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View Full Version : Common Revit Myths... I want to hear the one's you've been hearing!



hand471037
2004-08-20, 03:47 PM
I love some of the things I hear from heavy ADT people who know nothing about Revit.

"Revit can't handle large buildings"- when once I was talking to a heavy ADT user who was complaining that his sections on a five story 30,000 sq ft building were taking over 30 minutes to generate... when Revit does the same thing in minutes. When I showed him that fact using a project in Revit the same size as the one he was doing in ADT, he said 'but Revit can't handle large buildings'. He asked me to make a major change, like move an exterior wall on the stair tower or something, and I did, and my P4 *laptop* updated the whole model, every view, and even things like the floors, stair width, and more all live and in front of him -I mean it's wasn't lightening fast, but it did it in a minute or so- he finally started listening to what I was saying, and wound up buying Revit the following week...

"Revit can't detail"- when I've been able to detail within Revit faster than I've ever been able to detail within AutoCAD, to the point that I detail in Revit and export back to Autocad rather than take the extra time to draw it in Autocad...

"Revit can't handle complex modeling like I do in Form-Z/VIZ/whatever"- that was from a heavy Form-Z user, who when I showed her the ruled curtain system, and made a very complex and curved curtain wall in several minutes, and then asked her how long something like that would take in Form-Z, she said 'a day'. That I stretched and altered the wall on the fly, as well as resized all the mullions, and asked her how long that would take her, to which she replied "I'd have to start over". then she said again that "but Revit can't handle the complex modeling I do..."

My favorite is that the codebase of Revit is 'too messy' and in some abstract way flawed- when I've seen bugs linger in AutoCAD and ADT for YEARS, simple things like display order in x-refs, or the problems with truetype fonts, or the fact that *just now* can it use more than 256 colors...

But the thing that really kills me is that there is this assumption that ADT does work well in the first place. It works, yes, and it works well for some, but this strange automatic assumption that something Revit doesn't do is something that ADT can do it is something that I'll just never get. Like assuming that ADT and ABS work flawlessly together because Revit doesn't work with ABS- when there are a myriad of issues in getting ADT and ABS working together. Or the assumption that Revit can't handle something like a 22 story building (please) coming from an ADT instructor who's probably never worked on a project that size, and has no idea what doing a 22 story building in ADT is probably like (which I would imagine would be more painful than doing it in Revit, but that's my biased assumption there :) ).

Then there's the other side of the coin too, the "me too", where Revit can do phasing, so people will say that ADT can do phasing too, when in reality there is no phasing toolset within ADT, and you're actually using Display Reps and Layers in a very complex process to have phasing (and a rather cumbersome and limited phasing as well)- something that even the ADT heavies I know talk about being *possible* but not something they really *do*.

Wes Macaulay
2004-08-20, 04:03 PM
ADT users don't use ADT. But those who have not really tried Revit say much of the same things you've said, Jeffrey. It's boneheaded, sure, but it's human nature. (Human nature is boneheaded, after all.)

The biggest problem is that few have the time and fewer will take the time to learn Revit when they're busy getting the job done. So they blow it off with some broad-brush statement that it can't handle what they do.

aaronrumple
2004-08-20, 04:13 PM
...of course much of this rhetoric came from adsk sales prior to the aquisition of Revit.

Scott D Davis
2004-08-20, 04:21 PM
Revit6.1 DOES NOT have ability to switch between different geometries within the very same object so for example you can not execute this:
imagine a railing
IF infill=glass THEN we have a FULLY PARAMETRIC glass infill
IF infill=timber THEN we have a FULLY PARAMETRIC timber infill
IF infill=lattice THEN we have a FULLY PARAMETRIC lattice infill
IF infill=horizontals THEN we have a FULLY PARAMETRIC horizontals infill Ummm...yes Revit has the abiltiy to do that through parameters and if/then type formulas built into the family.


Anybody who has ever programmed anything in GDL or BASIC has to agree that is IMPOSSIBLE to create a library part with unlimited geometry elements WITHOUT dynamic array-type variable (alias DIM[i] in AC) and loop-like statement (eg FOR...NEXT).
This particular user was certain that parametric arrays were not available in Revit, because Revit doesn't have a 'programming language' like GDL. Then I posted an example of a paramtric shelf (courtesy of Phil Read) in which the shelf brackets multiply depending on shelf length. Haven't heard back from him yet.

Cathy Hadley
2004-08-20, 05:14 PM
My personal favorite is that Revit can't do CD's... "It seems pretty useful for design, but I don't see it for CD's"... ARGH.... and in some ways I think this is perpetuated from AutoDesk itself...

I just finished my first good size set and I was very impressed and very happy with the drafting tools. I always was skeptical of the guys here who say they do even the most basic drafting task in Revit instead of the alternative .. Now I Get it !!!

BillyGrey
2004-08-20, 05:17 PM
Discussion with a peer (die-hard polyline guy):

"Revit does everything for you, I create my own roofs, I don't want it done for me automatically"

BAH!

I just finished a very complex hip roof system that, because of varying plate heights within individual rectelinear areas, etc.etc., I was forced to extrude much of it, join, cut, push/pull my hair out, and revise/refine until it actually worked, not just looked correct on paper.
It took some time.

Now I could have done it the old fashion way, and just drawn it via 45d lines over boxes "automatically" in about ten minutes, and called my plate heights out, but that would have been a little too automatic for this dude, and I would have been asking for big trouble/misunderstandings down the line.

I need to know things work before I proclaim they do, then let they guys downstream worry about it.

Revit: model it like it will build in the real world.


/rant

:)

Steve_Stafford
2004-08-20, 10:40 PM
I split Aquav's post regarding his disappointment in roofs since it is off topic for this thread and moved it to THIS THREAD (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=6451) instead. Let's try keep the subject intact...

BomberAIA
2004-08-21, 12:50 PM
I remember when Acad R13 came out, it had so many bugs I lost weeks of production time when I lost my drawings from crashes. Autodesk took no responsibility for their screw ups. When ADT came out, I tried to produce a rental project w/ it, I lost my a&&$#s. I would have been better off drawing it by hand and cut & paste the buildings together. Revit does everything better than ADT. When I get my buildings and floor plans imputed in Revit, I have design development drawings completed and I'm ready for CD's. ADT is a "Generic Drafting" program w/ a 3rd party architectectural program on top of it. It sucked then and sucks now. I was at WATG's office in Orlando and was shown a large complicated project being produced in Revit in about 6 weeks. You can not do that in Acad. If you did, it wouldn't be coordinated and would have taken more resourses to produce. That's my 2 cents.

hand471037
2004-08-27, 11:51 PM
I thought of two more myths!

1. "Revit just ripped off ideas from ArchiCAD/Vectorworks/ADT. it's really not any different, it just looks different"... when Revit's bloodline comes from PTC technologies, makers of Pro-E... And has really has more in common with Pro-E, Inventor, or Catia then it does with anything else that's out there...

2. "Whichever one sells more, Revit or ADT, will be the 'winner', to be used by everyone in the industry, and Autodesk will kill off the other"... when ADT & Revit are totally different with different markets in mind, Inventor and MDT seem to live side-by-side, and if Autodesk did get rid of Revit I highly doubt any of us Revit users would go to ADT, but instead would download trials of ArchiCAD and AllPlan...

BillyGrey
2004-08-28, 02:37 AM
Jeffey,

Re: #2

I beg to differ.
I would continue to use Revit until something better came along :)