On Thursday night, our facility engineer showed me an as-built AutoCAD sketch for his toilet room renovation project in our Ohio manufacturing facility.

He asked if I could enhance the sketch with Revit for his Tuesday meeting with the contractor and facility engineers.

Starting Friday morning, it took 4 hours using Revit to create a fully coordinated construction doc set of

• floor plan,

• interior sections,

• interior elevations,

• reflected ceiling plan,

• plumbing fixture and washroom accessory schedules,

• 3D plan and 3D interior views.

AutoCAD Plan File Underlay

I linked his AutoCAD sketch of field measurements into the Revit file for tracing and as a reference for his ADA-toilet partition proposal.

Using the View Visibility (VV) settings, I set the Imported Category (Linked CAD file) to Half-Tone to make it less pronounced in the views.

Fully Coordinated Views & Document Set

Our interior designer provided a spreadsheet of components with their respective materials and model numbers for each room.

While she didn't specify the location of components; interior elevations and sections displayed product locations and heights for her review.

Using Bradley's pre-built Revit Family Library, the interior views and schedules immediately updated as the Revit components (lavatories, toilet partitions, accessories) were added to floor plans.

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Cost Estimating

We added a Revit COST parameter to another plumbing fixture\accessory schedule (not printed). We exported the schedules to a spreadsheet to assist with the contractor's quoting process.

Revit Room Objects accurately reported each room's square footage for the floor finish renovation of each room. Additional face-to-face dimensions were added to field verify clearances between existing walls.

Sections & Reflected Ceiling Plan

Cross sections were created to field-verify clearances between the ceiling and structure.

It took 2 minutes to create a 'blank", correctly oriented reflected ceiling-tile plan from facility engineer's photos. He wanted to enhance the discussion of ceiling fixture placement (lights, vents, diffuser) with the lighting and HVAC engineering contractors.

Printing & Export to AutoCAD

The project was printed to scale on C-size PDFs; that are easily viewed or printed. Revit annotations (hatch, text, dimensions) automatically re-size and updated as we "played with each view's scale" to fit them on C-Size title block.

This plant facility is still managed in AutoCAD. However, we can export the Revit views to AutoCAD for inclusion into the facility's existing AutoCAD master file.

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Revit delivered these bottom line results;

• design intention was very clear with accurate, coordinated plans, schedules, elevations, sections and 3D views.

• faster creation of documentation with pre-built Revit 3D/2D product models; that include 3D & orthographic viewing options.

• efficient, shorter long distance onsite contractor & facility engineer meeting,

• the contractor received accurate counts & square footage of product to be installed.

• improved construction communications (less travel) between Wisconsin and Ohio with unlimited 3D viewing.

• improved installation coordination with 3-dimensional documentation.

Like most projects, our facility engineer returned from his trip with red marks, notes and decisions; that needed to be applied to the Revit file.

However, in Revit -- changes made to plans, elevations, sections or schedules are IMMEDIATELY updated in all the other views. This is the native functionality of Revit; because all of the project views are contained in one project file.

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