Revit in Review
September 14, 2017
Revit in Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Revit
Revit is our primary design tool for creating construction documents. It is used on 100% of our projects and all of the departments use it. The main problems Revit addressed was the turn around time for drafting buildings. Since Revit is a design tool and not a drafting tool. The process from idea to finished documents has shortened.
- Real time collaboration between design teams. With the ability to have multiple users in one file. The coordination between team members is more effective.
- embedded information about the parts and pieces of a building. With shared parameters associated with every component in a Revit model the team is able to convey the design better.
- Family Management. Revit organizes the parts and pieces (or families as they are called in Revit) in a logical manner with categories. This allows the users to better control visibility of parts and helps with quality control for the construction documents.
- Visibility control in views. Between the categories, view ranges, filters, worksets, and detail level you can basically make anything look the way you want it to look.
- Text. This is the biggest issue Revit has. It handles text boxes horribly. Though release Revit 2017 has made improvements to this issue, the program still has a long way to go to get to good text box.
- Applying materials to components. This process is a difficult and clunky process.
- Aligning to a shared coordinate system. Despite all the training and info videos, this is still one the most difficult things to master in Revit.
- It has reduced the number of errors and omissions on projects.
- The learning curve on the product has taken longer than thought. you will eat up some time learning how to use the tool well.
- If you do not fully commit to Revit you will cost you more than it will make you.
- It has help reduce the number of request of information (RFIs) received on a project.
The difference between Revit and AutoCAD is that AutoCAD is a drafting tool while Revit is a design tool. All AutoCAD did was digitize a drafting process and it had no embedded intelligence in the product while Revit being a design tool is more than just lines and circles it is walls and doors that has information associated with those components so you can determine what it is made from or what finish is on it. And because of this intelligence you now have a "single source of truth". While in AutoCAD unless you put a note next to the "door" you did not know what those lines were suppose to be nor do you know anything about that door. So ultimately Revit was the platform we went to because the demand for that digital intelligence from the clients and the request to do design quicker could be met with Revit.