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| Fig 1: Blind men trying to comprehend an elephant. From Wikipedia. Read the Story here. This is not an allegory for the folks who have written about this topic. It is a metaphor for my (and a lot of my colleagues') difficulty in comprehending the topic based on their writing. |
For anyone transitioning from an AutoCAD workflow to a Revit one, it is often a given that one would instinctively take the a laissez faire approach to handling the issue of setting out Origin Points for a project. Revit as an application, is fairly good at downplaying the whole issue. It usually does not matter until one has to link other models into the Main model where all the documentation is being recorded. Even then, someone in the team magically figures out how to use Shared Coordinates and make the linking work. Then someone accidentally removes a link, or overwrites a Shared Coordinate and then this whole setup suddenly fails to make sense anymore. It is often worse when, later in the project, one has to aggregate all the models in simulation platforms such as Navisworks or Synchro due to the simple reason that other programs are usually unable to read Revit's Shared Coordinates or the teams do not export projects consistently. One can certainly ensure that the project is exported using Shared Coordinates. In practice however, I've found that there are always one or two models that somehow slip between the cracks. So, the work-around seems to be one where one imports all the models, then painfully find objects that belong to the same coordinates and then align everything. Life would be a lot easier, if someone had set the ground rules from early on in the project.
