EXTREME Frustration!!.. Help..! Revit Massing slowness prob

[Richard McCarthy]

Does anyone have problem with massing in Revit? I am doing a large urban planning scheme and using Revit for the massing of the whole town. After modeling about 100 blocks or so, Revit is now INCREDIBLY SLOW every time I try to add another mass. It takes about 30 seconds to get to the sketch mode after clicking "add mass" button, and about 3 minutes (sometimes upto 5 minutes) to process after finish massing ONE block.
My system is pretty speedy, it's Athlon XP 2800+ with 512 mb of Ram, and a nvidia GF-FX card. (with OpenGL turn off)
anyone got any suggestion how to speed this up? (I still have about 6 city blocks to model)

Also, how does every one do their Urban Planning with Revit?
How does everyone get their building SIT ON the terrain that it was suppose to sit on... and do this accurately and quickly...?

I am thinking to use Sketchup to do this, export the Revit model to Sketchup or MAX and then use the "Glue" plugin to make the models to sit on the terrain. I dunno how it will turn out yet...

[Scott D Davis]

Yeah, I don't think Revit was meant to be an Urban Planning tool!

I think you'd be better off with a Gig of rAM, but still you are asking Revit to produce a huge model.

[beegee]

You may be able to speed things up a bit by linking some massed objects from other files, then copying , rotating and mirroring them.

But in the end, I agree with Scott, you're creating a large file and the more RAM you have for that the better.

[Richard McCarthy]

It shouldn't be that hard for Revit to handle. It was just couple of hundreds of simple BOXES. NOTHING MORE. I have done HUGE 4 building model on Revit and that's like over 100x more complex then this. I don't understand why Revit is so slow right now, and constantly complaining about Wall joints when THEY ARE JUST BOXES.


BTW, that Yoda quote sounds like the Bruce Lee quote...
("To learn, you must first empty the cup"...)

[Dimitri Harvalias]

I gave up on massing for this very reason. If what you are doing is, and will always be, an urban planning study then I would suggest that you have a couple of choices.
If there is no need to extract any data from the file (areas, building heights etc.) then I'd just do it SketchUp. We've had great success with SU for urban planning. You can assign different uses (low-rise, commercial, retail etc.) to different layers with different colors and its ability to provide 'instant' shadows makes it way easier than Revit for this type of thing. Streets, water and parkland are easy to simulate as well.
If you do a lot of planning then I'd suggest playing with simple extruded solid families. With a little creativity and some formulas you can actually get Revit to do some pretty cool scheduling of areas based on the type and instance parameters of the in-place families. You can create some very versatile families with parameters for height, width and length.

[christopher.zoog51272]

It shouldn't be that hard for Revit to handle. It was just couple of hundreds of simple BOXES. NOTHING MORE. I have done HUGE 4 building model on Revit and that's like over 100x more complex then this. I don't understand why Revit is so slow right now, and constantly complaining about Wall joints when THEY ARE JUST BOXES.


Ahhhh.... but they aren't just boxes..... remember revit "sees" each mass as a separate building shell with 4 (or more) walls, a roof and a floor(s), and their relationship (constraints) to each extrusion. Click on the show shell button to see what I mean. I believe revit's massing tool were meant to mass out the design of just a single building. The were crammed into release 3.0 and I don't think they have received any development attention since, rightfully so IMHO. In my 4 years using revit, I can count the number of times I've used revit's massing tools on one hand :roll:

If I were you, I would use sketch-up, you could do the terrain in revit, then export the dwg to sketchup and run with it.

But if you are really set on using revit for this, you might want to try simple inplace extrusions instead. Or better yetm export out to dwg what you have so far, delete the masses and relink them as a dwg, that might help:?

good luck!

[tatlin]

Richard,

You may want to recreate your context / urban design masses using inplace or loadable families. This will perform much more reasonably. Also, if you make the families using category Site, they will 'sit on' and follow your terrain topography.

The Massing tools in Revit are meant for single buildings and not for large scale urban design or to create many, many buildings on a site. This is primarily because of the dependent elements (walls, roofs and floors) that are generated automatically from the Mass each time you modify it. Also, each time you add a new extrusion, the rest of the Mass regenerates as well.

For cases where you do not need a 'shell' of walls, roofs, etc generated from the form, creating the extrusions using normal families will give you a better result.


It shouldn't be that hard for Revit to handle. It was just couple of hundreds of simple BOXES. NOTHING MORE.

If you'd like to discuss further, just PM me or send an email.

[christopher.zoog51272]

Richard,

You may want to recreate your context / urban design masses using inplace or loadable families. This will perform much more reasonably. Also, if you make the families using category Site, they will 'sit on' and follow your terrain topography.

The Massing tools in Revit are meant for single buildings and not for large scale urban design or to create many, many buildings on a site. This is primarily because of the dependent elements (walls, roofs and floors) that are generated automatically from the Mass each time you modify it. Also, each time you add a new extrusion, the rest of the Mass regenerates as well.

For cases where you do not need a 'shell' of walls, roofs, etc generated from the form, creating the extrusions using normal families will give you a better result.

[quote:0917585271="Richard McCarthy"]It shouldn't be that hard for Revit to handle. It was just couple of hundreds of simple BOXES. NOTHING MORE.

If you'd like to discuss further, just PM me or send an email.[/quote:0917585271]

beat you by a few seconds there matty :wink:

[Scott D Davis]

I like the idea of creating a simple "box" family as a site component, with length/width/height parameters.

Then create your site, load in a "box" and stick it on your site. Copy the box, create a new type for another size, and copy it around. Seems like in no time, you could create a nice urban planning study, without the added weight of Revit massing, whichare far more complex objects than simple boxes!

[Wes Macaulay]

We have been teaching local architects to use Revit as an urban planning tool. They model up Site-category families (so they hug terrain automatically) the represent the buildings and create a shared parameter for floor area, etc.

In their project they create the terrain model then load in the buildings. Buildig counts and gross floor area is scheduled and BAM -- urban planning 101 done in Revit.

If you don't need any mathematical analysis use an in place family; category could be generic model or site... doesn't matter much.

Massing is useful ONLY if you're going to carry on with walls and roofs after, and then you delete the massing anyway.

[tatlin]

beat you by a few seconds there matty :wink:

Hmm... yeah, the guy that owns the server always wins. :roll: Nah, that's just what happens when I try to multitask, or at least attempt to proofread before hitting submit!

BTW, will there be a spellchecker built in to the new AUGI site? I know I need it, as do many other people who post here!

[Richard McCarthy]

Wow! Thanks everyone for your answers!
I think I will try out that Site-family extrusion method, sounds exactly what I am looking for, with added bonus of Area calculation !
Thanks again!! :D