Revit LT 2018 Multiple Houses (Single Development)

[Nis]

Good morning all!

I've been an Autocad user for a few years and about a month ago started to use Revit LT.

We are about to start a development of 30-40 houses (8-9 different types) and would like to show the client what the whole street(s) would look like in 3D. Is this possible in Revit LT? If so what would be the best way to go about it? Or is it best to model each individual house in Revit LT and then export to something like Sketchup?

Thanks for your help,

Nis.

[willsud]

Welcome to the forum Nis,

I am sure you will receive more informed replies but when I do houses on sites I create a toposurface from the digital survey then create the houses in a separate Revit project.

Then I Link the house project files into the site project which allows you to move the house model around and up and down so that you can see how it fits against any slopes etc.

Although Revit will not allow you to directly edit the Linked house project file while Linked into the site project file, a trick is to open another instance of the Revit programme where you can edit the individual house files, then in the site project file you can Reload the linked file which will update any changes.

Hope that makes sense

[Nis]

Thank you for the prompt reply. It certainly does make sense!

I have a topo which I intend to create the site from but I didn't know you could link models into other files. All I have to find out now is whether Revit LT covers items such as roads and paths etc.

Nis.

[Robin Deurloo]

No need to export anything to Sketchup. While there is no rendering in LT (you can in the cloud) the realistic view is pretty good and at least as good as what you get in Sketchup.

How to model the project is dependent on a few things I'd say. Are you sure about the location of all the houses already or will they be moving around on the site and even worse rotate? If things will still be moving around do what William said and make a file with the site and one with the houses. If the houses will still be moved relative to each other then I would make 1 file for each type so you can still move and rotate them around in your site file. The problem with this approach is keeping stuff the same over the different sub projects, say you have a window that is the same over multiple projects, you need to keep that in mind and keep track of it.

You can make sheets and details in the overall project, but keep in mind that things will get weird there if you move around the separate houses, so again something to keep in mind.

Best way it to model everything in one file of course, but some families are not very happy when you try to move or rotate them (face based stuff for example) so there are some things to consider.

With regular Revit you can bind the links in the end when you know things are in their right place, not sure you can do that with LT as well.

[terriBIMita]

Bear in mind that Revit LT doesn't support the worksets, but I think you already knew.
However, I use the same process. One file for each "Building", one file for "Topography" and one file for the sheets.

Bear in mind that

[misobim]

It's always good to clarify details like this (what's not supported in Revit LT, in this instance). Thanks for sharing - it'll help others in the future with a similar question.