By Dennis Collin
So many times whilst training I get asked the question, “How do I stop people messing up my Revit model?”
This often relates to users moving objects like the survey point, which often indicates the shared position origin, or accidently moving a linked Revit project, or an AutoCAD site survey drawing and by doing causing a lot of project time to be lost in resolving unnecessary coordination issues.
To prevent this from happening use the Pin function on key objects, this will prevent accidental dragging or deletion of critical elements within a Revit project. This command is located on the ribbon interface after selecting the desired objects to be pinned as shown in the image below:
To add an extra layer of protection, use the selection filter toggles at the bottom of the screen. This will prevent selection of key objects, such as linked files, underlay objects or elements that are pinned. However, this filter does not prevent users from measuring or placing dimensions on those objects which is useful.
Pinned objects will show a drawing pin when selected. Removing the drawing pin will release the object for editing.
If further steps are required to prevent undesired model changes, consider placing the critical elements into a Workset and have that Workset checked out by a non-project ‘user’. The username is derived from the Autodesk Account login, however account administrators should be able to setup a Revit user alias for administration purposes.
Users should be able to see the elements on Linked Files & Site Model worksets, but until they are relinquished only the owner can alter that part of the model.