AUGIWorld Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 20) REVIT STRUCTURE So, here we are, the 12th hour of BIM. We started hearing about it around five years ago. I, like most people, dismissed it as another trend. A fad, if you will. A year later, BIM was popping up in quite a few presentations, and people (architectural people) were starting to jump into this technology, with Revit being the software of choice. Now, we are running up against the fact that many of the architectural firms with which we consult are using Revit and either require us to use it or strongly recommend that we use it so they can leverage BIM. “As long as it doesn’t affect [negatively] how I get a job out the door, I’m into it,” was my general opinion then. So, then a job came across my extremely disorganized, cluttered, coffee-stained desk. This particular job had a bunch of different levels, crawl spaces, and odd sloping roof structures. Do you know what I mean— the kind of weird sloping roofs that having you pulling your hair trying to figure out where to terminate your columns and your framing offsets? I started building the model in BIM with Autodesk Revit Structure release 2, as I recall. By the next morning I had attracted a crowd of pleased principals and department heads amazed at what was actually coming out of the plotter. The best part for them was the small amount of time it took to model the entire structure. My new addiction was born. The BIM Effect now. If you wait until you are “forced into it” it is going to be very difficult to do this under the gun, and the end result will be unsatisfactory. This entire BIM revolution will affect you negatively. Prepare for a positive experience Sure, I was the star of the show. Then we needed construction documents. A BIM hater was then born. Are you kidding me? It took me one day to model the entire project, and now is taking me the same amount of time to put in some uplift bridging and some stupid lintels. And forget about our standards we worked on for the past decade. You can toss them out the window! This was the reaction across the country once it became apparent we weren’t just playing around anymore and that this was replacing our beloved AutoCAD®. People just aren’t ready to move their company to a completely new way of putting work out the door. I have been telling anyone who will listen to me and now I am telling you: Get Revit in the door, learn it, and start building templates, families, and start transferring your company’s standards 20 The honeymoon ends fast Now, if you are prepared for this, the BIM revolution is going to affect you positively. When you can link an architectural BIM model as opposed to inserting a flat, 2D CAD model, you gain huge benefits right out of the gate. You can literally monitor elements from the architectural model and have Revit TELL you if an architectural item has moved. It also will give you choices about how to proceed. You can half-tone the entire model in one shot, saving time (sometimes hours) purging and cleaning a CAD file because the layers collide with yours and you wind up with a mess. BIM eliminates this. There is only one drawback. You have to know HOW to do it, WHEN to do it, and to what EXTENT you need to do it. For starters, here are a few things you can do before you are on a live project. I always start with importing a title block and getting my sheets to resemble, as closely as possible, what I was spitting out in AutoCAD. View titles, symbols such as north arrows, and even plan notes can all be done, within reason, before you add your first column line. This part of the BIM game reminds me of the movie The Gladiator, where Russell Crowe is standing there in the middle of the Coliseum with his Gladiator buddies…basically about to get publically slaughtered, and he states, “Whatever comes out of those gates, we have a better chance of survival if we stick together.” Well, YOU have a better chance of survival if whatever comes out of that plotter at least resembles what used to come out of that plotter. Start with the basics! 1. Typical details. You are not entirely bound to using ONLY Revit. You can import your typical details from AutoCAD and place them on a sheet before the project even starts. 2. Line weights. Yes, in Revit, you have a good amount of control over line weights. Get these, as closely as possible, to what you are accustomed to seeing. 3. Families. Although families is an advanced topic, you can still find families that will replace your blocks in AutoCAD. Look to AUGI (www.AUGI.com) or Revit City (www.revitcity.com) for families and learn how to create them. You will quickly see that families drive the Revit model. 4. And, last but not least; brace yourself and others. If you have done steps 1 through 4, you have braced yourself. It is the bracing of others that will prove to be your biggest challenge. I’ll elaborate below. Challenges I can say without a shadow of a doubt that your biggest challenge is going to focus on finding people who are willing to do this. It will make or break your efforts. It doesn’t matter the size of the firm either. If you have people who just aren’t willing to try using BIM and modeling, you need to work on this. And it isn’t an easy thing to do. The conversation usually goes like this. Them: “What is the benefit to me using this?” You: “Well, the coordination, the easy sheet creation, the no layers, the ability to look at your results in 3D.” Them: “What is the benefit to me using this?” (This is the person saying “I’m not listening to you and I am going to be contrary at every turn because I don’t think it will ever be better than what I am doing now”). Unfortunately, I do not have any good advice on what to do with or about these individuals. They will magnify the bad and obscure the good things that come out of the application. My only advice is to find eager, smart, forward-thinking people who can help you. These individuals will be instrumental in helping you turn the corner in this thing. “Yeah, that was a pain, but here’s what I had to do.” These types of statements coming from your end users are worth their weight in gold. Training You need this. Take it from me, you need this. Training comes in all shapes and forms, but I am a firm believer in structured, by-the-book training that you pay for. Yes, the training will use a simple model with examples that are “not in the real world,” but it gives you exposure to the software and the processes involved in implementing it. Usually, the instructor is pretty good. Sometimes the instructor is awesome; sometimes lukewarm. Either way, you get the face-time, and you get a w w w. A U G I . c o m http://www.AUGI.com http://www.revitcity.com http://www.augi.com
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