Revit 7.0 Review

[JamesVan]

Latest article by Lachmi Khemlani on AECBytes.com:

http://www.aecbytes.com/review/Revit7.htm

[BillyGrey]

Pretty cool read, until I got to this paragraph:

"Revit 7 does not demonstrate any dramatic new feature additions. In that respect, it is more of an incremental release rather than a major upgrade. This explains why at Autodesk University, there was only a brief mention of Revit 7 and a lot more attention focused on the upcoming structural and MEP applications"

Huh???????

Anyway, thanks for the link JV, and nice to see your "name in lights" in the article.

[Chad Smith]

"Revit 7 does not demonstrate any dramatic new feature additions. In that respect, it is more of an incremental release rather than a major upgrade.
Wow, talk about a hard person to please. :shock:
I was introduced to Revit back at 3.11 (I think it was) and in my opinion r7.0 is by far the most advanced release when compared to it's previous.

[Wes Macaulay]

The article scolds Revit for lacking free-form geometric modelling tools (which most don't really need) and for becoming less easy to use, and for poor documentation.

Revit has become more complicated, and I don't know if you can expect someone to self-teach themselves anything. It's not the new features which would have killed me; it's the little quirks of Revit which could drive you nuts if you didn't know how to beat them.

Video tutorials would be great... it's hard to understand a program until you can see it working.

[GuyR]

According to Autodesk executives, IFC support is forthcoming as well

That's interesting, anyone heard when.

Guy

[Chad Smith]

Maybe March? I've heard from a reliable source that that is when R8.0 is supposed to be released. :wink: But, of course don't take my word on that, it's just what I've heard.

[Roger Evans]

Just had that buzzing sound in my ears again .. did someone just mention Video Tutorials?

What a good idea!

[Scott D Davis]

This explains why at Autodesk University, there was only a brief mention of Revit 7 and a lot more attention focused on the upcoming structural and MEP applications"
Huh? What classes did she attend? They were all about 7, and the new features! Beyond that, 7.0 was a huge release with tons on new features!

[ariasdelcid]

I guess pretty soon we will be back to being CAD WIZARDS:

"...I also found that while the basic modeling capabilities of Revit continue to remain unsurpassed in their ease of use, the application on the whole does seem to be getting more complex and requires serious effort and training to master. In that respect, the continued addition of new features seems to have finally taken its toll in impacting overall usability. It is no longer possible to sit down and master Revit on one's own, without resorting to some kind of professional help. The documentation also has not kept up very well with the enhancements to the application and is not an adequate resource for learning the new features. The tutorials are all text-based and very long-winded. The lack of video tutorials really makes itself felt in this release..."

[Wes Macaulay]

Is the application really getting more complex? New features I guess - like Legend Views - but on the whole it's not much more to master than Revit 4, really...

Lachmi just needs to spend some more time with the software!

Granted that learning Revit is not an overnight task...

[ariasdelcid]

Well ... I think some of the advisory board members have been steering towards a hard science fiction reality...but I think the majority of us are just architects or designers..not programers.. Revit One took my breath away...That is sooo romantic....I miss you soo much...

[ariasdelcid]

And how many 1000 room hotels do you do?

[jbalding48677]

Well ... I think some of the advisory board members have been steering towards a hard science fiction reality...but I think the majority of us are just architects or designers..not programers...
Arias -

This is not necessarily true, the one thing that has been great about the meetings is that there are architects invited from all areas of the profession. Each encouraged to voice their opinion and each listened to intently. I think this is an unfair poke at the board members and the Revit design team.


Revit One took my breath away...That is sooo romantic....I miss you soo much...
I still have my 1.0 disk, and I don't think Autodesk would mind if I copied it and sent it to you. Let me know ;)

[Martin P]

I will admit that Revit does seem to have a lot of stuff not that you dont HAVE to know about You could still use Revit easily if you ignored them -

design options, phasing, massing, worksets, note blocks, groups, stacked walls, vertically compound walls, curtain wall systems, legends - etc etc....... You can quite happily use Revit and ignore all of these things, I dont really use a lot of them often other than phasing and groups but I could still get by without even those.

At its core Revit is still very simple to use - you could switch off all the toolbars except for <basics> <view> <drafing> and still produce drawings with no problems.........

You just need to know what you can do without learning/using. Maybe this is something that should be made very clear to new learners, I do in our office but if we were all new to it I could see that it may be quite daunting.

Families, well they never have been simple - but I think they are much easier to use now than they used to be..... As are most things in Revit.



I hope that we never see Revit LT.

[narlee]

Been using Revit since before ADesk takeover. I'm still using the same routines, plus more/better/easier with each release. Example being ability to adjust in-place family objects without opening them. Example being ability to dissassociate reference-plane based objects without copy/move/copy work-around.

More difficult, more complex? Poop. Easier, better.

Geof Narlee.

[christie.landry]

I still have my 1.0 disk, and I don't think Autodesk would mind if I copied it and sent it to you. Let me know ;)

I saw all you're Revit disks back to pre-release stuff!!! I'd hate to see your attic.

Don't copy software...that's never ok...:-) Hey maybe those will become classics and we can auction them off as collectors items. I could dig around here in Waltham to see how many more I can find...

I think we found our give -aways for next years Revit Mixer...

[sbrown]

Example of easier better. Need to place walls based on acad background, you used to have to trace, now you can just pick the lines.

How about stacked walls, you used to have to build one wall, then split it into 3 walls, sounds easy(if its just one wall, but you'd have to do this around the whole building) make sure everything stays aligned, Now just build a stacked wall and draw.

Yes 1.0 was easy to learn, but then you would have complained it was not really useful cause it couldn't do CD's.

[christopher.zoog51272]

I think we found our give -aways for next years Revit Mixer...
Sweet.... Retro Revit schwag!!!

If you're yuring for the good 'ole days......, when walls were only one layer, when referance planes were called construction lines, and there were two railing tools (regular and panel)......only revit 1.0 will do!

[christie.landry]

Sweet.... Retro Revit schwag!!!

lol
Nice Chris!

[Andre Baros]

When you're accustomed to upgrading your AutoCAD once per decade the ability to keep using each new build of Revit without starting from scratch makes it seam like not much has changed. On top of that, if you're just playing with building maker for a few days and not taking it into production, it easy to think its complicates rather than simplifies.

[outpostarc]

I'm still wearing the watch that Revit gave to the early adopters. But I'm not giving it up! Cool watch by the way.

[MikeJarosz]

I will admit that Revit does seem to have a lot of stuff not that you dont HAVE to know about You could still use Revit easily if you ignored them -

design options, phasing, massing, worksets, note blocks, groups, stacked walls, vertically compound walls, curtain wall systems, legends - etc etc....... You can quite happily use Revit and ignore all of these things, I dont really use a lot of them often other than phasing and groups but I could still get by without even those.

At its core Revit is still very simple to use - you could switch off all the toolbars except for <basics> <view> <drafing> and still produce drawings with no problems.........

You just need to know what you can do without learning/using. Maybe this is something that should be made very clear to new learners, I do in our office but if we were all new to it I could see that it may be quite daunting.

Families, well they never have been simple - but I think they are much easier to use now than they used to be..... As are most things in Revit.



I hope that we never see Revit LT.

This exact criticism has been directed at Excel for years. Why do there have to be so many features?

Bill Gates answers that there are any different Excel users. Excel has financial mortgage functions side by side with trig functions. Very few of you reading this are likely to ever use both at the same time. Each is there for a different type of user.

If I were a single practitioner designing residential architecture, I would be using one set of features. As it happens, I am a high-rise commercial architect who has little use for rafter and roof functions.

As long as Revit offers the tools I need, I am not bothered by the presence to tools I do not need.

Now, Waltham, keep adding those tools.......

[irwin]

The application we kept in mind was Word. Word has many advanced features (e.g., on line collaboration) that most users have never used, but these features don't get in your way if you don't use them -- you can just start typing. As advanced features were added to Revit we tried to avoid getting in the way of users who don't need them. For example, if you don't need design options and never create any, they don't affect the way you work in any way; the only overhead is a single extra button in the Tools menu and one more tool bar (which is off by default).

[SCShell]

The application we kept in mind was Word. Word has many advanced features (e.g., on line collaboration) that most users have never used, but these features don't get in your way if you don't use them -- you can just start typing. As advanced features were added to Revit we tried to avoid getting in the way of users who don't need them. For example, if you don't need design options and never create any, they don't affect the way you work in any way; the only overhead is a single extra button in the Tools menu and one more tool bar (which is off by default).

Wow, that is exactly what David C. told me at AU when someone said that people remark that the Revit screen "looks" to simple to actually do a set of working drawings. I thought that it explained a lot!

As a "one man" outfit for the most part, I do not use worksets. Although I sometimes feel a bit inadequate by not having learned how to use this powerful tool, I also know that you don't have to use all of the crayons in the box to create beauty. Heck, I only know how to use 50 percent of Wordperfect, and I have been using that program since version 3 or 4.

Furthermore, and probably the best part, Revit allows me the freedom to find graphic solutions which maybe were not the original way the founders may have intended! We call them "work arounds". I call them "individual approaches". You gotta love a program that allows for individualism! Thank you.

Steve