- [Male Instructor] When working in BIM 360
you have three different methods that you can use
to link Revit models to one another.
In this video, we're going to start with
the simplest of the three
the process of direct linking to a Revit model.
Now this one is the most like what you already do
in a non-BIM 360 Revit project
in other words, you will have your
host model and your link and you will simply
link the model into the host and then that is a live link
to that file and as that file is changed
as folks make changes and save those changes,
you will immediately have access
to those saved changes within your host.
There won't be any limitation to when you
see them or how you see them.
Now of course in BIM 360, this is limited by
whomever has access to the folders
so if the folder you place a link in
does not have the access rights that allow
you to link to it, then you won't be able to create
the link in the first place
but otherwise, there are no limitations on
what you see or when or how you see it.
This method is best used within a project team.
For example, maybe the architectural team has
several models and they want to link them together
for coordination, and they have different folks in the team
responsible for different parts of the project
so direct linking would make a lot of sense
in that scenario, but you might choose one of the
other methods for linking to outside consultants
so we'll look at some of those other methods
in future videos, but let's start here with the
direct linking method and let's switch over to
Revit to give that a try.
For this demonstration, you can have any
BIM 360 model open that you like
just whatever model you want to create a link into
so I've got a building model here
and I'm going to link in a few of the other
architectural models from the architecture folder.
To do that is exactly the same process that you would do
in a non-BIM 360 project
you go to the Insert tab and you click Link Revit.
Now when it gets there, the only difference between
the link we're doing and what you would normally do
in a non-BIM 360 project, is where it goes for the link
so notice that it did take me to the Kinetico project
that I happen to be in, and that is on BIM 360
and then it will give me visibility into
whatever folders I have access to
now I'm logged in as a member of my architecture team
and she has access to the architecture folder
so that's what we're seeing here
and we're not seeing any of the other folders.
This is what I was talking about earlier where
if the structural team had models in their folder,
I don't even see the Structural folder in this location
so I'm not able to link to anything in Structure
for that reason.
But if I go into the Architecture folder,
I have full access to that folder,
so I can link to any of the models that you see here.
I'm going to start with the Building Site
and this one is set up with shared coordinates
so I'm going to choose Auto By Shared Coordinates,
and I'll click Open
if you're working in your own files then
you can choose origin origin or shared coordinates
or whatever the appropriate centering method is for you
and I'll talk more about shared coordinates in
a future video.
Now this particular file has more than one site,
so I'll choose the appropriate site and click OK
that dialogue won't appear if you only have one site
and then of course you can see the site model appears
now this is sort of a temporary stand in site model
that the architecture team is working on
and then eventually they would get the civil engineer to
involved and replace it with something from them
but let me go back to Link Revit.
I'm going to select the other file that you see in here,
also link by shared coordinates.
And then that would appear in the correct location
now the only difference between the two links here
the site model and the tower model is that if I go to the
home screen here
and show you the list of models in that Architecture folder,
what you'll see is that the Building Site
is a Workshare Cloud Model
and the Tower is simply a Cloud Model
so I wanted you to see that we could link to
either a workshare enabled file
or a non-workshare enabled file it doesn't matter
so a link is a link and
Revit and BIM 360 don't care whether or not
worksharing is turned on for that
link functionality to work.
So what happens when folks make changes now?
Let's take a look.
So let's say that the person working on the site model
tells me that they've made some changes that
I might want to see
so all I need to do is go to the Manage Links dialogue
just like you would in any Revit project
select the file that you want to reload
the Building Site in this case
and then I will click the Reload button
and it will immediately load the new version of that file.
Notice up here that you can see that the Saved Path
for both of these files are on BIM 360,
so that confirms that we are linking
directly to those live models in the BIM 360 location
and I'll go ahead and click OK here
and you can see that the site model
they've added a few new windmills here.
The other way you that you can see the latest changes
is if you've closed your file for the day
and let me go ahead and synchronized my changes here
and I'll just add a quick comment
and click OK.
And then let's say that I decide to
open the file back up again
it's the next work day, so I'm going to
select it right here to reload my admin building here
and I want you to watch the tower as it loads in.
It's a subtle change, but if we zoom in over here
you can see that the steps here in front of the
tower element are now a little bit larger
so when you first
load the host model, just like it would in your
local area network,
it will automatically reload
any changes to a Revit link to a direct Revit link
but while you're working throughout the day,
if a change has occurred, then you will need to be
alerted and use the Manage Links dialogue
like I showed you first.
So in always, this behaves exactly the way
you're familiar with links behaving now
it's the only difference is that the path to those links
location of those link files is up on the
BIM 360 site instead of being on your local area network.
Once again, I think this method is best suited for
internal team collaborations within your team
and when you want to share links
with members outside your team with the
outside consultants or the broader
extended project team, then you're probably
going to want to use one of the other two methods
that we will begin looking at in the next video.