Go Further with Revit

[Clyne Curtis]

I just returned from the Lynn Allen "Go Further" presentation, and it was pretty good. I attended the break-out session for architects and they talked 10 to 15 minutes on ADT 2005, and then spent the rest of the time talking about Revit. Way cool stuff, as usual! BTW, is it just me, or does the new Sheet Set Manager for ACAD 2005 look and feel like the Revit browser.....go figure.....
Just wondering.

Clyne

"I Revit, therefore I am."

[Scott D Davis]

Was it actually Lynn giving this presentation? She is an "OttoCAD" programming guru, and I'm really interested to hear about her views on Revit. If anyone was ever more "Pro-AutoCAD" it would be her. If she's bought into the change to Revit, it says huge things about the direction Autodesk is headed.

[christie.landry]

Lynn did the main session that was AutoCAD focused and the Autodesk AEs did the industry breakout sessions that included ADT and Revit presentations.

Note that Lynn has published her desktop guide for her top ten tips for the AutoCAD and Revit Series though.

Christie Landry
Autodesk
Revit Product Marketing Manager

[Clyne Curtis]

No, she gave the "What's New in Autocad 2005" presentation and then conducted the break-out session for Inventor and mechanical engineering. She does know her Autocad stuff, though. The Revit session was run by a couple of architects, I forget their names, and they demoed how they have implemented Revit into their offices. It was very informative for all the current non-converts who were in attendance. In reply to my question one of the Autodesk Revit guys did say that they were working on the building systems (HVAC, electrical, mechanical) for Revit as well as well as structural enhancements but he couldn't or wouldn't tell us when we would see that.

Clyne

[hand471037]

Clyne,

When I was at the 2005 'boot camp' for resellers (to get us up to speed on the new product) and we were shown the sheet set things all I could do was laugh (but not in a mean way). It's very revit like, but not at all like Revit, all at the same time. It's got the feature, but not the idea, and that's where the rub lies.

At the time, I remember thinking that it was as if I had been driving a BMW when everyone else had been driving Chevys. Now, my BWM doesn't leak oil, and it has a computer brain that helps control the brakes and traction so that I can just drive where I need to go. Everyone else's Chevy leaks oil, and doesn't do a thing to help them in terms of brakes and traction. But then Chevy sees my BWM, and see that it's cool, and wants to make a car like mine.

So, ok now, I go to see a demo of the new 2005 Chevy. It doesn't leak oil anymore, and now it helps you with brakes and traction control. Great! However, it's not that they made it not leak oil anymore, it's that they added a catch-basin under the engine, along with a hose and a pump that will pump the leaked oil back into the engine when I remember to push a button on the dashboard of the car (which if I forget to do the oil will overflow the basin and cause bigger problems than the leak did). And the Traction Control and Brake systems both require me to preset them to what the road conditions are going to be, using a complex series of levers, and if I have to change those settings (because I'm no longer on the freeway, let's say) then I've got to pull of to the side of the road and stop the car first.

I honestly like the new sheet features in 2005. I think it will be great for many people, for it's finally an easy way to batch plot in AutoCAD. However I think that most will just use it in this capacity, for when we did the Boot Camp, it took us almost 20 mins just to make a callout that referenced a sheet so that it would fill itself out. Add to that the fact that any changes to the sheet numbers and such have to made via the sheet set manager, otherwise it simply breaks your sheets, and I see it being another feature of AutoCAD/ADT that few really fully use, IMHO.

And I see it as something else that will draw people toward Revit, for while AutoCAD/ADT can now do sheets, it's somewhat painful, so when they see that it's simply done for them within Revit I can see it being just another reason to consiter the switch.

I, too, have heard rumors of a 'alpha' Revit Building systems out there, but have no details. Would love to hear more!

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Jeffrey,

Couldn't agree more. Features are one thing, Accessing and managing those features is whole other animal.
The beauty of Revit is the way all this funcionalty was built-in, from the ground up, to do all this stuff. No setup, no fussing about. It is, simply put, a CAD manager's dream.

[Prodev75]

Jeffrey,

Couldn't agree more. Features are one thing, Accessing and managing those features is whole other animal.
The beauty of Revit is the way all this funcionalty was built-in, from the ground up, to do all this stuff. No setup, no fussing about. It is, simply put, a CAD manager's dream.

Amen to that


I just returned from the Lynn Allen "Go Further" presentation, and it was pretty good. I attended the break-out session for architects and they talked 10 to 15 minutes on ADT 2005, and then spent the rest of the time talking about Revit. Way cool stuff, as usual! BTW, is it just me, or does the new Sheet Set Manager for ACAD 2005 look and feel like the Revit browser.....go figure.....
Just wondering.

Clyne

"I Revit, therefore I am."


When Autodesk acquired Revit I think it brought new direction. They probably just borrowed a little code. No harm in that.

[Wes Macaulay]

Jeffrey -- your metaphor of sheet sets being the [second] oil pan under a Chevy made me laugh, if painfully:

a) I own a Chevy
b) you're dead on

I don't know how much Sheet Sets are going to be implemented. I think they should, but like all things in AutoCAD, they're complicated and you have to obey a lot of rules for them to work. And architects are terrible at obeying rules.

[aaronrumple]

AutoCAD/ADT has become too "fragile". There are too many ways a user can break links, explode objects, and subvert the very idea of BIM. A BIM system in which you can corrupt the BIM database so easily, isn't going to be a very powerfull BIM system.

[Steve_Stafford]

The greatest potential weakness of every "database" is trust. If you don't trust the data, you won't use it.

[hand471037]

You know, more and more, I'm relising that the real game here is not what the computer can do, but how accessible it is for the target user.

Look at it this way: I've been learning lots of unix stuff of late. I love some of the things one can do with it, it's vastly more powerful than anything on the Windows side. However, not too many people ever used Unix, 'cept for servers or in an academic useage. Then comes along Apple, and they go and build their next-gen OS over the top of BSD Unix, and now you've got a much larger portion of the world enjoying that power of Unix, because it was made much more accessible without being dumbed down or crippled.

As that old Revit inc. whitepaper says, drawing on the computer is a problem that's been solved. Many times over. And I hear, over and over, when showing people Revit, about things like Arch-T that did some of these things years and years ago that Revit does today (but in a much more limited capacity). The issue here isn't what they (the developers, I mean) can make the computer do, it's how accessible they can make it while not crippling the power that computers give us to manage and manipulate information.

So now we've got sheet sets in AutoCAD/ADT vs. Revit. Sure, it's not rocket science to add sheets to AutoCAD/ADT, any team of compenent developers should be able to do something like that. However it's much harder to make sheets something that's so easy to use that you wonder why you ever worked any other way. But that's where the real value is today in terms of IT I feel, the real value of that market. It's no longer 'how do we make the computer do X' it's 'How can we write software that helps people do X'.

[gmak]

My 2 pence worth...(as a Revit user for only around 2 months)

I'm very interested to hear what you've all been saying about ADT vs. Revit; particularly the sheet sets in 2005.

I was a microstation user for years, but finally got sick of messing about trying to get compatibility with consultants who all seemed to use Autocad based products. I know Microstation V8 is (supposed to be) directly compatible with DWG, but in practice I was finding the compatibility a bit hit & miss. So, I made the jump to Autocad.
Got myself a subscription and license for ADT 2004.
Did some training and dove in to using it in production.

As a small (one man) practice, production time vs. design time is very important to me. While I found that I could crank out 2D work pretty quickly (much as I did when I used Microstation), but this sort of defeats the purpose of having ADT. In using ADT for BIM, I was finding that I was having to do things the way that ADT would allow me rather than the way that I wanted them. I can only assume that this is in some way due to the mechanical legacy of Autocad. However, I perservered and spent weeks trying to get wall joins working, figuring out the arcane way in which to create wall types, etc. I thought I was getting the hang of things.

When they released ADT 2005, I got my subscription upgrade and was pretty excited about the new features (like sheet sets). However, I also noted that Autodesk had released a new version of Revit. So, I got my distributor to send me a demo CD and I began to look at what Revit had to offer.

Wow!!!

As a test, I decided to try to port an ongoing project from ADT into Revit. What had taken me weeks to do in ADT, I did in a weekend with Revit. I haven't looked back. I called my distributor and had them change my subscription from ADT to Revit (this is one of the benefits of the whole Subscription system).

Having used both products as a relative newcomer (which many of you will know from some of the silly questions I've been asking over the last few weeks), I have to say that Revit is far more effective as an architectural tool. Where ADT forces you to do things its way, Revit does things in (what seems to me) a logical way. In ADT you are building a computer model which you'll treat as a building, in Revit you are building a building which is in the form of a computer model. (Does that make any sense?)

Clearly the two products are approaching things from very different directions, but there are also some very fundamental differences that make Revit more useful and practical. To me (so far) these are:


Automatic updates throughout the project. ADT doesn't do this automatically, you have to regenerate sections, etc. In Revit it just happens; there is no need to worry that your information is not fully up-to-date.
Creating new elements (families). The way you make things for use in your project is like making them in reality with Revit. In ADT it seemed more like you were programming.
The Sheet Set tools in ADT were impressive, but too complex. As was the Project Navigator. Both seem to be simply another way of viewing XREFs and Paperspace. The Revit interface is simple. clear and concise.
Yes, I can already see things in Revit that I wish were better, and things that I wish were in there. The spline tools need some serious improvement and 3-d sweeps along 3d paths would be a big improvement. We could all come up with a long list. But, I found the same problems (and more) in ADT.

I can see where a firm with a long legacy of Autocad would need something like ADT in order to maintain backwards compatibility and avoid roll-out costs in changing software platforms. However, for companies making the switch to BIM or from other products Revit is simply the best solution.