I am trying to workout the best way to indicate to people using our company Revit templates that we have Dynamo definition that could help them on a particular task.
An example would be our setting-out plans, we have a definition for pushing coordinate information into a schedule. So somewhere on this sheet we could do with showing people that.
These would be getting updated rather a lot, so I was thinking if I could somehow use schedules outside of the sheet (see image). These would show the definition name and a brief description of how it could be used. We could potentially use Bumblebee to update this information as and when from a master excel file.
Has anyone come across this idea and potentially gone about it in a different way? Would be interested to hear your thoughts!
But… when I was at an Architecture firm, we used a DWG linked into the project template from our “R” (Resource) drive.
-take a breath-
This DWG just had text in it and was linked into the starting view only. It had no other elements and was just used for “BIM Broadcasts”. Stuff like updates, new content, training announcements, etc.
Why a DWG?
It was Revit version agnostic. We were able to maintain one file, and it worked across all supported Revit versions.
Previous to that, we used an RVT and had to have a version for each Revit version. Which was harder to maintain.
This also meant that updating an “announcement” was relatively simple. I only had to update one file, and every project that started with the template would be connected to that file.
This was nice because always running a Dynamo graph will never happen consistently at any scale (unfortunately).
*Note: I am not suggesting that this is the best way to do this, just thought I would share
I’ve also seen the full Revit “dashboard” route for this. The template starting page has schedules, legends, and other sets of helpful project data, but also includes annotation families with URL links to documentation. For example, your sheet list section could include one or more objects linking to your Dynamo documentation for sheet setup, auto-numbering, or any other number of sheet related automations you have. Only the documentation (and respective DYNs) change while the link locations stay the same so the annotation families rarely have to be updated and are always pointing to the correct information.
It can be a lot of work since everything is handled individually but also give you the freedom to manage tasks one at a time.
I’ve seen homepage hyperlinks, and even pop-up web-pages integrated into the start-up of Revit… DWG actually seems a good use here as it’d be easier to produce and maintain, can stick with the file when off the network (while intranet pages just open as a 404) and allows expand ability too.
Our company has edited the starting view in our template to list all project specific information, including Dynamo scripts and PDF file names, revit server or not etc.
