Revit MEP Does Not Work...Yet

[jarom]

I implore you all. Do not waste your time, money and company resources on a program that can not even create a line for a simple site plan. For what most of us use to diagram a set of drawings, is it really worth more to do lighting calculations. this way, but it it does not even do point to point so that is not that great either.

This program is like buy a Ferrari with no tires and no engine. Looks fast and like it should be a great preformer, but ultimately it is just a car on blocks. It promises improvement in speed, but you still have to finish the fundamental processes in AutoCAD. It take me twice as long to do a simple 10,000 sqft building in Revit than it does to do it in AutoCAD, Excel, Visual and Word. Revit was supposed to eliminate all that.

Don't Waste your money, the program is not ready. I have no doubt that it will be some day. Architecturally it works great. But don't sucome to the pressure of an architect to use it for Electrical, Mechanical, and/or Plumbing. It is not ready and the Autodesk support is just not there to help either.

[mjdanowski]

I implore you all. Do not waste your time, money and company resources on a program that can not even create a line for a simple site plan. For what most of us use to diagram a set of drawings, is it really worth more to do lighting calculations. this way, but it it does not even do point to point so that is not that great either.

This program is like buy a Ferrari with no tires and no engine. Looks fast and like it should be a great preformer, but ultimately it is just a car on blocks. It promises improvement in speed, but you still have to finish the fundamental processes in AutoCAD. It take me twice as long to do a simple 10,000 sqft building in Revit than it does to do it in AutoCAD, Excel, Visual and Word. Revit was supposed to eliminate all that.

Don't Waste your money, the program is not ready. I have no doubt that it will be some day. Architecturally it works great. But don't sucome to the pressure of an architect to use it for Electrical, Mechanical, and/or Plumbing. It is not ready and the Autodesk support is just not there to help either.

I think this is something which has been stressed by the majority of the people using Revit MEP to come through here. However I have to add that a lot of the frustrations you are probably seeing are probably due to the fact that you are unfamiliar with the software.

Revit MEP has a lot of downfalls, but if you know what they are and you (more importantly) know how to get around them the whole process of dealing with the software becomes a lot easier.

That being said, you are right. The work required to get reasonable drawings created is a large setback with MEP.
It is great that we can do all analysis in one place, but if we have to split up the programs needed to present that work then all Revit MEP becomes is a really limited set of analysis tools tools which have to be ported to AutoCAD anyway.
The advantage of Revit MEP for engineers will be to take information directly from Architectural elements, do analysis on it, and then link that directly to drawings. When you can't do the latter phase of that, then there is no point of bothering in the first place.

[Paul.Hellawell]

I have just finished documenting 5 pump stations under a bridge all in MEP and Structure. While it wasn't flawless. It worked fine and was definately quicker than using AutoCAD. Particularly as the design changed serveral times during documentation. It can handle lines on site plans just fine (Site riticulation I am talking about). Also try doing clash detection inside AutoCAD. I agree its not 100% finished and has its quirks. But with a little determination you can document jobs in it. Our HVAC guys are singing its praises too, although they still have alot of family creation to do before it works as they want it.