Revit in China

[BomberAIA]

I was in Beijing for 2 months as an architectural consultant. No one has heard of Revit. They all use AutoCad. There is a large market that know one is pursuing. Maybe it's because they will break the code and have illegal copies on their PC's. Are there any AUGI members in China?

[arqt49]

Break the code?
If you do a torrent search, you will always find a cracked revit!
And I do not beileve the chinese government filters the internet for thing like crack software. Only dalai lama and political stuff.
If they don't know about revit, that's another story.
I guess their labour cost doesn't compensate an upgrade to BIM ;)

[Andre Carvalho]

I'm sure Autodesk is trying to reach that market. China just hosted Autodesk University China a few months ago....

Autodesk also did the same with Autodesk University Japan as well.

Andre Carvalho

[dbaldacchino]

I wonder what would happen if Revit gains widespread use in China. If more outsourcing groups crop up there, we might face some seriously tough times! Probably firms will soon learn that you've just infused more communication and management problems and the rewards are almost negligible, if at all existant. But then, I have no experience of outsourcing, yet.

[Henry D]

I wonder what would happen if Revit gains widespread use in China. If more outsourcing groups crop up there, we might face some seriously tough times! Probably firms will soon learn that you've just infused more communication and management problems and the rewards are almost negligible, if at all existant. But then, I have no experience of outsourcing, yet.


I would be more worried about outsourcing to India..they have a lot of well educated technical people who speak English. The language barrier in China will make it more difficult for outsourcing. I know a developer who outsourced his drawings to India and he paid about 1/5 of what it would have cost me to do it.

[Brian Myers]

I'm sure Autodesk is trying to reach that market.

Actually, Autodesk views Asia as its next big market sector, they'll likely be pushing it big time over the next few years.

[ajayholland]

At a recent LARUG (Los Angeles Revit Users Group) meeting, practitioners from RTKL presented a project designed in Revit and intended for construction on “the mainland”.

As in many other locations here (U.S.) and abroad, Revit is just beginning to be adopted in China. Also be aware that the organization of the design and construction professions is quite different there than elsewhere.

The project presented was a 50+ storey high-rise, designed and documented through the DD stage, and then turned over to the local jurisdiction and “design institute” for completion of construction documents (in AutoCAD).

In our current global economy, outsourcing is not a threat; it is merely a strategy that contains both risk and benefit.

~AJH

[BomberAIA]

They have firms that just do CD's. However, all the young graduates speak some English. They use SketchUp, Photoshop and Powerpoint for all their presentations. All their keyboards are in English, but when they type, the computer translates to Mandarin. I made a 3D presentation in Revit, they were all amazed. I found many principals educated in the US. That's my take on my observations while i was there.

[BomberAIA]

Oh, one other thing I forgot. When I was in DC as a principal, my firm outsourced to Mexico using AutoCad. They charged $5.00 per hour. They could only get the drawings ready for CD's. There were a lot of mistakes.

[iankids]

In the dark old days (when I was using AutoCad), I once, when under the pump with a horrendous workload, tried to outsource a drawing to a number of different companies in India.

I must say that it was a complete and unmitigated disaster. The lack of actual building knowledge meant that drawings were returned with:

Doors the wrong size
Wall drawn with incorrect thicknesses
Simple Sections with numerous design - construction errors
Plans and elevations which didn't match each other etc etc etc

I spent more time fixing things up (as you do), than I would have spent doing it correctly myself.

I shudder to think what a revit model would come back like!

I think that overseas outsourcing may work for something like rendering / photoshop etc where no one expects to construct from the image, but otherwise, I would always employ a local junior, who will be easy to guide sitting at the next desk.

Cheers,

Ian

[hand471037]

I think a huge factor in this is the whole 'design institute' thing.

Y'all might not know this, but I think you've always got to turn your building design over to a local 'design institute' who actually is the one who does the CD's when doing work in China. It's actually a government thing that they have to be the local 'Architect of Record' if you will. Most of them from what I know use AutoCAD to do that work.

So while earlier design phases can be BIM, until the local design institutes migrate to BIM it's still going to be a lot of AutoCAD in China for now. From what I understand larger firms working in China and using BIM are trying to team up with the local design institute earlier in the project ala IPD styles of working so that they can at least make use of the BIM models even if they aren't working in BIM yet.

[William Troeak]

I have worked with a Revit consultant from China and got some great results. He is able to turn projects around very quickly and it almost creates a 24 hour a day firm.

But one bump we ran into early on in the process was the conversion and translation of text. Some of the early families that we where seeing from him contained Chinese characters for names. After a few rounds of translation and discussion the problem was resolved.

If you can deal with the langue barrier it would be a great experience at least once in your career to see how people in other countries approach the same task.

[Chad Smith]

I think a huge factor in this is the whole 'design institute' thing.

Y'all might not know this, but I think you've always got to turn your building design over to a local 'design institute' who actually is the one who does the CD's when doing work in China. It's actually a government thing that they have to be the local 'Architect of Record' if you will. Most of them from what I know use AutoCAD to do that work.
I can second this. At my last company we had our head office in Australia, and a few offices in China. The CD work was done locally and then emailed over there where I believe they were then approved by their 'design institute' body, and they required DWGs.


But one bump we ran into early on in the process was the conversion and translation of text. Some of the early families that we where seeing from him contained Chinese characters for names. After a few rounds of translation and discussion the problem was resolved.
I also understand that we had to pay for someone in China to translate our AutoCAD drawings. In the end I wrote up a VBA program that listed the english notes in a dialogue, and you selected which note you wanted to place, and it placed the english and chinese version in the project. Obviously this didn't cover all the notes, so we still required translation, but it cut the cost and turn around time down as there wasn't as much to translate. As new notes were sent back to our head office, we added them to our translation database.
I'm not sure what is happening now with their Revit use.