We’re excited to announce that Kinship now supports Revit view templates. You can upload view templates to your library and collections, load them into models using the Kinship add-in, and track their use across all your projects. This is project view templates like you’ve never seen before.

A bit of background.

To understand why we’re so excited, let’s take a quick look at what view templates are and how they are used in Revit projects.

View templates in Revit provide a way of reusing properties applied to a view, such as visibility/graphics overrides, filters, scale, detail level, view range or discipline. Teams can use view templates to ensure consistency and adherence to company standards within documentation views. They can also use them to enhance productivity by ensuring clean and clear working views for modeling.

Until now, the main methods for using view templates have been either to create them from scratch – I won’t even go into how time consuming and error prone this is – or to include them within a model template. The latter approach is fairly effective for individual projects, but it has significant limitations:

• Improvements made to existing templates during the course of a project rarely make it back to the project template. Or capturing updates becomes a maintenance task in and of itself.
• It’s difficult and time consuming to update view templates across multiple projects in progress.
• It’s cumbersome to share new templates with a whole team.
• There’s no central location to see and manage all view templates that have been developed or that are currently in use.
• There’s no easy way to bring a subset of view templates into a model. Revit’s “Transfer Project Standards” forces you to bring all view templates. So you first have to bring them all into an empty model, then delete the ones you don’t want, and then transfer again into your destination model.

View templates like never before.

Our new support for view templates eliminates the headaches and limitations associated with managing view templates across an entire team. With project view templates in Kinship, you can:

• Upload one or more view templates from a project to your library and collections. View templates get uploaded with all of their associated properties and data.
• Search view templates in your library and collections using the Kinship app in Revit and load them directly into any project you're working on.
• Manage the standard naming for all of your view templates within your library and collections.
• Add comments to help the team understand how to use a particular template.
• See the category that each view template belongs to.
• See which projects each view template is being used in and how many views it applies to within each project.

BIM Managers can move view templates out of project templates (.rft), allowing for both more general and more specific uses, and all with less maintenance.

Team members can use personal collections for their own working templates, ready to be use on any project, with no time wasted setting them up.

How it works

Adding view templates to your library or collections couldn’t be easier.

While in a model, select Add to Library or Add to Collection in the Kinship ribbon panel. Then choose View Templates. This will open a dialog where you can select the desired view templates, and... that’s it!

View templates uploaded to Kinship contain all of the data and settings that were part of the template within Revit, including filters.

A word, or two, on filters.

When adding a view template to your library or collection, all filters being used by that template will be included. When you then load that view template into a model, its filters also get loaded.

In Revit, you can create filters that “make sense at the time of creation.” For example, if Collaboration is not yet enabled in a model, then you cannot create a filter rule based on a workset — it simply does not appear in the drop down menu. This makes it impossible to set up workset-based filters in a project template.

There are ways around this limitation, e.g. keeping the project template as a central file, but these come with their own issues and caveats.

Kinship’s support for view templates does away with this limitation. Filters containing rules that refer to worksets, for example, can be saved to the library with their rules retained. When these filters later get added to a model, they will automatically work when the given worksets exist, and otherwise will stay disabled.

We hope you enjoy Kinship’s new support for project view templates. Let us know how you’re making use of the feature and how it’s helping your standards, workflows and project deliverables.