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Joined: Tue, Nov 5, 2013
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Greetings everyone
This is my first ever post on the forum. I work in the steel construction industry as a draftsman using mainly Autocad and Solidworks for industrial buildings, but I'm currently also studying to become an architectural draftsman. The software we use mainly in school is Vectorworks, but I've been learning Revit myself (learning new cad-software is basically my main hobby now) and have used the software on my schools latest project.
Despite some obvious frustrations at using a software package without anyone around to give direct guidance, it worked out pretty well, if I say so myself. I am pretty optimistic about the software itself, but I also have some questions about all the trial and error I encountered during my first project before I embark on another project. Some things I hope can be answered quickly using past experience from long time Revit users, others are perhaps not so straightforward.
Question 1: The name Revit itself stands for 'revise it'. I basically thought this meant that one of the great powers of the software lies in the fact that during any stage of the design, geometric changes can be made easily. From my Solidworks experience, I realise the power of modelling everything parametrically, so I consistently locked a large amount of geometry to eachother, with the idea that I was modelling a robust parametric model. I locked floor boundaries to walls, upper floor walls to lower floor walls... However, on actually getting to a phase where I wanted to reposition my walls and other geometry, make accurate changes to level heights, and change the thickness of certain construction elements, the software goes completely mental and I get an enormous list of errors, lots of geometry needs to be unjoined, and basically, cleaning everything up takes a huge amount of time. Did my error lie in overestimating the parametric capabalities of the software, or did I just go about linking all the geometry in a wrong way, and if so - is there some kind of hierarchy or rule of thumb I should respect in locking geometry in my building model?
Question 2: Joining construction elements like walls and floors that consist of multiple construction layers is controlled by the function of the individual layers (1 - construction , 2 - substrate, etc... ). This works well most of the time, but sometimes situations occur where I would like to change the join manually. Is there a way to control individual joins without having to modify the entire family/type?
Question 3: Floors often have different finishes in different rooms. This has led me to think that it is perhaps more interesting to just always use 1 floor type for the structural part (a floor type simply consisting of precast beams for example) and then have different floor types for different finishes which I would add in a later stage of the project, which I would place directly on the structural floor type. Is this a generally accepted solution for finishing or do you handle it in a different manner?
Question 4: Whenever I look at Revit tutorials online it seems to me Revit isn't designed for detailed building design and all wall and lots of elements seem to be more sketch-based in nature -rather then something I'd expect from a software that calls itself a 'building information modelling - tool. This may ofcourse be a skewed observation because tutorials generally don't go very deep into actual construction design, but it is rather frustrating to me. I've noticed that in my country (Belgium), as an architect designing individual houses, it is often required to produce very detailed designs and drawings at a very early stage in the design. Maybe it's because the role of the architect here -more than in other countries- often also resembles that of a construction manager who has to oversee the entire construction process from start to finish. Generally, there is never really any graphic documentation in the process where using 'generic walls' or 'generic floors' is detailed enough, and yet, those are all that ever seem to be used in tutorials, so having to explain all kinds of difficult or annoying joins in geometry are conveniently avoided. I realise this is more of a rant than an actual question, maybe it might instigate some interesting reactions.
Question 5: The revit family editor seems to try to be an entire mechanical modelling tool in itself. It can do a lot, but it just seems quite clunky at times. If I'm modelling something that's more complex than a cube, do I really need 20 parallel reference planes in one view to constrain all the lines? I completely lose oversight between all that linework. Managing the model seems a very intimidating task. Any constraints you place or forms you create can only be reviewed and modified by actually clicking on the relevant geometry in the model. There is no table containing this information. It also seems that generally the family editor seems very poor at finding solutions for constrained geometry, often giving me messages that I'm overconstraining the model when I'm very clearly not. Maybe the comparison is not fair, but it seems like it tries to be something like Solidworks all by itself and it's quite frustrating to model 3d objects in an environment that is clearly less suited for this. Are there some people here with experience using professional mechanical modelling tools that can confirm or deny my experience with the family editor? Will it all get better after familiarising myself more with the editor?
Question 6: I've seen some very impressive panel systems following irregular curved shapes being created in Revit using the massing tools. Can the information for the creation of systems like this actually be extracted for the fabrication of the actual panels (and does this actually happen in the industry) or is it just a fancy visualisation tool?
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