There was also mixed response as far as the designers using Revit versus dedicated
CAD staff. Most Consultants and Architects I've encountered that are using Revit seem to have dedicated people doing it, that way those people can invest the time and effort without it interfering with other work and income. However, several people have noted that using Revit effectively can require more than simply 'drawing', you need to understand some of the associated relationships and issues. There was some consensus that it would likely be rather ineffective to use third-party Revit specialists if that are not familiar with AV.
We're all familiar with
CAD and AV, but right now the office only has one Revit guy, and he's getting baptized by fire. He took a couple training classes -- has spent a few days recently watching tutorials online and then playing inside of Revit. We're still trying to figure out enough about the program to determine how we want to integrate it (if?) throughout the office.
The opinion was split as far as using Revit if not required. A couple of firms seemed to go with it because they had committed heavily to having the workflow arranged for Revit projects while other companies used Revit only when required. One person noted that in preparing for their presentation they had been surpirsed to find that the number and p[ercentage of Revit projects in
house had actually decreased the last few years and they currently had none in progress. It seems that very few AV firms have transitioned totally to Revit as it is not resally effective for single lines, wiring details,
etc., thus almost all still use AutoCAD for some of their work even on Revit projects.
Seems about the conclusion we've reached. Even if Revit was excellent at those things (which it sorely isn't), we couldn't afford to have all 6 consultants in the office cease work on everything they're doing for a couple weeks of Revit training. Not to mention once they did begin work again on real projects, they'd be chugging along very slowly as they get used to Revit. It's just not
practical. That said, if we could find a way to let people work within AutoCAD and then had a couple people wise enough to set up the document management in Revit and made it so Revit was only needed to
plot the set out and otherwise people could continue working within AutoCAD, then that would be something we'd be interested in exploring.
One of the presenters at the meeting specifically discussed the Wisconsin requirements relating to AV. They were a BIM proponent and presented that as evidence of why everyone needs to move to BIM. I have a feeling it may be more someone at the State being sold on it without having any idea of what it represented or the implications. That seems to be a common view, that Autodesk and some early adopters have done a great job of selling Owners and especially government agencies on BIM without any real proof of concept, we're just now really starting to be able to assess the impact of
CAD on many building life cycle issues and costs, and many legal and liability questions yet to be resolved. But hey, it Green, it's state-of-the-art, it uses the Cloud and so on so it must be great!
The architects we're working with generate models that they
send us at certain checkpoint (35% Review, 50% Review, 65% Review,
etc.), and as we go, they update the model and
send us a new model, and then we
send them our stuff to put on top of their own. That means updates to the model will tend to happen in chunks and not fluidly as if they were in the cloud -- if we put a lot of time into laying out a wall, it's possible that wall will be deleted in the next update from the architect. One
point raised by our in-house Revit guy is "anyone who knows anything about Revit knows you never move anything you -- you delete is and create it again". So another problem we
face (having not tried this myself, I don't know that this is true) is if the architect deletes a wall we have a bunch of wall plates on, then builds a new wall a couple feet back from the previous one, do our plates move or do they all get deleted and then we have to hope we notice that they've been deleted and need to be created again?
Lots of manufacturer's have Revit models available already (Christie, Middle Atlantic,
Crestron, Da-Lite, Soundtube,
etc.) so it's becoming less of a pain to have to create custom elements.
But nobody is building those elements to any standard. A rack from Middle Atlantic shows up as a "Generic Model", a ceiling
speaker from Commmunity shows up as a "Communications Device", a ceiling
speaker from another manufacturer shows up as "Specialty Equipment 1". There's no rhyme or reason to whose equipment will show up in which
category. We're also faced with the problem that on all of our state jobs (the ones that would require Revit), we as the consultant cannot mandate a specific manufacturer for any piece of equipment. This means we can't just go download a Revit file from a manufacturer's website if it's going to have that company's
logo included in the model. Makes it a real pain for us because you get into the
Crestron gear and we could be speccing a whole DM
system with lots of different rack units and wall plates that has logos on every piece of gear, and then we have to go in and remove those logos or hope our DSF (Division of State Facilities) project manager doesn't red flag us. The DM
system is a good example though of where this gets tricky, because there isn't an exact direct alternative for DM that wouldn't blow the entire model to pieces if somebody were to substitute in
AMX or Extron components everywhere.
Revit is likely in everyone's future, and we've already talked with Autodesk about creating a dedicated AV family
category in the software so that we can start having some AV specific features (even simple
amplifier calcs for 70V speakers would be a start). In the mean time, I'm just hoping they at least add structured cabling into Revit 2014...
Getting an AV
category would be good. What would be better is having a way to delineate who owns which elements within a model. Currently if the Telecom guys put in a bunch of ceiling speakers
in one part of the building and then the AV consultant puts in a bunch of ceiling speakers in a building, when we try to generate equipment schedules for the gear that we are responsible for, there's no way to filter out the Telecom contractor's stuff. The worst-case example is with wall plates. When we place all of our wall plates in a model, there's no easy way for us to generate wall-plate/
back-box/mounting-type schedules that wouldn't also show us gear from all of the other contractors working within that same BIM model.
--
So let me
bounce a question off of you guys. If we built our drawings in Revit except for our 2D stuff (schematics,
block diagrams,
etc.) is there a good way to get the AutoCAD title blocks to jive with the Revit title blocks? Currently our title blocks are whatever we get from the architect, though DSF has their own standard they use. The problem is that the state only has a
title block for AutoCAD -- they have not made a standard for title blocks on Revit-generated drawings, and getting Revit to
play nicely with the
title block DSF provides has not gone well -- one architect we work with just made their own
title block in Revit that fulfills the intent of the DSF AutoCAD titleblock, but it's not identical.
That means if we do a dozen drawings in AutoCAD and a dozen drawings in Revit, but don't go through the hassle of linking our AutoCAD drawings into Revit, we end up with half of our sheets using one titleblock and half using the other. We have a second issue then which is that the Revit stuff is all automatically numbered and titled whereas the AutoCAD stuff isn't, so if Revit goes and updates our numbering scheme, is there any sane way to avoid having to then go in and renumber all of our AutoCAD sheets? Is there also a sane way to generate an all-inclusive index
page in Revit even though all of the sheets are not being processed together in that Revit file?
