Best Practices: Prepare Models

When preparing design models, consider how they will appear in the clash matrix. To increase efficiency and avoid issues when using Model Coordination, follow these best practices for preparing design models:

• Check the visibility settings, worksets, phases, options, section boxes, and so on, to remove any unnecessary data in design models. Disable external links. For details, see the Revit Help.
• Separate a single MEP model by discipline for mechanical, electrical, and plumbing.
• Use scope boxes in multiple Revit views to isolate areas of large models. For details, see the Revit Help.
• Check that the Location and Site for all models is the same. Check the model alignment and ensure the geo location for project base point, survey point, and internal origin point are in sync. For details, see the Revit Help.
• Revit settings for levels and building story affect how Model Coordination auto sections the models by level. Use the same level names between each of the Revit discipline models. For details, see the Revit Help.
• Use filtering and create 3D views in Revit specifically for model coordination. Create aggregated models by level, zone, or category. By default, the {3D} view is used when publishing models from Revit. Each 3D view in Revit, when published to Autodesk Construction Cloud, is considered a model in a coordination space folder. For details, see the Revit Help.
• Ensure that the prepared 3D views in Revit are published to Autodesk Docs for use in Model Coordination. Verify the Publish Settings in Revit to confirm which Revit 3D views are published to Docs. Avoid publishing unnecessary 2D or 3D Revit views to ACC. You can choose to publish without links. For details on Publish Settings, see the Revit Help.

Aggregate and Align Models

Aggregating models in Model Coordination allows you to understand how different disciplines and trades, often represented as separate models, fit together. This allows for clash detection and constructability reviews. Precise model positioning in Revit is key to help ensure clash data are accurate and valid.

You can use the Transform tool to check the alignment of models within the project and edit their position and rotation if necessary. When you transform the models, the new positions are used anytime those models are viewed in context of the project. For details see, Transform Models.

If you apply a transform to a single model, such as a single Revit 3D view, changes are saved for the RVT file. Therefore all 3D views within that RVT file will have the same transform applied. For efficiency and consistency, you don't need to repeat the transform-definition process for each Revit 3D view.