A letter to Autodesk
The following is a letter I am sending to Autodesk through their little feedback email thing, I thought some of you might be interested in what I had to say:
Before I really get started, let me give you some background information on the current project which has me so frustrated on the current state of Revit MEP:
My firm just finished our third, and largest, major project in Revit MEP. The project consists of a 200,000 square foot mixed use building in which we designed mechanical ductwork, hydronic piping and electrical in.
Our central file ended up being 95MB, although it would sometimes fluctuate to 110MB+. The architectural file, after we knock it down a notch by purging and other strategies is 340MB. To accomplish this project we bough new Core i7 based x64 machines with ample physical memory to handle the project.
Our firms experience with Revit consists of two "power users" whom consist of myself and a mechanical engineer. We take care of project management, family creation, troubleshooting and instruction of other engineers. We have both been using Revit MEP since Systems 2, been to AU, training courses (a while back), and for the most part know the program inside and out. Other engineers working on Revit projects will usually be directed by us on what and how to do specific tasks.
I am the electrical engineer who is working on the project and for the most part, handled all of the floor plans and schedules.
I write this letter now because over the last month or so, my job, and the jobs of those working with me, has been an absolute gauntlet of anger and frustrations. Bugs, performance issues, crashes, inabilities and coordination nightmares have plagued us day in and day out, and it is almost exclusively due to the fact that using Revit MEP is a simply miserable experience.
The fact that using Revit is a chore is nothing new, and we have dealt with it on other projects before. However, this project was different for a few reasons. First, it was our first big leap into a multi-user (3+), multi-discipline environment working in Revit simultaneously. Second, it was a large, complicated project. Third, it coincided with Revit 2010, which seemed to completely ignore the major issues currently plaguing this software. The following is a brief recap of why my life has been a living hell over the past month because of Revit. These comments will mainly be based upon the electrical end of things, but I can assure you that mechanical and plumbing have similar issues.
Performance:
By far the biggest problem with Revit is the overall performance of the program. It simply takes five times as long to do anything in Revit than to do it in AutoCAD or other drafting software. With five people in the model it takes 15+ minutes to save to central. To load the model it takes another 15 minutes. The program is constantly "regenerating" every time you do the smallest and insignificant action. Many times you will change nothing and Revit will regenerate, keeping you waiting for a minute or two. Creating circuits takes a minute or two per circuit, followed by another minute or two to select a panel for it.
My biggest question in regards to these performance issues is "why?" Why does it need to regenerate the entire sheet when I update a circuit, move a receptacle or do some other localized task which has nothing to do with anything but a few elements? Why does it take forever to create a circuit, which by default, really has nothing to do with anything yet?
Finally, why doesn't Revit have full multi-threading support? These performance issues have been a huge problem since this program came out. Processors clock rates aren't getting any faster, they are moving towards multi-threading and numerous cores. It seems to me like a no-brainer that if Revit could fully utilize eight threads on a CPU, that performance issues would start to melt away.
Bugs
While performance is the biggest problem with Revit in my opinion, the killer as far as your patience with the program is concerned are the massive amounts of bugs. On this current project I think we discovered so many bugs that I am of the opinion that Autodesk should be paying us to use the software to debug it for them. To make things worse, the bugs that we encountered are not small issues, they were massive coordination and design problems which either created a lot more work, or deleted work you previously did. Below are a sample of some of the nightmare bugs we have encountered:
- Can't move element (even though its not being moved), so lets delete it!
Revit would give me that error with the only option being deletion of any wires which were connected to certain pieces of equipment. It would give me the error any time I saved to central. Apparently it has been fixed in 2010, but since we did not upgrade to 2010, it still plagued us.
- I don't like that element, so lets delete it:
Revit didn't like that element, so it just deleted it, randomly, without any notice. Coordination nightmare.
- Random home runs.
Lets put home run arrows randomly in the middle of my circuits even though there is only one circuit connected by wires to it. Probably related to the next bug.
- Random circuits:
Revit randomly puts electrical devices on multiple circuits, even though the device or fixture only has one electrical connector. I found that this is due to worksharing (it happens when you save to central), and what it essentially does is put a device on the circuit it was on BEFORE you your last save, and the circuit it was on AFTER it. Needless to say, changing the circuit of electrical devices is something which is required for our design.
- Face based explosion!
Every time the arch updates a linked model, anything hosted on the changed elements goes completely whacko. By whacko I mean thrown to the ends of the building or wherever else it wants to send it. It takes me a day or two to fix everything.
In addition to these ones, in 2010 it would revert ALL of my changes back to my last save when I saved to central (when other people are in the model), and plan regions flat out didn't work at all.
As you can see, all this caused massive amounts of work, mis-coordination, and aggravation. Add it to the constant crashing, data loss and other issues and you have one of the least stable programs I have ever used.
Workflow:
Circuit receptacles
Surf the internet
Add circuit to panel
Surf the internet
Save to central
Surf the internet
This was my workflow for the last month, can you see where it is inefficient? In retrospect, I can honestly predict that doing this design in AutoCAD would have literally taken half the time. In addition to the massive performance hits we were taking, we had a nightmare of a time with five people in the model. It takes 15 minutes to save, so do the math. Many times I would want to load in an updated family, but couldn't because someone was saving. Other times I would want to edit an element but couldn't because I would have to save to central, that's another half hour before I could get to that task.
The key here is the issue of saving, you can't have more than 4-5 people working in the model at the same time. With a big project like this, that is a killer. Add the performance issues of saving taking so long and it is pandemonium before submission day.
Moving beyond the issue of just efficient workflow, you also have the human toll of Revit. Lets just say tension and stress was a bit high working on this project. Some angry words were said, and people were generally not in good mood. How could you when you would loose 2 hours worth of work because of a saving issue or a crash? I even got hit in the face with a bottle of white out by a coworker, and although it wasn't aiming at my face, the entire situation could have been avoided if we weren't about to kill something.
Ultimately, saving to central needs to be a seamless process which doesn't take 15-20 minutes. Tasks within the model such as loading families and taking out elements need to be able to be accomplished without waiting for someone to finish to save. In reality, Revit really needs a network process which can handle all of this stuff in real time.
Coordination
The issue of coordination is where the few perks of using Revit are quickly erased because of the software's bugs and lacking abilities. The biggest problem I have encountered as an electrical engineer (outside of the issues with bugs) is the disparity between the model in Revit and the schedules/one-line in AutoCAD.
The major culprit here is the panel schedules which were done in AutoCAD. The schedules for panelboards in Revit are simply unacceptable to our needs. You can argue all you want about "design intent" and other factors in relation to that, but these schedules do not show what we want, how we want it. Therefore, we had to coordination all 1200 circuits within this building from Revit to AutoCAD. It was an absolute nightmare, and kept us in the office till 3AM the night before the submission. This was further compounded by changes being made as the schedule were coordinated, with required additional coordination. You can see how this can get bad.
In regards to analysis, I can only say this; I don't trust it. The majority of my defined spaces (in turn defined by architectural rooms), have errors or issues with them. They overlap, their limits are not properly set, or they encompass half the floor because of a bad room definitions. I wanted to do a load calc of the building using schedules, and it turned out that I couldn't do so because a good deal of my lighting fixtures were not being picked up in the space, giving me a false number which I only noticed because I was vigilant of such. Until the usability and consistence of analysis tools are fixed, the analysis feature of Revit MEP is very limited.
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Originally Posted by SAMeyrow
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