How to Update Linked Model
BIM Suite · ProjX Setup — Supplemental Lessons · 4m
This lesson teaches you how to effectively update a linked architectural model in Revit, ensuring your project remains current and organized. You will learn to overwrite existing models, maintain naming conventions, and manage links efficiently.
Specific skills covered include archiving old models, re-establishing links as central models for easier access, and preserving worksets during the update process. This approach promotes a consistent workflow for your team, reducing confusion and potential errors.
Transcript
In this video, I'm gonna show how to update a architectural Revit link. So I'm in my project x model. You can see my background, and I've just received an updated architectural background from the architect. Here it is. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy this projects, Revit links, and we've already got this one.
So just so you can see what I'm doing, this is the incoming one and this is the outgoing one. I want to overwrite this model with this model. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to copy the text there and then append old to this, going to move that to my archive folder, and I use replace, and I'm going to paste over that. So I'm going to rename the new model the same name that it had been before because I like to maintain that model naming convention. Then I simply come back to my MEP model and manage manage links, and here we go, projects arc.
It's got the correct safe path. I just hit reload, and you can see it's got this new little bit of wall here, which I just put in so that you can see that there's a change and we've successfully updated the model. So updating the link model can be as simple as that. That is the quick and dirty way of updating the model. Now I actually like to go a step further, I like to recreate the link model as a central model in that location in the links folder.
The reason I like to do that is because as it is, it's a central model that's been moved from the architect's office to our server and around to the links folder. I like my my architectural links models to be central models where they are at, so if anyone in my office needs to get into that model to check things out, they will do so in the same manner in which they access any other Revit model, they go to Revit, they go to open, they click on the model, they make sure create new local is checked and they go into it. When they're done, if they made any changes, they SQL Central, if they didn't make any changes, they don't. I want that consistent workflow for my people, so people don't get confused and so we don't corrupt models and so we don't have other confusions. It's a little bit more work, but that is the way I like to run my models.
So this is a take it or leave it sort of portion of it, but it is what I recommend. So first thing we're gonna do is we are going to get out of the MEP model because Revit won't let you be in an MEP model and the model that is linked into that model at the same time. I don't really know why, but it won't let you. So we're gonna close out of that. We're going to go to open Revit links.
I'm gonna single select this. So this is a central model, but it's been moved here, so we're going to select detach from central. Going to open it. We do want to definitely preserve the worksets because architects tend to use worksets as layers. So now we're in it, and, you know, you can see this little new bit here.
Just do file, save as project, select over that model, hit save. Now you do wanna replace the existing file, and you're done. You wanna close it because you never wanna be in a central model. So now if you or anyone else wants to get into this architectural model to check it out, the workflow is the same as it ever is for any model. It's familiar. No one has to understand how anything works. They just need to know how to open it rather than model safely, which is a standard way of checking creating local.