Recycling Revit 2010 Drafting View Details

Today in our Revit MEP training we spent a significant part of the morning working through the three options we have for creating details in Revit MEP. 

1. Creating a Callout View so that a live portion of your Revit model can serve as a back-drop for your detail
2. Importing or linking an existing AutoCAD detail into a Revit Drafting View
3. Creating a new Revit detail from scratch in a Drafting View

What Next?  How to Recycle Detail Views in Revit

We wouldn't recycle details created from Callout Views because they are dependent upon the specific portion of the current model that is used as a background.  However, we can certainly reuse details created in Drafting Views from imported AutoCAD objects and Revit objects.

How to Recycle Details Stored in other Projects:

1. Set the project current where you would like to add an existing detail from another project.
2. Navigate to the Ribbon’s Insert tab > Insert from File > Insert Views from File.
3. Browse to and select the Revit file that holds the Drafting View(s) you wish to import into the current project.
4. Pick the Open button at the bottom-right of the dialog.
5. In the resulting dialog, pick a Drafting View off the list in the left pane to preview it in the right pane (provided the Preview selection option is checked in the bottom left-hand corner of the dialog).
6. Pick the OK button to complete the process.

TIP!  You might consider organizing some Revit MEP project files on your company's server into a Revit Detail Library.The individual project files might contain details of a specific type. For example, a project that contains multiple standard HVAC details, another project that contains your company’s Electrical details, etc.

Follow-Up Notes:

If a DWG file is linked into a selected Drafting View, Revit will break the link and treat it as an imported CAD symbol when inserting a Drafting View from another Revit project.

Drafting View(s) copied into the current file will have the same Discipline and Sub-Discipline assignments as defined in the original project. So by default, the Drafting Views copied into the current project will be copied into the same location in the current project as they were located in the source project.  In the example below, the properties of the view illustrate that it will be located under the Discipline of Mechanical and the Sub-discipline of HVAC in the Project Browser.