Templates are a big deal. Your template can determine whether you make or lose money with BIM. A strong template can make you efficient. A poor template can win you a gold medal for Wheel Reinvention. I’m not being hyperbolic. To succeed at BIM, you need a strong template. Without that, all the other time, money, and effort you throw at BIM will be severely handicapped.

I get a lot of questions about templates. Everything from people looking for advice in developing their own to people just wanting to have someone else make one for them. One route to getting a functional template is to buy a pre-made template, and then tweak it to meet your company’s needs (here’s a list of templates to start from). Letting someone else do the heavy lifting with template creation isn’t a bad idea. But in the long run you need to have a deep ownership of your company standards. So whether you’re tweaking a template you bought or starting from scratch, there’s no escaping templates.

ArchiCAD Template Basics: View Map and Layout Book

There’s too much to cover in one post or one video. But if people want, I’ll be happy to record more videos on template creation. In the video below I talk about some basics regarding views, layouts, and schedules in my standard template. I hope you enjoy it. Oh and there’ll be a follow up post on BIM Engine this week that goes into more detail. Much like I did the Organizer video from a few weeks ago, I needed to record this video so that that forthcoming post makes sense.

A big caveat: my template is in complete disorder. Or well feels that way to me. You’ll notice I have no title blocks in my layouts, some of the views aren’t set up properly, etc. Ignore all that. I could either record the video while I was fixing things or wait until they are all done. Seemed better to share sooner, and none of the unfinished stuff really matters to the subject at hand. And I haven’t written the post (or recorded the video) about how you should be doing titleblocks. That’s coming though.

That all said… Follow Shoegnome on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube so that way you won’t miss a thing.