CREATE A REVIT STARTING VIEW - Your Launch Page

When it comes to keeping your team informed and up to date with Project specific information, your starting view is one of the best tools you can employ! It is a great place to keep all important information at hand and easily found by your entire team.

Creating a custom starting view or launch page has the added benefit of helping your models open faster whether you are opening a local file or a central model. By default Revit will open your model to the last viewed view when the model was saved. This is not an ideal situation as it can be confusing to the person opening the model as well as affect the performance of the model. Especially if the last viewed view was 3D view or another view with demanding graphics. To solve this issue it is essential to have your template open with a custom created Starting View.

In this post we will step through the process of creating your starting view title block and then how to get Revit to display it first every time you open your model.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR CUSTOM LUANCH PAGE TITLE BLOCK

For this step you will need to create a new Title Block called "Launch Page". This will be where you put all the useful information you want to display for your team when they open the model. At the very minimum you should include the Project Name, Project Address, Project Number and Client information. You can also include the following, remember that this is your launch page and you can include as much or as little information as you need:

• Team Communication Board

• Template Version Number

• Design Team Information

• Project Status

• Current Issues and Revisions

• Model Maintenance Info

• Links to Project Files or BIM documents

• Nested 3D view

You can also use space on your Launch Page to keep editable shared families which can be shown elsewhere is the project and edited from this one location for ease of consistency and Quality Control. When you have loaded your new title block into your template it is best to keep it separated, utilizing sheet organization, from the rest of your sheets. Remember to uncheck Appears In Sheet List in the properties palette to prevent your Launch Page from showing up on your sheet lists!

HOW TO SET YOUR STARTING VIEW IN REVIT

It is thankfully an easy process to set a Starting View within Revit. Navigate to the Manage Tab, in the Manage Project section, you will see a button for Starting View.

Clicking on this button will pop up the Starting View dialog box. In this dialog box there will be a drop down from which you can select the view you would like to set as your starting view. I think it goes without saying that here is where you want to pick your new custom Launch Page. Click OK and you are all set. To test to make sure everything is all set up, save out of the Revit file and re-open. The file should open to your beautiful new Launch Page with all the useful important project information.

You can choose any view in the project as your starting view, however, by using a title block you can call up any information you may include on a standard sheet which makes it that much more versatile. It also helps speed up setup and QA processes, which I'm sure we can all agree we'd appreciate spending less time on.

REDUCE LOADING TIMES AND IMPROVE COMMUNICATIONS

As you can see this process is quick and easy, the toughest part is trying to decide what information to show on your Launch Page without going overboard and providing too much information. Why not take advantage of a technique to reduce loading times and use it as a place where your team can get up to date project information? As well as provide the perfect place to drop team communications to keep everyone on the same page. What information do you plan on putting in your Launch Page? Let us know in the comments below!