Designing in Revit

[Wagurto]

Is there any tool available to design in Revit? How do you guys do it? do you still use sketch paper to get your ideas and then start using Revit?
I saw once a set of tool to create rooms and relationships in chief architect that later they turn into walls and doors. Something like that would be nice to have in Revit don't you think?. Let me know how are you using Revit in the early phases of the design process.
Thanks

[Scott D Davis]

Massing, then convert massing to walls/roofs/floors. Or start sketching basic programatic areas with generic walls and room tags. Move the rooms around until satisfied, then start applying more detailed elements.

[Roger Evans]

Depends on the job in hand / my mood / time available etc

Sometimes handrawn sketch ~ this can be scanned / imported as jpeg & taken up to scale then traced over ~ you can get nice graphic effects this way (example in Presentation Experiments in Gallery)

Sometimes I draft out using Line Tool per Level with differing colour & line weights to differentiate areas etc I call lines L1 / L1 New / L2 etc That way say when viewing Level 2 you can see Level 1 below but there is less confusion because Level 1 Lines are a different colour & you can also see or get an idea of layout in 3D view

Using just lines allows my brain to concentrate on the overall layout without having to think about or control wall heights/ levels ie less impediment to my thinking process

Walls doors etc are then drawn & aligned to the lines

(Both methods are very useful in trying to achieve specific roof shapes by the way
and visibilty can always be turned off )

[Wagurto]

I don't think creating rooms with walls would be a good idea since you can't joint to rooms with walls overlapping to each other. I think massing would have the same problem. It have to be something like regions but they have to include areas on it, so we can move it around try different option etc. Unfortunately there is not specific set off tools for that early stage of the design process. May be I should put this in the wish list and maybe some day the factory will include something in future versions of Revit.

[Scott D Davis]

Massing works well. You can put two masses next to each other, (touching) and then use the Wall by Face to place walls only where you want.

Creating rooms isn't tough either. You move two rooms next to each other, delete the overlapping wall, and your done. We do this all the time and have used this method for preliminary design many times.

Although I like your idea...take Massing to a simpler level first. If we could create the 2D footprint of the massing shapes only first, and tag their area, then rearrange these 'regions'. Once the area relationships were established, then you could go back and extrude and tweak the massing into 3D, and then apply the walls/floors/roofs.