Day 7 — Worksharing and coordination

Up to now you've been alone in a file. Real projects have twelve people in one model and five disciplines in five models. This day is about both — and it's the day that most changes how useful you are on a project, because it's the vocabulary of every coordination conversation.

Revit LT does not have worksharing. Read this day anyway; the Links and coordinates half works, and the vocabulary is what matters.

Worksharing: the model

Collaborate → Worksharing. Enabling it creates worksets and turns the file into a workshared model. Then Save As to your server or ACC location — that becomes the central model.

The workflow, and every part of it matters:

Central model (server or ACC)
    ↓  Open with "Create New Local"
Your local file (on your C: drive)
    ↓  work, Ctrl+S often
    ↓  Synchronize with Central  ──→ pushes your changes, pulls everyone else's
Central model (now includes your work)

Rules that are not negotiable on a real project:

• Never open the central model to work in it. Open it with Create New Local checked. Working in the central is how you lock everyone out.
• Make a fresh local every morning. Stale locals produce the strangest sync errors, and the fix is always "make a new local".
• Ctrl+S saves your local. It does not sync. Two different operations. Beginners lose work assuming otherwise.
• Sync often — every 30–60 minutes. Long gaps mean big, conflict-prone syncs.
• Relinquish when you sync, and always before you leave for the day. Elements you're still borrowing are elements nobody else can touch.

Worksets

A workset is a named group of elements used for ownership and bulk visibility — Shell, Interiors, Core, Level 2 MEP, Site.

Two purposes:

1. Ownership. You can take an entire workset, which prevents others from editing anything in it.
2. Performance. Closing a workset unloads its elements from your session. On a large model, closing the worksets you don't need is the single biggest speed improvement available to you.

Worksets are not a substitute for categories, filters, or view templates. Don't build a workset per element type. A handful of meaningful ones beats forty.

The active workset is shown in the status bar, and new elements go into the active workset. Check it before you model, or you'll scatter walls across worksets and spend an afternoon fixing it.

Element borrowing

You don't normally take whole worksets. You edit an element and Revit automatically borrows it for you. It stays yours until you relinquish.

When you can't edit something, Revit tells you who has it and offers to send an editing request. They get a notification and can grant or deny it. To see ownership visually: View → Worksharing Display → Owners colours every element by who has it. That's the fastest answer to "who's got this?"

Full detail in worksharing.

Links: the multi-discipline model

Architecture, structure, and MEP each own their own file and link the others.

Insert → Link Revit. Critical choice in that dialog: Positioning.

• Auto – Origin to Origin — aligns internal origins. The default and usually right when both models were set up together.
• Auto – By Shared Coordinates — uses the coordinate system published between the files. Correct on a real project with a surveyed site.
• Auto – Center to Center — aligns bounding-box centres. Almost never what you want; it will silently put the model in the wrong place.

Link, don't import

Linking references an external file; it stays owned and edited elsewhere and you reload to get updates. Importing copies the content in permanently, along with its line styles, layers, and text styles.

Import CAD once into a template and you inherit its junk forever. The rule in every firm standard: link, never import. If you must import CAD for a site plan, import it into a drafting view, not a model view, so it can't contaminate your model space.

Manage links in Manage → Manage Links: reload, unload, or change the path. Set paths to Relative so the project survives being moved.

Copy/Monitor

Collaborate → Copy/Monitor copies levels, grids, columns, walls, floors, or MEP fixtures out of a link into your model, and then watches the original. When the structural engineer moves grid C, you get a warning telling you the monitored element changed.

This is how disciplines stay coordinated on datums. Collaborate → Coordination Review is where you triage those warnings — accept the change, postpone, or reject.

Coordinates: the classic failure

Three different things that beginners conflate, and getting them wrong is the cross-discipline coordination disaster:

• Internal Origin — Revit's true, invisible 0,0,0. You cannot move it. Keep all your geometry within about 10 miles (16 km) of it or you get accuracy and view problems; a common rule of thumb is 20 miles as the hard limit.
• Project Base Point — the project's local reference, usually a building corner or grid intersection. What your drawings dimension from.
• Survey Point — the real-world surveyed reference, tied to actual site coordinates and elevation above sea level.

Shared coordinates is the mechanism for making files agree: one model publishes coordinates, the others acquire them (Manage → Coordinates → Acquire/Publish Coordinates). Do this once, early, and document it in the BEP.

If a link comes in a mile away or rotated, it's a coordinates problem, and the answer is never "just move it until it looks right" — that breaks the agreement. See coordinates and positioning.

Clash detection

Collaborate → Interference Check → Run Interference Check finds hard geometric overlaps between two sets of categories in the current model and its links. It produces a list you can select from, and an exportable HTML report.

It's basic. Real coordination uses Navisworks: export .nwc from each discipline, federate them, run clash tests with tolerances and rules, group clashes, assign them, and track resolution over time. Navisworks also does 4D sequencing against a schedule.

The vocabulary you need in the meeting:

• Federated model — all disciplines assembled in one viewer, not merged into one file.
• Clash test — a saved pairing of two selection sets with a tolerance.
• Hard clash vs. clearance clash — geometry overlapping, vs. geometry inside a required clearance zone.
• Issue — a clash promoted to something tracked and assigned, usually in ACC.
• BCF — the open format for passing issues between tools.

The coordination meeting, decoded

You now have the vocabulary for the most common exchanges:

Today's exercise

You can do all of this solo — one machine, two files.

1. Enable worksharing on a copy of RB-Practice.rvt (work on a copy; this is a one-way change). Create worksets: Shell, Interiors, Site, Core.
2. Assign your elements to the right worksets. Select all exterior walls, floors, and roof → set Workset to Shell in Properties. Same for interior walls and your casework → Interiors. Toposolid → Site. Stair and shaft → Core.
3. Save As to a Central/ folder as RB-Practice-Central.rvt. Close it.
4. Open the central with Create New Local checked. Confirm the title bar shows your local path, not the central's.
5. Make a change, Ctrl+S, then Synchronize with Central with Relinquish all mine checked. Open the central directly (just to look) and confirm your change is there. Close without saving.
6. Close the Site workset (Collaborate → Worksets, set it to Closed) and watch the toposolid vanish from every view. Reopen it. That's the performance lever.
7. Turn on View → Worksharing Display → Owners and look at the colours.
8. Create a second model — File → New → Project, add a couple of structural columns on your grid locations and a slab. Save as RB-Structure.rvt.
9. Link RB-Structure.rvt into your architectural model, Origin to Origin. Confirm the columns land on your grids.
10. Copy/Monitor the levels and grids from the structure model. Then open the structure model, move a grid 6", save, and reload the link in the architectural model. Watch the coordination warning fire. Run Coordination Review.
11. Look at your Project Base Point and Survey Point in the Level 1 plan (unhide them via VV → Site). Move the Survey Point and observe what changes and what doesn't.
12. Run an Interference Check between Walls and the linked structural columns. Read the report.

Save. Tomorrow you make Revit do the work for you.