We have been approached by a museum to model their building in 3D.

Their goal is to take all drawings and consolidate them into something managable and reliable. In addition to having a coordinated set of as builts, they are hoping to leaverage BIM capabiliities for some maintainance and FM. The model will then be used for any future work reducing the need for re-surveying.

This isn't too much of a problem in theory. The reality is that the current drawings don't really give much of a clue as to what is going on vertically. They look like decent plans but when you come to trace over them, you ask yourself "what is that? and why does this wall look like it was concieved by Escher as the inside face becomes an outside face!"

The size and complexity of the building is scary. They want me to make "something simple" and refine it later as we go. I like to model accurately from the ground up but it looks like I'll have to be flexible in my approach. Some walls are irregular shapes so I guess I should use in place families to mass'em out although I would hazard a guess that it's non parallel dry walling. The worse part is that columns don't line through on each level. 2D drawings are brilliant works of fiction and Revit doesn't blag!

Anyone got ideas for work flow and client approach for working up an as-built model. It's due to the lack of understanding about modelling that is hurting. I was asked to just do plans and not worry about elevations for now!