Hi There-

I've been wondering if anyone out there has been using Revit MEP and the wealth of information in it, to do some very basic things. I'm fairly new to AUGI, so please forgive if this question is out there and has been answered.

The first, biggest pain is area take-offs. Yes, there is gbXML already in existence, but short of taking a gbXML file and parsing it myself, is there an easier method to query a Revit model to produce wall areas, orientations (very important), window areas, roof areas, roof tilt, etc for any given space/zone in my model? Does anyone have any references that are known solutions...books, white papers, etc? I only ask because we still (gasp!) have to use area take-offs from time to time in situations where gbXML is not an option for us.

The second question I have, is, we envision using the Revit model as a place to manage projects...for example, if someone makes a decision to change the installed equipment density in a space, or a temperature setpoint, we want to be able to see when this change was made, and who made those changes...we'd even like to be able to place a signature on the change, indicating ownership of the change. We are aware that worksets may be able to help us organize this a little bit, but it seems sort of a stretch to use them in a simple-minded way....using only the idea of borrowing or ownership to handle and manage changes. Isn't there a way to take the log file (my understanding is that there is a log created which stores the commands of every Revit session) to capture this information? Could I then write a script to somehow parse through this log, find relevant information, and publish these changes and make them visible somewhere in the model?

Finally, our team has been noticing "instability" but we are not sure if this is attibutable to the user or to the software. Any suggestions about how to wade through a difficult situation like this, where we are trying to come to grips with whether it is us (users) or them (developers)? What are the best resources that we have at our disposal?


Thanks in advance,
Your BIMBro