Revit

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tkb

tkb

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MA
Anyone here using Revit for their designs?

I use it every day designing pad layouts, electric rooms, underground conduit and equipment racks for installation and prefab.
 
I taught myself AutoCAD in the late 90’s.
I have dabbled for years.

I took a one week course on Revit about 5 years ago, but never really used it until the last two years.
Revit can be very frustrating until you start to understand the program and it’s nuances.
 
I used to, but now I just do everything in Chief Architect.... I think I’m on X11.

It’s primarily for residential architectural design... but, I do some high end custom homes, and I use it for my lighting designs and E-sheets. A lot of the residential architects are using it, and if you want to work off their base plan, you’ve got to have it. If they’re working in CAD, it works for that too.

I use it for minor CAD work in the commercial space and design-build floorplans. I have my own CAD blocks I typically use, and drawing sheets set up. All of the commercial architects are working in CAD, so the chief architect program really works well for me to cover all my bases. Essentially we’re probably doing the same thing but through different programs.


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Joe Villani said:
No, but a couple of questions:

Did you know CAD prior?

How was the learning curve?

Thanks
Joe
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I had about 15 years experience with AutoCAD before getting dropped into a Revit project. How "was" the learning curve? Geez, if I didn't have a sharp contact in our BIM/CAD department to run to, I couldn't count the number of additional hours I would have wasted spent using Revit. What's worse is that not all our jobs are Revit, and the "selection" conventions, to mention one, are reversed between AutoCAD and Revit. It's the same freak'n company!! There may be value added for the customer using Revit, especially with multiple trades and someone (usually the architect) wrangling the base model(s), but if you're doing solo work I can't see it.
 
There are several differences between Revit and AutoCAD and how the interface works, but after getting the hang of Revit I wouldn’t go back to AutoCAD.
I can do a job in Revit much faster than I could in AutoCAD.
 
gadfly56 said:
I had about 15 years experience with AutoCAD before getting dropped into a Revit project. How "was" the learning curve? Geez, if I didn't have a sharp contact in our BIM/CAD department to run to, I couldn't count the number of additional hours I would have wasted spent using Revit. What's worse is that not all our jobs are Revit, and the "selection" conventions, to mention one, are reversed between AutoCAD and Revit. It's the same freak'n company!! There may be value added for the customer using Revit, especially with multiple trades and someone (usually the architect) wrangling the base model(s), but if you're doing solo work I can't see it.
Click to expand...

Autocad was developed in the 1980s. When it started we didn’t have “mice”, we had digitizers. The whole mouse interface that we are all familiar with now was an Apple Lisa thing that most operating systems adopted. Autocad predates that. In pretty much every GUI if you are creating something new you select the object then click on it type things to create it. To edit or modify something that already exists though first you select it, then choose an action. Autocad though has you choose an action THEN select what you want it to act on. That’s the default at least. Slowly some things have crept in that do some actions the “Windows way” but the traditional interface is still there. There are tons of other small examples where things in Autocad are done in the traditional (predating Windows, MacOS/X) Autocad way compared to today’s more uniform approach. It drives newbies crazy,

In contrast Revit was born after GUIs sort of became standardized. So it does things more the “Windows way” that drives traditional cad users crazy. It’s a separate programming team, probably a company Autodesk bought.

Another big difference is that Revit works on objects, kind of like solid modelers. So a beam is...a beam. You stretch a beam or change the type of beam. You can cut it or notch it. You can change materials which affects weights and costs.

Autocad is a drawing program. Everythjng in Autocad is a line or maybe a polygon. A beam is just a collection of lines in 3D space. You can extend lines or cut them. But you then have to stitch the ends back together. Notching means drawing lines to represent a notch. Changing beams means deleting a group of lines and inserting new ones. It has no ides what a bill of materials or a weight is.

Autocad Electrical is pretty cool but it is essentially a database system and macros running on top of Autocad. If you go in and modify a wire with standard drawing tools, Autocad Electrical has no idea what you did and will be messed up from that point on. Acad Electrical though is heavily oriented towards panel builders and industrial drawings.
 
Most commands in auto cad work either way - you can select the objects and then pick the command, or you can select the command first, and then pick the objects. Its very flexible. And there are lots of nifty shortcuts you can do with the element handles, like dragging the corner or side of a rectangle. Or you can pick an object, then press space bar once to move it, twice to scale it, and three times to rotate it.
Revit, not so much. It’s very inflexible. You have to press control to add items to the selection which makes no sense at all. The tab button is needed for making sleections in about 5 different ways.

And I hate trying to pick an object in the middle of a drawing, and it selects the title block when you can’t even see the title block because you are zoomed into one small area - but that’s just how Revit works.

And I don’t think the learning curve ever flattens- I’m still learning more and more.

But yes, even given all that, I still prefer it to auto cad.
 
I do almost all of my designs in Revit now. I like the way it handles panel schedules, load calcs, equipment schedules, and things of that nature.

I was proficient with AutoCAD before and didn't think the learning curve was too bad, but I'm also a younger guy who likes learning new technology. There are significant differences from AutoCAD and it will take some time to get your templates and families built the way you want.
 
steve66 said:
And I hate trying to pick an object in the middle of a drawing
Click to expand...

Trying to select object was driving me insane, until I learned that you can hold the mouse near the thing you want to select and hit tab to cycle through selecting each object near your pointer. So its move mouse near thing I want to select, then hit tab a couple times until the desired object is highlighted.

Been playing with revit for a little bit now, mainly using it for conceptual drawings of a couple things I will be building.

I REALLY like Revit + greenlee bendworks for conduit. Install all the conduits in the model, run it through bendworks which aligns couplings, deals with bend radii, etc, then spits out a file you can give to the supply house (well if your supply house has the fancy bending system) and you get back a ready to install pile of precise cut and cnc bent pipe.
 
Todd0x1 said:
Trying to select object was driving me insane, until I learned that you can hold the mouse near the thing you want to select and hit tab to cycle through selecting each object near your pointer. So its move mouse near thing I want to select, then hit tab a couple times until the desired object is highlighted.
Click to expand...

Yes, tab to select different objects that are close to each other. Also tab to select circuits. And tab to cycle through dimension snaps (edge of wall, center of wall, ...) And tab to select chains of objects (like several walls). Here is something that describes the many uses of the tab key:


But my basic point is that Autocad never puts us through all that nonsense. Selecting objects is probably the most basic function of a drafting program. Autocad does it right. Revit does not.

I should have clarified the learning curve a little. A lot of it is stuff most electricians probably don't need: rendering, making brick walls look like brick and so on. And a lot of the learning curve has to do with worksharing and collaboration. Just doing electrical plans probably wouldn't be too hard to learn. But working with linked architectural files and work sharing with multiple people working in the same file at the same time adds to the complexity.
 
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