The Revit Technology Conference was held at the Sebel and Citigate in Melbourne on 18-20 June, 2009. RTC is the main user-run conference in the region with 220 attendees mostly from Australia and NZ. Those in attendance mainly came from the architecture, structure, and MEP disciplines. Architectus and GHD had the largest contingents, with both sending (but don’t quote me — this is just an eyeball guess) over 10 people. And although it was a user-organised conference, it was good to see Autodesk and the two major resellers having a sizeable presence.
The sessions were spread across several streams and run simultaneously (like many other conferences), catering fairly well to established users so I wasn’t able to see everything I would have liked, but took in a broad range of topics targeted at a range of levels, seeing talks from the Principal’s, general, Architecture, and BIM manager streams.
In reporting these sessions, it is important to note that I myself am not a Revit expert, and am only reporting and analysing the content delivered by the presenters. Other Revit users may disagree with the approaches taken by the speakers and statements that they made (and hence disagree with my analysis) but these speakers are generally regarded as experts within the community and there were no statements challenged in any of the talks I attended.
While the speakers generally spoke really well, the content of the sessions was of vastly varying quality, covering the full gamut between excellent and very poor. One session in particular — ‘Multi-practice collaboration in Revit’ — was completely off-topic and failed to address any of the well known issues to do with using Revit on large, distributed or multi-practice projects. Many of the remaining sessions I attended concentrated on either promoting BIM approaches generally (ie the use of software that supports BIM workflows and methodology), or on addressing shortcomings of Revit. One well attended session — ‘Lost in Space! Finding stuff you can’t see’ — gave the 23 most common ways of losing stuff you’ve drawn in Revit files. A session that I rated highly — ‘Case study – Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp’ — dealt with how to (try to) model a complex building working within the limits of the modelling engine in Revit. The outcome? It’s possible for an extremely expert user to model a similar building with many simplifications, but impossible to model it accurately. Further, when attempting to model complex building such as this, the required approach to modelling prevents the functioning of the automated floor plans & elevations.
Revit itself:
I’ve been to other Revit demonstrations previously but this is the most in-depth look I’ve had. I learnt some new things at the conference, but also confirmed of things I’ve previously uncovered through research and analysis.
Things that impressed me included:
- simple scheduling
This was awesome. Schedules on drawings linked to room and/or equipment names, plot sheet lists etc - simple modelling
Fairly simple buildings are handled well by the modelling engine in Revit - documentation tools
These worked really well. I especially liked edge silhouettes for elevations and ‘grain’ (where you could define how things look at differing levels of detail)
Things that I was less impressed by:
- complex scheduling and data linking
While simple scheduling was fantastic, complicated scheduling and linking to external data was really ordinary. You can only do scheduling using the database built into Revit, whereas this data is often more powerful when linked to external data sources such as Excel or other databases. This I believe will become crucial with BIM and interoperability - complex modelling
There are many hacks required to model non-standard things, and really complicated things just aren’t possible in Revit - simple modelling
While I think it handles the modelling of simple buildings well, there is a caveat: even the simplest models require a lot of additional information (even beyond ‘BIM’ information) to be input for Revit to function. You can’t just draw stuff! Ever! The separate concept modelling tools replicate some of the functionality of SketchUp, but once you move into the main part of Revit things get complicated quickly - customising documentation tools
You generally have to accept the look of annotations, arrowheads etc, as it is fairly complicated/inefficient/not recommended to change them
It will be interesting to revisit these summary points when I get more hands-on with Revit in the future.
Lasting impressions:
To use Revit, especially in teams, requires a high level of CAD proficiency for all team members. It was agreed by the Revit managers I spoke with that users must not only be highly skilled CAD operators, but that they must also posses a fair amount of CAD manager sensibilities.
