ProjX: Project Browser Tour

In this video, I'm gonna give you a tour of the project browser, which is essentially how to navigate the model, how to get around to different views and perspectives and sheets and everything else that's built into the model. So the first thing I wanna explain actually is that if you've just opened up Revit out of the box, probably your properties and project browser windows are stacked on top of each other like this on the left. I actually recommend that you change that because once you start drilling into these things, you just have to do a lot of scrolling, you can't see very much. So I recommend that you move properties over to the right. If you have multiple monitors, maybe you wanna move it onto another monitor, but I'm just gonna show you what I recommend for a single monitor.

So just left click and drag the properties over, get it over to the right until you see this blue box. Sometimes it's not totally obvious and it can be a little finicky, but you let go of it and it's docked over here on the right. So this gives you just more visual space to see your project browser and also your properties. Okay. So the project browser is split up between views, legends which are essentially just text boxes, schedules, sheets, families, groups, and Revit links.

You will spend most of your time in views followed by sheets. So let's open up views and see what's in here. So we've got our view set up organized by project setup, coordination, and then the disciplines. So project setup is really only used for setting up the project initially, and then if you need to make some adjustments to background settings, you might use some views in here as well. But if you're doing production, if the model has already been set up for you, there's really no reason for you to go into project setup.

When this says start here, this refers to start here to set up the project when you're very first initially setting up the project. Okay. So coordination, there's a variety of views in here that you can use for different specialty things, clash detection, just looking at the architecture, MEP coordination, we've got some structure as red floor plans and some other things. Can check this out in your time to explore it, but again, we don't spend much of our time in coordination when we're doing production. Now the rest of the time that you will spend in it, since this is mechanical series, is you'll spend most of your time in mechanical.

And we've got mechanical split up between sheet views and working views. Now you notice there's sheets here, so what's the difference between sheet views and sheets? Well, we drill down here and we're just going to open up m one zero one, so this is a sheet. So if I open this up, and so if I expand the sheet even further, I can see that there's a floor plan and there's an reflected ceiling plan view on it. So I'm gonna look for this floor plan mechanical floor plan o one.

So sheet views mechanical floor plans o one. This is the view that's on the sheet. So really all this is is these are all views up here. These are sheets and views go on sheets. So I'm gonna collapse sheets again and close that.

So all these all these sheet views, somewhat obviously the sheet views since they belong on sheets, they are set up to look good on sheets. They are designed to be presentation quality, that's where your annotations go, all that sort of thing. Whereas working views are intended for pure production working. The views the view settings are set up to be good for seeing what you're doing, but also moving fast. We might have other trades turned on.

And also in a working view since it's not gonna wind up on our sheet, you could add anything you want to it. You could type notes to yourself, you could add in PDFs and images and things like that to reference as you're working. You can change the view range, you can really do whatever you want because it's your space to do production and it won't affect what shows up on the sheets in terms of the visibility settings. Now of course, if you start deleting ducts and things, it's gonna, you know, get deleted. So that is the basic difference and organization of the views.

Project setup, it's really just for the model setup, you don't need to spend much time in there. Coordination also, you know, we'll address it later, but you're not gonna spend much time in there, then just go to your discipline. And if you need to annotate things and get the presentation set, go to the sheet views. And if you're just doing pure production, you can spend your time in in the working views. And this project is all new work.

If it were phased if this were phased project with existing and demo, there would be categories for existing and demo. But we'll get into that when we have videos on doing phased work. Okay. So that's Fuse. One other thing I should say about this is that this project browser is organized based on these parameters over here in the properties.

So you can see that this view that I have selected, and I'll just go ahead and open it, these parameters view sort one, two, and three, you can say this set to mechanical working new work. That's mechanical working new work. So this project browser organization scheme is reading these three parameters, and they're grayed out because they're set by the view template. Now I could change this, I'm gonna right click it and say browser organization. See I have a few options.

I could even create a new schema. So let's say if I set it to two tier view sort, it's taken that last it's disregarding view sort three. It's just sorting it between the first two. So you can see sheet views. That's all my sheet views. So two tier view sort might be nice on smaller projects. You don't have that many views, you don't wanna drill down. That would be perfectly fine. One tier view sort is getting less useful, but, you know, teach your own if you prefer this, that's also fine. If you go in a browser or there's other there's other browser organization schemas that you could do, like all the views associated with different levels.

So that's a quick tour of the view of the views of the project browser. Briefly, legends. Legends are essentially they're they're purely they are purely two d spaces. They they are not referenced to the three d model at all. They don't live in three d space and they are generally useful for going on sheets. So I believe this mechanical general notes is on my m zero zero one sheet. Yes. Mechanical general notes. So those are legends, and they can also be, you know, you can have these sorts of things. So those are legends.

There's more to learn about that, but we'll save that for a different different video. And then schedules are where things like equipment schedules live, analysis schedules, different things you can do. We get into this a bit later. The schedules, you just click and drag and you can place them on sheets as well. Schedules are a whole thing.

Now here we are in sheets and there it's literally just a title block. You could actually not have a title block, but it's generally where you put your title block and then you drag views, legends, or schedules onto it to populate your sheets with the views and other assets you wanna see on that sheet. And this is also organized. We have this setup organized based on the view sort parameters. So sheets are also have these these parameters, view sort one and two.

We only have two for the sheets because we just don't think we need three for that. And similarly, you can change this to view sort one if you just wanted it to be a bit simpler. Okay. So then families, this is an ordered list of where all the families live. There's a lot in here.

There are other ways to get families on, so like you don't need to go to ducks to to model ducks for example, you just hit the duct modeling tool. We'll get into that later. But I do like for example, they're not in here at the moment because haven't pulled any yet, but we haven't pulled them in yet. But once you pull in mechanical equipment, there's a category for mechanical equipment, you can find it pretty easily and you can just drag and drop into a view to place mechanical equipment. So I I I spend a fair amount of time in here, some people don't.

It's kind of preference as to how you like to to add things, but that is this is, you know, a tree containing all of the different family types including annotation symbols. So tags are in here, you know, pipe tags, mechanical equipment tags, symbols, all sorts of stuff. Every everything that's a family exists under this tree. It's you can discover it in in here. Title blocks, for example, they're gonna be in here somewhere. Okay. Families. Groups, mechanically, I rarely use groups. You can have detail groups and model groups. They are what they sound like.

You select multiple elements and you can group them together using the keyboard shortcut GP, and the group definitions will come here. So you could drag and drop these into a view and it would place them. Revit links, this just is another place to look at the Revit links. I I generally don't look in here at all. There's other ways to access the links which is in the the project setup workflow video, so you don't have to worry about that.

Generally, for production, you're gonna spend time in sheets and views, sometimes legends, more schedules if you're doing Revit schedules, you'll spend time in there. And for mechanical, you'll spend most of your time in mechanical sheet views and working views. Alright. That's a pretty quick tour. Let's get to it.