Autodesk BIM 360 or Autodesk BIM 360 Pro license into your workflow email us at [email protected]
Bluebeam Revu
Another application we’ve come to adopt and adore, and continue to adore more and more is Bluebeam Revu. Many organizations understand Bluebeam to be a powerful PDF driver that is reliable and easy to use from a multitude of application due to it’s integration with Microsoft Office, and other desktop publishing tools. When you peel back the first layer of the onion and come to understand how powerful this application is, you can see how easy it is to integrate it into your daily tasks. Many people are familiar with Adobe Acrobat, and after I show them Bluebeam, I get the same sort of reaction when I used to show hardcore AutoCAD users how quickly a set of drawings comes together in Revit. The other key point is it has slimmed down drafting features that can be used by project architects, reviewers and designers to help BIM authors along with developing a concise drawing set. From simple mark up tools and user profiles that can be saved and exported for future or standardized use, to the online collaboration tools of Studio Sessions, this product keeps giving you more, the more you use it. If you need to reorder a PDF quickly, or make tweaks to PDF like you might have in Acrobat, there are features in Bluebeam that will take care of these needs, but where I really came to love Bluebeam was for it’s simplistic approach to documentation and tracking changes. The overlay features let you monitor for missing information that can happen so easily in the BIM process. The status tracking of mark ups and mark up summaries are super powerful tools to keep production humming along productively and predictably. Although Bluebeam offers an in-depth onboarding program in Bluebeam University, which is available through your license, you may have nuance to your documentation process that you may want to review with us. If you’re already a Bluebeam user or have some licenses in your office, there’s a good chance we can help you get some more value out of them!
CTC Hive Integration & Library Management
If you are managing BIM infrastructure for multiple offices, or multiple disciplines, or perhaps you’re just one office and want a better handle or more flexibility on your Revit content, I strongly recommend you look into CTC Hive. Hive is our preferred library management tool, but we also love it for it’s analytical capabilities. When using HIVE across your team, each Revit user becomes a contributor of firmwide BIM data, and collects important data about your assets (BIMs) as well as your processes. This license is relatively inexpensive and can pay for itself on a single project. The content management capabilities for HIVE are immense in that it enables quick, accurate searching for family content within a vast cloud hosted library environment. Searching is easy due to the number of ways you can target what you are after, and then you can see what parameters are available and their different pre-defined values are their for the given types. Depending on what view style you choose, you can also get a pretty good preview of a family, a drafting view, or a predefined sheet. This CMS can even help you store View Templates and Schedules for quick copy and transfer to new or older projects. The analytics are also a huge benefit if you are a model reviewer, BIM or Model Manager, or simply like to keep an eye on the projects from a model health perspective. The easy to use dashboard helps you pinpoint common issues like too many warnings, unplaced rooms, locate duplicate instances, and an over-abundance of (sharp inhale)…in-place components. I love the fact that I can see when a model changes size dramatically, or when the number of groups jumps through the roof. These little things might seem like silly to the unitiated, but for those of us who have spent hours cleaning up models, having these tools shed light on where the issues lay, is miraculous to your productivity. We’ve become quite adept at using Hive to manage our libraries and provide easy access to end users who simply do not have the time to go searching and sifting through a massive library of half developed Revit families. If content is your concern, we can help you!