Best practice urban design

[AP23]

We are evaluating if Revit is suitable for urban design. So far we have used Revit to create surrounding buildings as a background for the main buildings, but we haven't done any medium sized or real large urban design. The fact that you can import cad data and pick the lines to create 3d geometry works really well, but it's very time consuming to ad details like the hip roofs, what we always do. The urban designers in our firm prefer to use SU or 3ds max, because you can quickly create volumes, ad vertices and pull to create roofs. But you can't schedule the area in these programs.

Going through the documentations, Autodesk recommends 3ds max for urban design or to create surrounding buildings,

Any thoughts on Revit and urban design?

If you do use Revit, what is your process. Do you create all the volumes in one in place family, or do you create each building in its own family?

[ron.sanpedro]

I like Revit for the ability to schedule areas, but you are somewhat limited in that you can't do formulas in schedules as I would like, so you are forced into Excel. But the ability to do massing and calculate basic site coverage and density stuff, which SU certainly doesn't do, should be nice.
That said, this is somewhat theoretical, as we are only just talking with our Planning group about Revit's capabilities. But I am hopeful that the areas will be useful, and that some other things will prove fruitful as well.

Best,
Gordon

[Steve_Stafford]

Fundamentally a Revit project is centered around a "building". Can you do more, yes but you may hit a wall at a certain scale and level of detail. Once you get bigger than a two mile diameter for scope (pretty big for a building but not so big for a city) you'll start pushing the underlying design assumptions of Revit. That said SketchUP doesn't really like getting really big either.

Autodesk suggests Max (or Maya now) because they own it and would like to sell you the software but also because it is designed for the presentation aspect of design and the scale. But unfortunately it doesn't address the planning issues from a complete documentation standpoint or help resolve practical business considerations. This leaves a nice void between the two tools to fill. A Revit Site/Planning tool needs to be able to be "big" while gracefully managing the data associated with specific buildings. For now it seems Site/Civil planner's thirst remains to be quenched unless they only need the engineering tools in Civil 3D.