Originally Posted by
Phil Read
When a fellow student started a design critique with, "well, this isn't really what I had in mind...." the blood was already in the water and the professors could smell it like sharks.
The "free flow of ideas from concept to realization" never happens. Not in Film, Music, Law, Engineering, Life, Art, Dating, Work, Marriage, Solar Power, Kids, Medicine, School, Politics, Religion, Whatever. So let's stop dreaming about the day we'll be able to dance and wave our hands in the air and will perfect buildings into our computers. It's impossible to turn ideas into Buildings any more than you can turn feelings into decisions. If Revit could do this it wouldn't be called Revit. It be called HappyArchitectHolodeckCADv1.0 and it'd be free, never crash and when you used it birds would chirp happy tunes while children in the distance flew magic kites and wore peppermint gumdrop smiles...
More specifically: if Max/SketchUp/etc.understood the intent of what you were modeling, I suspect the translation to Revit would be far more rational. But this isn't the case. Those tools produce generic geometry. But geometry alone isn't enough; you have to be able to embed intent. Creating morphic forms is an interesting exercise in design iteration. But making blobs isn't the same thing as making decisions about construction (or constructibility). Blobs don't have the same rules as buildings.
So explore pure form making in whatever tool suits you (even a pencil). Once the intent of the design is understood starting in Revit isn't falling short. It means you're ready to add meaning to your design. It's not automatic or perfect. If it were I suspect we'll just get ugly buildings fast.
-P