ProjX File Setup

Okay. In this video, I'm gonna show how to set up the projects models on your computers that you can get cracking. So in your downloads folder, you have the zip package for the project files. So go ahead and copy that, control c. And then if you're working on your local machine, you're just gonna need to find a local hard drive, maybe have a projects folder for it somewhere, and then let's create a new folder for this project.

So we're gonna I'm just gonna close one projects example for downloads. Obviously, you might just wanna name it projects. And then I'm going to have an incoming incoming. And then I'm and I'll go ahead and go into there and control v, that zip file in there. And then I'm going to create a Revit folder, and I'm gonna create a links folder.

K. So come to the incoming and extract here. Get those models. So this one that says modeled example, this model has already been modeled. So you can just go in there and check it out, look at it.

If you wanna poke around at a model that's already got production done in it, you can that's for you to open up. But this is the one that is already set up, but doesn't have any modeling done, doesn't have the families already dropped into it. And this is the one that you're gonna wanna set up for you to use for doing your projects project. So copy that, control c, come over to Revit, and I'm gonna drop it here. And I'm just gonna take this out.

And we set this up to be a full MEP model, not just a single discipline model just so you can see what's going on with the other disciplines because lots of folks are gonna be working in a multi discipline project environment. So that's why we keep that MEP in there. Okay. So I'm gonna move my links model in, my architecture model. So copy that, come over to Revit, links, and paste that model in there.

Okay. So now we're ready to go to Revit. So I'm gonna copy that path. I'm gonna say open and you just paste that in there and hit enter, and then I can single click that. Now what I just did, opening Revit and browsing to it, and I'm about to hit open here, that's the correct way of opening any Revit model. It is not correct. It is a bad idea. It is bad practice. It is risky to go double clicking on Revit models to open them. That's normal for every other kind of file out there.

Do not do that for Revit projects. Never double click on a model that's just on, you know, in Windows Explorer somewhere. Always open Revit projects from Revit. And there's a number of reasons for it. One of the main reasons is is that if you're wrong about your computer like, if I double clicked on this, my computer might try to open this with Revit twenty twenty five, which would upgrade the model, which would be bad. Okay. So here we are. Browse to this model and look down here. You'll see that under work sharing, detach from central, and create new local, these are both grayed out. That means that this is a standalone model.

It's not a central model, which is fine. You could just leave it like this if you wanted to, but I'm gonna show you how to create a central model so that it is closer to the environment you're likely to be in on real projects. So go ahead and open that. And also, by the way, if you wanted to be in a later version of Revit 2025, 2026, that's fine. Do exactly what we're doing except instead of opening with Revit 2023, open in Revit twenty twenty six.

Revit will upgrade the model during the step that we just did, and that's fine. And you can ignore this for now. We'll address that in just a second. But if you wanted to run this in 2026, say, just open Revit twenty twenty six, open the model, it'll upgrade it, and then when you save it, it'll save it as a 2026 model. Not a big deal. Okay. But here we are. We're in this model. And if you wanna leave it as a standalone model because you don't and you don't anticipate working in workshared models, that's fine. You can just keep going.

And when you wanna save, you just hit the save button up here. But it's more common that you'll be in a work shared model environment, and your BIM manager will set that up for you. But for this one, you're gonna do it yourself. So we're gonna go to the collaborate tab. Gonna go to click the collaborate button, and you wanna do it within your network, not in the cloud. Hit okay. K. So now we've we've just turned work sharing on. You can see this worksets down here. By the way, we don't use worksets, so we're just gonna ignore this.

But we're now in the central model and we don't actually wanna be in the central model. We need to save it. So do file, save as, project, have this selected. And just to verify yours for yourself, you can click options down here and it will it has make this a central model after save checked by default, which is what we want. So go ahead and click save.

Okay. So now it's a central model. It's saved, but we're in the central model and we don't wanna be in the central model. So before you do anything else, close the project just by closing that tab there. Go back to open, single click this project, and now you'll notice that you have options here, detach from central or create new local. Create new local is what you want, you wanna create a local copy, hit open. If you're doing this for the first time, you won't see this. But if it when you do see this, it's okay to hit overwrite existing copy. So ignore that. And so you can see that we're in a local copy because it has appended my username.

It'll append your username to the model file up here. And when you're ready to save, you don't click save, that will just save the local copy, it won't synchronize with the central. You wanna come to collaborate, sync with central, synchronize now, and also this button up here is the same thing as the synchronize now button. So you can just come up and click that. Okay.

But first we need to get our background linked in, so come over to manage links, select project ARC ARC 23, and click reload from. If you're in a later version of Revit, the button will be somewhere else, but it will still say reload from. So you just gotta go find it, then find that link model, single click click it, hit open, and hit okay. And then you can verify that there is the link model in. So this is now set up and you are ready to begin projects production.