Refining Revit Standards: How Real Firms Put Model Properties to Work

Chris Shafer

As I mentioned earlier, this session is session three of a three-part series on Guardian's model properties. So, session one was focused on sort of those high-level capabilities and the overall purpose of model properties within Guardian.

Session 2 was really a deep dive into cleaning your models, transfer project standards, and cleaning your families. I would recommend if you weren't able to catch those before, going back to our website or our YouTube channel to check them out.

So today, we're going to be focusing on how actual firms, in this case, ODE Consultants and HED, uses model properties within their firms.

So with that being said, we're going to start with some introductions here. So I'm Chris Shafer. I'm the Director of Communications and Partnerships here at Guardian. We also have Gauri Pandey, who is the BIM lead at ODE Consultants, and Tom Whitehead, who is a practice technology systems leader at HED. So I'd like to welcome both Guari and Tom to today's webinar. Thanks guys for coming and joining us.

All right, let's get into today's agenda. First, we're going to be starting off with these definitions of throughout model properties. There's different terms that we use, so we just want to make sure we level set those terms. The next, we're going to get into some of the more common model properties uses.

Today, Tom and Gauri will be demonstrating very specific use cases within their firms, but firms use a lot of different capabilities to clean their content and align their standards. So we're going to be getting into some of those more common uses. And then we'll get into how HED uses model properties. And with Tom, we'll be starting off with a little Q&A about HED's content strategy and how model properties plays a role into that strategy. And then Tom will be demonstrating how he uses model properties to analyze and clean manufacturers' content.

And then we're going to switch over to ODE with Gauri, who will be demonstrating how a simple concrete material has an important role in how ODE delivers their projects. So with that being said, we're going to go ahead and lastly, we're going to be following up with our Q&A.

So those who may have not been partake in the previous sessions, what is model property? So model properties is really a tool that automatically aligns your standards. So it converts both your graphical and Revit standards

to that of your project or your firm's standards. Now, what makes Guardian really unique in this case is those conversions, which we call mappings, are stored in what's called a mapping configuration file. So when you make a mapping, you're teaching Guardian for all future properties to make those mappings automatically. So the more you use Guardian, the more intelligent it gets, and the cleaner your projects and just your Revit infrastructure gets over time.

So let's get into some of those definitions. So we're going to be talking a lot about model properties. I've mentioned it a lot already. So it is fundamentally is the engine for cleaning and aligning standards. And this is the term that we use kind of throughout Guardian and all the various capabilities that model properties has.

But how you interact with model properties within Guardian, it is the dialog and process for cleaning the active model and families.

So another important term here is incoming properties. So this is a dialog for processing and cleaning incoming content. So it's still utilizing that model properties engine, but it has a unique sort of role as identifying content as it comes into

your models. As I mentioned before, mapping configurations, this is the database of mapping rules. And as Jake highlighted last week is, it is also the key to the engine. So without having a mapping configuration assigned to your project, a lot of these functionalities won't be activated. So it's always important to have that mapping configuration assigned to your projects to get all those features.

And lastly, as we mentioned before, mappings are the conversion of 1 standard or property to another that are stored within your mapping configurations.

So let's get into some common uses here of model properties. So very basically, purge unused. So when content is loaded into your project, just take a simple family, there is a lot of properties, a lot of Revit properties, a lot of graphical properties that just not used. So Guardian will automatically purge out everything of those families or basically any content that's coming into your project that is not being used. Over the years using Guardian, I've always been surprised how much, would you say, sludge that is in your families and how that sludge just adds up into your models and really starts impacting not only the performance but also the quality of your documentation, those unused properties just dilute your actual standards. So it makes it harder for everyone to understand what your standards are and to apply them correctly.

Right, merge duplicate families. So we've all seen this before. This looks what appears to be exactly the same family that you're importing from, say, another project. And Revit says, oh, you know, there's something slightly different. It might be the value that's assigned to an instance value or something else in which Revit says, well, I don't want to make the assumption this is the same family, so I'm just going to put the ones and twos and threes. Guardian makes the assumption that the project you're working in is the source of truth, so any incoming content wants to be updated and mapped to that.

So Guardian will, with Guardian's model properties, Guardian will go ahead and merge those duplicate families.

Then taking up the next level here is project model cleanup. So this is where firms will clean and align their graphical Revit standards for their individual project models. And then sort of the big thing that a lot of firms will use model properties for is for perfecting their templates and their content. So in past webinars, we talked about the content car wash. And so this is really what we're talking about here is going through that process and making sure every nook and cranny of your templates, your content are in perfect alignment with your standards.

So...

What I'd like to do here is kind of get into a little bit more specific use cases for model properties that we've seen throughout the years. So we talked about cleaning individual models, but one step above that is aligning standards from Guardian sync properties. In previous webinars, we talked about how you can host

your baseline standards in the Guardian Cloud, which we call Guardian syncs properties. And Guardian will identify and if set accordingly, automatically update your models' properties to that in the cloud, ensuring perfect alignment across your projects. Also going through and cleaning your Revit templates and starter projects, as we mentioned before.

Cleaning your content containers, and cleaning, even cleaning your Revit family templates. We have firms who will make sure that everything that's provided from a Revit content perspective is in perfection with your standards.

And then incoming properties. So as we mentioned before, purge unused.

Very simple way of utilizing Guardian. Then, as Jake demonstrated last week, transfer single, where we've seen too many times where you need to bring over, say, one single wall type or a single text type or something like that. But Revit only allows you to bring everything across. Guardian will allow you to do that.

transfer single. And then transfer project standards as a whole, where you may, you know, you may want all those wall styles, but you don't want all the properties that come with it. So Guardian acts as sort of that firewall. As we mentioned before, merge duplicate families, but then really getting into cleaning those incoming families, those details, views, and exploding CAD files even. So Guardian will launch if you don't have a proactive protection on exploding CAD, Guardian will launch to clean that CAD content and convert it to Revit properties.

And lastly, the content car wash. I would say that is, as we discussed in previous webinars, this is really the, I would say, the pinnacle of the use of model properties.

So with that being said, I'd like to switch gears here and hand it over to Tom, where he will kind of get into a brief description of HED. So take it away, Tom.

Tom Whitehead  

Sorry, I was muted for a second. Thanks, I must have hit it twice. We're about 450 professionals, multi-discipline. We have architecture, engineering, disciplines, both mechanical, electrical, plumbing, low voltage,.

We have landscape in-house. And we work in a number of different sectors. And as you can see, we're kind of scattered all over. I am one of the, not the furthest flung remote worker, but one of them. There's no office within a few 1000 miles of me. Marlon, out in Japan as our furthest dispatch.

And I've been doing this job for nearly, well, going on eight years. And, you know, started out in structural and in architecture, multi-discipline.

And here I am, yeah, and I handle all of the content, all of the systems, the underpinning systems, and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go, like what that means, so...

Chris Shafer

Yeah, so it sounds like sounds like you really handle the underlining sort of structure from, or we should say, your Revit structure within HED. So why don't you give us a sort of a 30,000 foot perspective on HED's Revit content strategy.

Tom Whitehead  

We do a bunch of different things. So for our bigger, more common objects, so things like doors, windows, casework, mechanical equipment, electrical equipment, plumbing, lighting, stuff that is fairly straight, well, I wouldn't say straightforward, but common. We either buy directly or customize stuff that we've bought to have it integrated into our systems. In some cases, that's renaming and re...

reworking some of the content. Some of it we are building completely from scratch, especially when users ask us for a collection for, say, healthcare. They need, you know, x-ray machines, but they want them to be fairly generic or, you know, office outfitting bits and pieces that are fairly generic before they get to specifics, those kind of things.

In some cases, we do crowdsource it in the respective people send us something that they need to use or need to be used regularly, and we will, I will go through and clean and make them happy, for lack of a better term. And so yeah, we utilize Guardian for those kind of things. And as we see it, we set up some processing rules so that we don't continue to fight the same fight over and over again.

Chris Shafer

Nice. I like how you phrased that, just not fighting the same fight over and over again. I want to say that's really sort of the heart of Guardian and the problem that we're trying to solve, right? Just solve the problem once and then let's move on. So you've talked about some of the Revit families that you...

you utilize whether it's internally building them internally or crowdsourcing or even purchasing them. So how do you, what type of content do you provide sort of from a Revit templates perspective, different disciplines, typologies, and even like standardized details?

Tom Whitehead  

With details, we have a whole documented workflow for each of the disciplines and market sectors that we expect them to follow where they do the collection and verification of technical details in the respective, does it have the right information?

Is it very project specific or has it been, you know, somewhat sanitized to be more generic? And then we have a set of guidelines for the users to go through and clean up those objects. You know, these are the text styles, these are the dimensions, these are the...

hatch patterns, fill patterns, line weights, all of that good stuff that you should be using. And I mean, we already have Guardian doing some of that as it comes in, but invariably, they're either going to start with a file that's not registered or, you know, something gets passed. Once the, once they.

Chris Shafer  

Right.

Tom Whitehead  

got that collection done, I go through and deal with Guardian and some other tools to clean up the final, you know, bits and pieces, making sure that all of it, and you know, a lot of times there's CAD stuff that's left behind, there's, you know, all kinds of stuff left behind. So that's what we handle. Then once it's cleaned and sanitized for protection, we publish it to Avail in the various forms that it might need. We have a standardized naming convention, a tagging convention, and then, you know, different channels inside of Avail for market sectors or discipline-specific information and they can consume it there.

We also have systems in place. We don't really use a Revit file project template like most folks do. We have a system that builds the file per requirements. Basically, the user tells us, these are the disciplines involved. This is the number of levels up. This is numbers levels down. This is the market sector. And we have a robot that goes out and does and builds all of that stuff out. And as it builds each discipline file, it weeds out the bits and pieces that are not needed for said discipline. So architecture doesn't get mechanical stuff and vice versa, right?

And then all the user has to do is adjust levels, make some tweaks, and they can get started designing as opposed to, you know, creating a bunch of views, creating a bunch of sheets, trying to figure out organization. All of that is standardized. As far as family templates, we don't really utilize those, only because...

There is so much.

We either go by what we've already built, you know, to align, especially with mechanical for their scheduling needs. We, I tend to just go, okay, well, I have an RTU, I need a different RTU. I'm going to start with this baseline, throw away all of the geometry and you know start building from that. So that's the way we work it.

Chris Shafer  

Right, right, nice.

Nice. So I really like the idea of the process you have in place where you're kind of putting the responsibility on on the teams to kind of clean their content before they hand it over to you. And then you'll use Guardians model properties to kind of do that final pass to make sure it's perfect alignment before kind of pushing it out into the HED environment or in Avail. So out of curiosity,

You know, really getting into the weeds of model properties, how would you prioritize individual types of model properties? For example, like line patterns and line styles versus subcategories versus shared parameters and whatnot. And for everyone who's watching.

Here's the model properties dialog that shows all the different property types. So out of curiosity, Tom, which ones do you prioritize over others? Or do you?

Tom Whitehead  

Well, I mean, you made a good point as we started out the meeting of, you know, somebody asking about how many, what's the largest number of materials that you might have seen in a project. And they're a little bit insidious when you get down to it, because with a material definition,

It's not just the baseline material, it can also be all of the ancillary appearance data that can be problematic in times. You know, if somebody gets very ambitious with how it's going to render and, you know, do they just load the biggest file that they could possibly find into that definition?

That becomes very problematic later on and starts slowing you down. We do have a standard for naming our materials, and with a lot of coordination efforts, those materials become important down the road in say, Revisto or Procore or something else, where you want to see things in a particular way, you know, clearances, for example. So that's, I mean, materials are an important one. And yes, in some cases, they're important to keep. You have to make that judgment call. But those are one of those things that are kind of insidious.

From a standardized system, you know, all of the stuff for line patterns and object styles become important. And those become important because, you know, people get confused about what they want to use and what should be used. When you have, like in this example, 7 variations of ultra heavy. Some of those are dashed, right? But really, you know, if we go back to what many consider, you know, beautiful design work and drafting from the, you know, hand line drawn stuff, they didn't have obteen different variations of dashes and different line weights. It was very simple. And to communicate what we need, 9 times out of 10, I would say 99 out of 100. We don't need all of those. So we want to limit that. And this seems to help with people making decisions. You know, it's decision overload, and you're trying to...

whittle that down. For object styles, the problem is, you know, not only do they show up and it's another thing that you have to tweak, but if you're using view templates extensively, it means more hunting for what to use to turn off the thing, right? And we tend to try to be very specific when we add a subcategory.

into an object, a different category, because we want to make sure that it's very clear what it's used for and that there is a real need for it. So we want to either transition or thwart those extra ones coming in. And there's some egregious examples that we will see in a minute, right?

Chris Shafer  

Yeah. A good example, a good example that of one that I always come back to as subcategories is clearances for, doesn't matter whether it's doors or mechanical equipment, it seems like every manufacturer, every firm has a different term of how they're describing clearances.

And your your view templates just become overwhelmed with the variations and half your red lines are just turn off this clearance, turn off that clearance. So like, well, there should be a simple button. I turn off 1 clearance in my view template and they're all off, right? So.

Tom Whitehead  

Yeah, exactly.

Chris Shafer  

So, why don't we why don't we shift gears here and get into how how you have established a process for for addressing manufacturers' content within HED? So, before we get into you providing the live the live demonstration,

So what are your thoughts on manufacturers' Revit families? You know, what's good about them? What's bad? What risk do they introduce?

Tom Whitehead  

It's such a...

We, you know, you and I talked about this recently, and I mean, it is a mixed bag. It is an absolute mixed bag. I mean, I, you know, when I first started working at HED, my exposure to stuff mostly was either architecture or, you know...

some random equipment, nothing, you know, too broad, really. From a multiple-discipline perspective, it becomes much crazier after you get into mechanical and electrical and plumbing stuff, especially mechanical. Mechanical has a

wide range of different devices and different manufacturers that want you to use their stuff. Green Heck is a perfect example that seems to be doing a great job of producing consistent and fairly solid stuff. And I haven't looked at it in a couple of years, but what I've seen is it's very consistent. It does its job. It has the information. But even in those best examples, the problem is it works really, really well as long as you use Green Heck. Once you go in and decide to use a different manufacturer, your schedules are going to fail miserably in a bad way.

The reason being is nobody uses the same set of shared parameters. I mean, it's kind of the Wild West when it comes to that stuff. And for us, what we had to do, and then part of the reason we purchased a package of, you know, default mechanical equipment, was to have a consistent set of parameters that were interconnected that could be, you know, we could set up a schedule and it would just work and it would consistently work as people placed stuff. So even in the good, in the best examples, you run into those kind of problems where the parameters don't line up if you're using a schedule, a real schedule, right? And then on the worst of the worst, you, I hesitate to, you could also, you could say mechanical equipment. Recently ran across a particular piece of equipment for a mission critical, a data center where effectively they had just embedded the output from, say, SolidWorks into Revit, into a Revit family, sent it along, the file, the family itself was something like 45 megs, just the family by itself.

Every bolt, every nut, every thread, every logo, every wire, every coil, the tube in the coil, the fins in the coil was modeled. And the users were complaining about...

slowness. And well, obviously, yeah, absolutely, it's going to be slow. And then you've got furniture families from some of the biggest names in the market will embed their own tag inside the family. And then you spend hours trying to figure out why you can't get rid of this tag that's nested inside the family.

And you can't get rid of, and those, you know, so that's the bad.

Chris Shafer  

So...

What?

How do you help your teams deal with the use of manufacturers content? What guidance do you provide them so they can help and not just kind of put all this on your shoulders?

Tom Whitehead  

Well, I mean, yeah, we set up a bunch of mappings. That's one thing, but we also have a guide that I've written and it goes through and goes, okay, well, what are, we can't expect a user to go through everything that we know. I mean, there's as many people on this call, you are a specialist and know much more than the average bear, right? And as such, you can't distill all that knowledge and have them understand it. So you try to hit the high points. And so that's what we do. We have a guideline for like, hey, I want to use this particular piece of furniture from random download from wherever.

How do I evaluate it? Well, first of all, don't go to Revit City. Second, this is the things you look for that are triggers or things that you should be aware of. And the CAD import and the visibility kind of, you know, like, let's try to fix that. And then as far as the, we...

We try to tell them if you're downloading mechanical or manufacturer content, unless it's just the model number or the tag, the Mark tag, it's not going to show up in a schedule. So be aware and don't expect that. And then you know how to clean them up and make them a little more lightweight.

simply. And then beyond that, if it's something that we're going to use, and we put it on them to solve, it's not something that we expect our PT folks to solve for them. I mean, sometimes we get involved anyway, but I mean that it, you know, we try to put it on them to be responsible for their own models, so...

Chris Shafer  

So when we, if you wouldn't mind just sharing your screen and provide a live demonstration of how you approach cleaning a Revit family.

Tom Whitehead  

All right, I'm going to share my whole window here because I don't trust that the dialogs will come up as expected.

Chris Shafer  

Yeah, and and so if you wouldn't mind just just quickly showing us how you go about that. What are the things that you prioritize and the things that you focus on?

Tom Whitehead  

Okay, so I've got a collection here. Everything, Chris, let me know that you can see what I'm showing here. Okay, so as you can tell, some of this is, you know, important. You know, you've probably seen some of these things before, you know, Noel, Hayworth, this is all furniture families.

Chris Shafer  

I can see, yeah, yeah.

Tom Whitehead  

This is actual stuff that was given to me by our workplace market sector and said, hey, these are our common things. Please, you know, make them.

you know, make up, sanitize them for our protection. There's a couple of things that we can initially see. And, you know, we have the families and the types. That's all fine. Nothing about this is really anything I need to address, because this is a manufacturer content. It's not any, you know, I'm assuming that this is the way it's named. I mean, granted, those percent signs, in case you didn't know, means that some web-based service had a problem with those spaces, and you should probably correct it.

But that's not my biggest concern, right? So we're just going to collapse this. Oh, I didn't want to do that. I just want to collapse it. There we go. Now, when we get into the shared parameters, I'm going to neuter as many of these as possible. What do I mean by that? I am going to basically tell them to remove them completely or make them family parameters. Now, there's a couple of things to point out here. Well, notice this width one down here that says width in inches. Well, you think that's a very common parameter. Why would you, you know, why would you care? What you didn't notice is it's a text parameter, so that actually does nothing.

That thing doesn't do anything. But we'll also see these kinds of problems here, where we have an authoring version that's two different shared parameters, but different GUIDs. So the reason why I want to neuter this stuff is it's going to be confusing. They shouldn't need it in a schedule.

But.

If they do, they're not going to know which one is which. And if I wanted to, of course, I would update the rules. I'm going to update the rules here. And I want to say, OK, we're going to change these to a family parameter.

Maybe they want to keep those things. I would suggest that maybe just delete some of these. I'm not going to go through the details. The materials here, of course, we want to get rid of the URLs. There's more parameters here. Now, you'll notice that we, of course, you know, Steelcase has to be more important than everybody else. So here it is at the top.

In some cases.

I could just replace these. Now, you get into a delicate situation about, you know, I want it to look just exactly like. The good, there's a good chance that whatever images that go along with these are gone. So ideally what I would do is go in here and know that I have an aluminum matte powder coat in my project that I could just transition to, or an oak that's sufficient, or an ash that's sufficient, and we could go in and edit our thing and, you know, go find us a, let's just find a black material.

And let's see...

flat. There it is. This is fine. This is fine. And you know, that way I can have this automatically, you know, every time it sees aluminum matte black powder coat, it's going to just change it to a matte finish.

So we've got this fill pattern. I would probably, I definitely want to change that, right? Because I don't, there's not many people in my firm that's going to understand what that is. There are a few, but not many. And that's just a big fat diagonal. And so this is pulling stuff from my existing project, so I'm just going to map that to something else, and you know...

Chris Shafer  

So how, a quick question for you, Tom, is how often, especially when you're going through something like fill patterns or line patterns, is it about being absolutely perfectly aligned with what was in these families to what's in your model, or just kind of close enough?

Tom Whitehead  

As I've gotten older, close enough is fine. So what I mean by that is it going back to that same philosophy of when we were doing hand drafting, you had maybe 6 line weights and you know, unless you were insane, only a few different patterns that you would use in a project. And as such, I keep that same philosophy. There's a certain, I mean, it doesn't help. I mean, this is...

across diagonal lines, I think, but I couldn't, I can't, my brain won't figure out what sombreado means, but I mean, if I have a more descriptive name, I would match it up to keep our graphics consistent, right?

Chris Shafer  

Yeah.

Tom Whitehead  

because we probably have something for, you know, either demolished or CMU, and we want it to be CMU everywhere. We don't want it to be CMU a little bit different than the other one. So yes, I try to find something that's similar, but as far as an exact match,

No, I don't care. I'm not going to do that. We've got, I mean, here's another one. We're going to just find something. So that's a center line. So I will pick, you know, what seems appropriate. So I've got a center line that's National CAD Center. So I'm going to do that.

I've actually got this map somewhere, so I don't know why it's doing that.

This is what happens when you've been using Guardian for, oh, 7 years, 8 years. Let's do this one.

Yes, that one's the one.

Chris Shafer  

Yep. Nice.

Tom Whitehead  

And then the one thing I want to point out is, okay, we've got Knoll horizontal trim.

or horizon trim, horizon worksurface, so these are all coming from that one family named Horizon.

Why do we need a subcategory for all of this? So yeah, we're going to nuke this with fire because we don't, there's no, we don't want those to, there's no reason for all of this. So we're just going to turn it all off. So.

Yeah, there you go.

Chris Shafer  

Nice, nice.

I really appreciate you kind of walking through an actual manufacturer's family and kind of identify where they've kind of gone overboard a little bit for what the actual needs for the end users are and for the project teams. And just kind of guiding people through what is what is really relevant in all this. And I think what you probably identified is most of it, most of it is just too much, too much for any given project. And it's just best to kind of blow it out or make it something that is simple and consistent within your project. So I really appreciate you demonstrating this Tom.

Tom Whitehead  

Yeah.

Chris Shafer  

So, um, I'm going to...

Tom Whitehead  

You're welcome.

Chris Shafer  

I'm going to share screens here again.

And we're gonna...

Get the presentation going again. And we're going to hand things over to Gauri, who is going to talk about ODE consultants and how materials are actually really critical to their workflows. So Gauri, if you want to mind taking away there.

Gauri Pandey  

Yeah, hi everybody. I am Gauri. I am a BIM management, part of a BIM management team at ODE Consultants. So ODE Consultants is basically a BIM focused consultancy. We have a multidisciplinary team of architects, structural engineers, and MEP professionals.

And we provide BIM support services for European and US-based projects, especially data centers, substations, and wind farm projects. And so far, we have delivered over 450 projects. And with this growing project portfolio and our team,

The need for maintaining BIM standard became really important. So for this, we implemented Guardian in our BIM governance.

So moving on to the next slide. So one of the best examples that we chose to review was concrete. How different concrete, we studied how different concrete materials were being used in our project.

So, the problem wasn't really...

The lack of standards or already had a well established standard. The real challenge was how do we implement it in our workflow? Because even though we had a perfect standard, Revit allowed the users to create it, like it had users had the freedom to create random material, duplicate random materials, families.

Which, which resulted, which in general resulted in graphical inconsistencies, material, random material schedule, BOQs, discrepancies.

So what we did was we started reviewing the concrete materials through all the projects in all our projects. And after randomly just instead of randomly deleting the materials, we consolidated, we analyzed the properties and consolidated our materials into two categories, which was concrete cast in place.

and concrete precast.

So, uh...

What we did was how we started narrowing it down was we started providing it different color codes. So.

Suppose we have 5 different sizes of words that for cast in place. So we provided a color code for five different words. And based on that, we created a view filters for that. And now after creating view filters, we created a set of predefined filled region because initially when we had random concrete element like, can you move on to the next slide?

Chris Shafer  

Yep.

Gauri Pandey  

So as you can see in this slide, we have random concrete filter, RC concrete, gray concrete. And even though each concrete had the same construction intent, Revit treated them differently. And because of which, as I mentioned earlier, material schedule discrepancies were found, BOQs discrepancies were found.

So now, after narrowing down into it into two segment like concrete cast in place and concrete precast, we created a view filter, so now five walls goes to 50 mm RC wall, 150 mm RC wall. Now we have to define color for it, and similarly for the precast. Now, after creating the view filters.

We created a set of predefined fill region because initially people used to create a random fill region to represent their own concrete. So now we have a set of fill region, set of view filters, and the material. Now, moving on to the next slide.

Now, the visual consistency was maintained and family. Now, initially, people used to assign random materials to the family with same construction intent, as I mentioned. Now, with Guardian. What like now we have a free set of standards. Now with Guardian, it actively helped us in monitoring it. How the process, the process we made, how Guardian helped us to maintain it. So moving on to the next slide.

Slide.

Chris Shafer  

I've got a question here for you, Gauri, is one of the things I really appreciated when we were preparing for this presentation was the results listed at the bottom here, where before you had a, because of this inconsistency in your your concrete material, your downstream results were being impacted. But now, because you were able to create a standardized set of concrete, starting with materials and fill patterns and whatnot, those results kind of related were able to to not only go from, you know.

Graphical consistency, but then, since you use those materials to schedule those materials, you had, you know, reliable schedules, BOQs, then you know, improved it improved everything and reduced your QA/QC and your overall model governance, and would you would you mind kind of speaking a little bit more to that?

Gauri Pandey  

Yeah.

Chris Shafer

Those results.

Gauri

Yeah, so initially when the random, when we had random materials, so we had to manually check everything because there was no consistency across the sheets. But after consolidating it into two materials, into two fixed materials,

So now, since we have everything defined with Guardian, we said, so now, since everything was defined, what we did was.

We had a list of we incorporated this in our Revit template. So now there is no need of now since we have it in our template for every suppose we have 4 substations substation project. Now we incorporated these things in our Revit template. Now every person who was working on this particular Revit template, they had everything predefined. They don't have to create a new set of filters or concrete material. Because Guardian has this feature of locking the materials, we can provide, it can guide a person from creating a new filter. It can restrict the other person from creating a new filter. So a lot of time was saved in the manual quality check that was being done because that was already set before the start of the project.

Chris Shafer  

Nice, nice. So why don't we get into and and and how once you've established those basic standards and you're utilizing Guardian and and from our previous conversations you had you had mentioned how you utilized the data coming through backstage to identify the discrepancies in your materials, and we were able to kind of really locate and identify concrete as one of those major issues, and then you were able to obviously use model properties to clean everything up from templates and families' perspective.

But then you're able to sort of add an additional layer of Guardian's other capabilities that would help reinforce those fundamental standards around concrete.

Gauri Pandey  

Yeah, so once everything was standardized, so now Guardian provided us 3, now 3 levels of monitoring. First is user specific monitoring, second was the project specific monitoring, and 3rd was the overall BIM governance. So now once everything was standardized,

People now they don't have this; they don't have the access to now randomly create materials or the field region, so that one.

A hint like option was closed for them, so, and also Guardian has another the another feature that we used was it used to give us a prior message if something if something if someone was creating something that would hinder with the standards, Guardian used to give us the prior message, so.

It can guide the person before doing that.

Chris Shafer  

Nice.

Gauri Pandey  

And the second property was now automation part. Now since we have view filters, we have created view specific templates, we can actually lock it so it can automatically assign to the particular view. So now every sheet, suppose I have.

10 plans and I have a specific template for 10 for plans. Now it could directly go into that plan. So now the graphical consistency was maintained, no random filled region was created. And similarly was with the work sets. We like before the start of the project, we used to assign.

the desired work element to the specific work set and we could lock it through the Guardian so that people cannot change it.

So yeah, that was another, yeah, that was another automation feature that we used for Guardian. And the third was the viewport automation. In this also, we could assign like what viewports we wanted to assign to the plan sections and elevation, and we can actually lock it through Guardian.

Guardian, so nobody can change it, so through the viewport, through the automations and the governance property, we try to maintain the consistency through all the projects.

So, yeah.

Chris Shafer  

Yeah, what I really appreciate this is, is there's a story here with a simple, simple material on concrete, and that that concrete has so many different functions downstream from a process perspective and a deliverable perspective.

but also your internal management of Revit as a whole, getting all the different features and capabilities within Revit to be perfectly aligned to those processes and those deliverable requirements. And so it may be as simple as a simple material, that how do you make sure that material is maintained and protected and it functions the way you need it to function throughout the entire sort of life cycle of the project. So I really appreciate how you thought about that across your entire sort of Revit experience of within within the firm.

Gauri Pandey  

Yeah, so yeah, I mean the after implementing this, so we concluded, we concluded with like the creation of standard is just the first process. Actually maintaining it and implementing it in every project is the real challenge and through Guardian we can actually through Guardian’s monitoring and automation capabilities. We can actually establish it in all the projects and it has considerably reduced our manual quality check time.

Chris Shafer  

Yeah, I think that's such an important aspect of all this is, again, just coming back to this concrete material, but as Tom was discussing as well, you pick any one of the couple 100 just basic properties or graphical standards within your model.

is when inconsistencies start to form, at some point, this is going to end up in your deliverables. And those are the sort of low hanging fruit from a quality control that reviewers are just, especially architects, engineers, are like, oh, that clearance.

Should be turned off, or that concrete material is not the correct material we use here, and so your quality teams become really a graphical checker and not really focused on the overall quality or.

The most important aspects of the quality within documentation, right? Really, how well that project is designed and communicated and whatnot.

So, Gauri, I really appreciate you participating in this. And for the audience, I think what, it's almost 2:30 in the morning for you. So it's the middle of the night. And so I really appreciate you participating and kind of presenting the story of how you've really thought about these basic model properties and the sort of outsized impact they have across your entire Revit processes and standards.

Gauri Pandey  

Thank you so much, Chris.

Chris Shafer  

Alright, thank you.

With that being said, I'd like to open it up for any questions that people may be having.

So I'm going to ask my teammates if there are any questions in the chat.

Josh Kennedy

Hey, Chris. I didn't have too many in the chat that we have to answer still. That one just did come in from Monet. It reads, is there a way to preemptively map new incoming properties like line styles, line patterns, materials, etc,

from entering an established Revit template without the need to manually map incoming properties every time a new line style or other property appears.

Chris Shafer  

Ohh, to automatically prevent new ones from coming in.

At this moment in time, the way the Guardian works is, one, coming back to that purge unused, Guardian will identify if any of those incoming properties are being used, and one, it will just kind of purge them out. Two is, and I think Tom was demonstrating this earlier, you can set these to just automatically remove. And so I think Tom was demonstrating this well, and Tom, if you feel free to weigh in here, is with certain content, certain manufacturers, sounds like you just got in the habit of just saying, just remove them. Whenever you see them, just remove them.

Tom Whitehead  

Yes, I mean, and I don't know how many people have access to the Guardian dashboard, but to the point of, well, I don't know what's out there. You can see some of that if you, through the dashboard.

Being able to see what bits and pieces are coming into your project. Now, it's a bit of a circuitous route to go find the thing and then create a rule for it, but you can still do it. It's one of those things that you don't know until you know.

Chris Shafer  

Yeah, exactly. I think that's the hard part, and I think, I think Josh, if we're getting to the core of the question is...

Guardian wouldn't know which ones to keep versus not to keep if they are being actively used.

I don't know, I'm kind of envisioning like, hey, here's our standards. If anything is not to the standards, just do away with it. But that will also have its own consequences as well. You know, say simple things, just like removing A subcategory assigned to an element within a family, then it will just adopt the object style.

for that content or for that individual element and it would have its own downstream impacts of that as well.

So hopefully we answered that question there, Josh.

Josh Kennedy

Yeah, I think you got to the core of it. I think, you know, we get asked a lot. I hear it a lot too, you know, is there a way to just identify a standard and say, map everything to this? You know, just don't let anything new in, which, as you just kind of alluded to, we've kind of intentionally decided to stay away from those wildcard type rules for now because of how...

risky they can be. The beauty of Guardian, I always say, is, you know, you do teach it once and it remembers forever, which is really nice. And to Tom's point, you can look at the data, see what is floating out there, and create new rules to be proactive against some of that too.

Chris Shafer  

Yeah, and and and last week's webinar, Dania from from Nelson Worldwide had had mentioned one of her strategies is just just mapping everything to a single to a single property, just being like, all right, if we see if we see that property in there, we know that is sort of like.

the throwaway basically, but at least we know that we've taught Guardian to do that and we're just not deleting things randomly.

Kind of like that question. Good question.

Josh Kennedy  

Yeah, there's a couple more. One quick one that I can kind of read off and then just answer from, and then there's one or two more after this. But from Samuel Witt, are all of the tools from today's webinar available to users as opposed to admins only? A quick answer is out of the box, there are admin only tools. You can choose to enable these mapping tools for your users. And we have like a tiered approach on how you can do that. So you can choose, basically allow users to clean up content as it comes in, but have Guardian not remember those rules. Or you can turn on what we call full mappings so the users can help create your mapping rules.

Chris, I'd be curious kind of maybe what you might add here, but in my experience, kind of smaller teams are more likely to allow the users to do full mappings. Whereas, as you can imagine, a large team, hundreds of people, it's a lot of cooks in the kitchen when you've got potentially that many people creating mapping rules. So one-time mappings tend to be pretty popular if turned on.

Chris Shafer  

Yeah, exactly. The one thing I may add is when you're getting to this level of Revit.

Is.

I would say even some of your intermediate, maybe even to advanced users, don't really get Revit to this level. And so that's another reason why you may want to limit it to your administrators. Good question there.

Thanks, Josh.

Josh Kennedy  

So 2 more that I see right now, one from William Chan. Is Guardian able to isolate specific shared parameters that exist in various family categories and remove them?

Chris Shafer  

No, yes and no. We're gonna put, we're gonna start with the yes side here is Guardian looks at it on a parameter by parameter basis. So if, as Tom was demonstrating of just blowing out those shared parameters from the family, is once you say that shared parameter is gone, doesn't matter what category or family category it shows up in, Guardian will remove it, or even if you want to just map it to a...

A shared parameter that's within your own shared parameter file, you could do that as well. So not on a category by category basis, but wherever that shared parameter exists in a family based on the GUID.

Josh Kennedy  

Thanks, Chris. We've got, they keep coming in so that there's two more again. Our own Gauri asked, is there a way Guardian can detect the views with the wrong template or the views with no templates?

Chris Shafer  

Oh, I don't think we have those capabilities yet.

See, see anyone else from our team have any thoughts on that?

There, I mean, there is the capabilities, there is the capabilities within Revit based on the view type to sign the view template, so there might be hypothetically a way between Guardian and Revit natively to make that happen.

Good question.

All right.

Josh Kennedy  

I think Tom was responding to that one with a, there are other tools today that currently do that, just not Guardian. I flagged it as something maybe that we look into helping them solve.

Chris Shafer  

Okay, alright.

Nice, nice.

Josh Kennedy  

And then lastly, one from Liz, which Jake and kind of Tom already discussed in the chat, but in case you wanted to add something to this, Chris, how do you know how good you're doing overall? What is the best metric for good enough versus 100% complete versus just started?

I think this is going back to, of course, just mappings overall and clean up.

Chris Shafer  

Oh, wow. I think Tom had mentioned the longer that he's used Guardian, the more forgiving he gets on, I would say, the perfection of Guardian. As many of you may be aware, I've been using Guardian for...

eight years now and gone through hundreds of thousands of families at this point in time and cleaning and getting used to this. I would say starting off with a perfect Revit template would be ideal, having your standards embedded in there.

And then...

To me, if you can do that, that would be sort of would be icing on the cake. And I guess the cherry on top would be, if you can go through your content library, that would be even better. And from there on out, and say, Guardian will probably automatically address 95% of all the properties in real time as things come into your projects from and that other 5% you can do you know your project teams can do on a on a project by project basis part of their routine model maintenance type of type of work there.

I would say once you've cleaned your content, your templates, don't strive for perfection. You're going to be able to know at that point really how effective Guardian is.

At, at doing its job there, and those little things around the edges, you can you can address on an as-needed basis, and so...

Hopefully that kind of answers the question there. I see that we're a couple minutes over time here, Josh. Any last questions or do you think something we can handle some of these offline?

Josh Kennedy  

No, you, uh, we we caught the end here, so we're good.

Chris Shafer  

All right, great, great. Before we wrap up, I just want to make a quick announcement that Guardian is sponsoring the BIM Invitational this year, which is July 27th and 28th in St. Paul, Minnesota. Myself and Parley will be attending. This is a great place to just really have those conversations about BIM and Revit that you have in the hallways of AU and the things you're really kind of nerding out with your peers about how to really improve the processes and improve the capabilities of of a BIM, Revit within your organizations, and it's a great way to learn a lot to take back to your firms to help improve everyone's capabilities. So please check it out on the BIM Invitational website. And lastly, if you have any more questions or want to

Want to see the video of this webinar, check us out on guardian.tech, where we also have on our knowledge base a lot of tutorials that really gets in the weeds of model properties and how to apply them just throughout your firm. So with that, special thanks to Gauri and Tom for participating.

especially Gauri participating in the middle of the night there. So again, thank you both for participating. Take care, everyone.

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