I'm in a 30 day Trial of Revit 8 and need some help.

[kbare]

I have been assigned the duty of test this program. 30 days isn't much time to figure all this out, especially for me. My company currently uses ADT 2005. I have used Autocad since 1985 but through all the upgrades have had a hard time changing to 3d walls styles and all that. The Revit Building 8 seems pretty easy on the surface. However the main reason I am supposed to work with this program is to figure out if generating schedules and bill of materials are possible. If they can be linked to a data base with costs and what ever else the estimators need. Door and Window schedules seem easy enough. Will it list totals for windows with different hardware and cost?

I am stuck on getting a bill of material for exterior brick, studs, dry wall, etc.. Is this type of list able to be generated?

[Tom Dorner]

The 30 day trial of Revit is for the version that can save. I always recommend to new users that they stay in the demo version which cannot save but you can still play with. Then when more comfortable activate the 30 day trial.

That said, Revit is a database and everything is schedulable. Revit does not however figure the quanitiy of items like studs, number of bricks, sheets of drywall etc. What you do get are quanties of length, area and volume that you can use to figure actual material quanities from. Doing so inside of Revit would be a little cumbersome, which is why they have made an API available and the ODBC export option.

If I were given the task you have, I would ODBC the Revit database and link into MS Access or SQL Server. I would also have my standard cost and quantity database that I would link into the same database I have the Revit ODBC linked into. In the Access or SQL Server database I would perform all the calculations to get to material quantities. For example LF of wall times 1.1= Exterior stud quantity. Area of wall divided by 48 SF = quanitity of 4x12 sheets of GWB.

You may also want to take a look at other off the shelf cost estimating programs such as Timberline which can derive a material quantity from raw quantities of an assembly. It is possible to get the Revit ODBC linked to Timberline.

HTH

Tom

[sjsl]

Timberline does not work with V8 only V7. I spoke to a rep recently about this and they may upgrade sometime in '06.

We have successfully exported out our data into MS Access. We had to hire someone that acutally knows access otherwise you will simply shoot yourself. We have implemented it mainly for SD work and estimates for now. Biggest stumbling block is the use of site data. Revit does not have types for site data, hence we cannot automatically retrieve this into access, but have to pull all of this data, paving, curbs, areas manually.
So we have resigned to just using it for direct only bulding cost info. The Factory was surprised when I sent them the file and noticed there were no types for site data.

This really took the wind out of our sales. and keeping up with current data is a huge problem, think of all of the wall types you can have, not to mention wall finishes.

Good luck

[kbare]

Thanks for the suggestions. I got the schedule to work for the walls in project from the tutorial "Creating Your First Building Model". Is there a way to have it total the lengths of the different wall types?

Tom. after the "I would ODBC the Revit database " you lost me. What is ODBC? I will give this information to are estimator and see if this makes any sense to him.

Thanks Again,
Kevin

[Tom Dorner]

Kevin,

Below is the definition for ODBC from webopedia.com:

"(pronounced as separate letters) Short for Open DataBase Connectivity, a standard (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/standard.html) database (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/database.html) access (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/access.html) method developed by the SQL (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/ODBC.html#) Access (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/ODBC.html#) group in 1992. The goal of ODBC (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/ODBC.html#) is to make it possible to access any data (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/data.html) from any application (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/application.html), regardless of which database management system (DBMS) (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/database_management_system_DBMS.html) is handling the data. ODBC manages this by inserting a middle layer, called a database (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/ODBC.html#) driver (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/driver.html), between an application and the DBMS. The purpose of this layer is to translate the application's data queries (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/query.html) into commands (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/command.html) that the DBMS understands. For this to work, both the application and the DBMS must be ODBC-compliant -- that is, the application must be capable of issuing ODBC commands and the DBMS must be capable of responding to them. Since version 2.0, the standard supports (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/support.html) SAG SQL (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/SQL.html). "

In short it allows a database like Revit to export its information to a database like Microsoft Access.

As stated by SJSL, this is not something for those not proficient in databases to tackle. I happen to have a database administrator education so it all makes perfect sense to me.

As for Timberline, my brother sells and supports it locally and we linked the Revit ODBC to it via the Timberline ODBC drivers. The Timberline programmers will probably never be able to keep up with the Revit development staff, so for the time being any Timberline link is best done as a DIY project in my opinion.

Oh, and as one final caveat to pass on, the ODBC export from Revit will have all the lengths, areas and volumes in Metric, so one must do the conversion back to Imperial units outside of Revit.

Hope this makes sense.

Tom

P.S. Attached is an image of a simple wall schedule you can do inside Revit. Something like this may be the place to start.

[Steve_Stafford]

As for Timberline, my brother sells and supports it locally and we linked the Revit ODBC to it via the Timberline ODBC drivers. The Timberline programmers will probably never be able to keep up with the Revit development staff, so for the time being any Timberline link is best done as a DIY project in my opinion.You and your brother have an opportunity to visit the R&D Lounge when you build your Timberline/Revit translator!!