Residential Design in Revit - Possible?

[Archimac]

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone is succesfully using Revit for residential design with traditional details such as corner boards, facia profiles, soffit returns, etc. It seems that there would be a lot of work to model and apply these elements just to get a decent elevation.

I have looked at Softplan and am amazed at the out of the box understanding of these elements. They can be included with one click.

Anyone have any advice?

Stan

[Allen Lacy]

Stan,

This is a school of education at a small university so the scale is not what you're looking for, but it's very traditional. Accomplished by using sweeps for the cornice and watertable. I used in-place families for the cornice stops. It can be done with not too much work. I haven't used Softplan, so I can't compare.

[Steve Jager]

I have done a fair amlount of res work with it and yes compared to Softplan and Chief Architect it does take more modeling time to create all the little bells and whisltes that the other two programs can make happen very quickly.

I would love to see Revit become a lot more automated for res work similar to these programs since 85% of the work out there is res work.

I use revit for res work becase I like the renderings it produces far better than the other porgrams. I also use chief to create kitchens and baths and their renderings and I also use Sketchup for certain presentations.

Short and long there is no one wonderful program with all the bells and whistles, but if Revit contiunes on it's current path we can only hope.

[nrenfro]

90% of the work we do is residential and most of that is very “traditional”. We love Revit and find that it dose very well for this type of work. I evaluated Softplan and was also impressed by how functional it appears to be out of the box. I suggest visiting the gallery here @ ZoogDesign. We chose to go the Revit rout because of the flexibility is offers and because it is truly Parametric. We do other type of work along with the traditional residential so flexibility was a issue for us. Bottom line is every firm has different needs and fortunately we have different tools to from pick from.

[Archimac]

Guys,

Thanks for the feed back. You are right that there is a lot more residential work out there and the software would have to be specialized. I wish Revit would have modules that focused on these specific disciplines. Maybe we will see it in the future if they come to see how important residential is.

Stan

[wfdesigns]

Our firm is also 90% residential of the high end. Revit works great. It does take a little time to produce the custom parts but if set up correctly, they can be used for other jobs as well by streching or tweaking.

[Kroke]

100% of mine is residential. Here is an old job I did last year with Revit 5.0 specific.

http://69.41.236.26/gallery/gallery2/LEFT_FRONT.jpg

[Archimac]

The examples are impressive! So how do you apply the moldings and corner boards etc. I would like to see someone do a pdf tutorial or procedure.

Stan

[sbrown]

They are all just "hosted sweeps", in place families or family components. Basically you draw the profile you want your trim and then there are many ways to apply it. ie roof base sweeps for fascias, wall based for moldings, in place for complex. For cornerboards I've created a family component that is wall based and you just set the size and height and align to the corners.

[wfdesigns]

Mouldings are done as sweeps and corner boards are created familys with parameter settings for width & thickness of boards, and a instance parameter set up for the height. You can do brick/stucco quoins as families with a instance parameter set up for each size to modify each seperatly from one another easily. As far as a tutorial look in the revit help for family tutorials. These that you are looking for are very easy to create.