New Job - Question about coordination with consultants

[antheajane]

Hello everyone. I have posted on here before.
I was in Revit for 7.5 years before transitioning to a much smaller firm (100 people to 6 people).
I am the only person in the office on Revit. We are hiring a 3rd party Revit consultant to help us with template and library implementation (trying to convince my new boss to hire Parallax).

I will be overseeing our first project. I am very comfortable with almost every aspect of Revit, however, I have not managed a model before. What is the workflow for working with consultants? We do not have BIM360 or a server yet. Is it as rudimentary as emailing a version of my Revit model to them to work in? Would they then link my base model into their Revit model and start working and then email it back to me weekly or bi-weekly?

Appreciate any feedback/ words of wisdom.

[GMcDowellJr]

Treat it just like you would AutoCAD and Xrefs -- share files and link. How you share, how often you share, what stays in which file, etc. are also the same (near enough) as when you were in AutoCAD.

[CADiva]

Treat it just like you would AutoCAD and Xrefs -- share files and link. How you share, how often you share, what stays in which file, etc. are also the same (near enough) as when you were in AutoCAD.

This is nice in concept ... except most ACAD DWGs are small enough to email ... very few Revit models are within email file size limits.

So ... some method of uploading to a cloud server, then sending a link they can download from. Some even have upload capabilities. If your company has Microsoft 365 licenses, then Sharepoint is an option. I think Autodesk Docs might be too if you have Autodesk Collection subscriptions. We use a 3rd party company called Egnyte, but I've also used Dropbox. None of these are for working files, but merely for file transfer to (& from) consultants.

[antheajane]

Thanks. I think my workflow will involve saving out a copy once a week, stripping it of seals etc, deleting elevations sections etc and then purging a few times before transferring file.

It might just be that simple. New job nerves!

[Twiceroadsfool]

Save yourself the time and energy. Just upload it once a week. No real value in the time investment of that save-as, stripping, and deleting.

[Robin Deurloo]

Yep keep everything in there, takes a lot of time stripping out stuff EVERY week.

For sending large files I use wetransfer.com, it can send files up to 2Gb and they stay on their server for a week for people to download.

[Marcel Jansen]

I would suggest using a CDE for the project where all member can upload their files every week.
And i am also with the guys above, don't strip your files before sending, with some exceptions.

Sometimes you strip files when you don't want to give all the information to other teams. I have done project where we delete all details and other projects where we delete all rebar.

[snuffy]

a bit of a contrary opinion, but we found that having a huge project uploaded to a cde, even with a good network, it would be very heavy working, and slow loading. Using PyRevit addon, stripping a project of every plan, view, unused family takes a total of max 5 min for a close to 500mb project. I think investing 5 min extra on a friday just to strip everything is acceptable if you want to have a slightly better performance in your cde.
Of course, the downisde of this is that if it is only you doing this, then those 5 minutes are useles. All project planners need to do it: MEP, ARC, Structural, Civil, etc.

[Twiceroadsfool]

Simply put: You are wrong, that its only five minutes. Your "5 minutes" only accounts for actually running the command. But if you are working live in a location like BIM360 anyway, now what you are talking about is:

1. Detach/Make-different model, SO you can strip it (where are you saving it for this action? That's both time AND storage now).
2. Run the stripping utility (whether its pyRevit, eTransmit, whatever)
3. Save it again
4. Re-upload it to BIM360
5. Have to distribute links to that particular version (because its not the live model)
6. Have to re-enter the main model (with views/sheets/families) to go back to "normal work."
7. Dealing with fallout of consultants not being able to reference any live views from your project, because they were stripped out (no tags, etc)

Even if it only takes 15 minutes to do all of that, its also a process that means we are trading models less often, because its a process. I prefer to tell my consultants "hit reload, changes are there" and everyone just keeps ripping through the project.

[Karalon10]

Agree with everything Twice has said above

- If this is done on BIM360 and the upload of the "stripped" model is made to the same place each time, you only need to establish the link to your model once. Then it just updates each time with the latest version.

But stripping the models down is a giant PITA, in our case for a particular project we are asked to detach the model from central, strip out ALL links (CAD and RVT - and any other link type) also strip out all sheets and just leave geometry. When this is on a fortnightly publish schedule it does take quite a bit of time out of the modelers day once a week to deal with cleaning, purging, and publishing the detached version.

Storage is not really an issue because its going up on the cloud on BIM360 and that system works well for archives and other publication features - I guess even slightly better in some aspects now with ACC and the naming convention controls.