Wood Framing - The residential kind...

Lets talk about wood framing and Revit...they're not exactly best friends.  Which gives us oh so very much to talk about...especially when we get into those pesky residential condo / residential long term healthcare projects.  How can we keep track of hundreds of moving walls, door and windows openings, their associated columns, beams, headers and joists?   How do we deal with an exponentially greater amount of elements in a model while keeping within a much smaller, tighter budget structure.  To me, wood framing in Revit is the last material frontier, full a challenges, frustrations and workarounds.  It's a continually evolving process in pursuit of a simple cost efficient workflow.

The focus of this next series of posts will be all about wood framing.  Beginning with the first challenge, software.  I would estimate, at this time, the majority of the larger scale wood framed projects are being done in Revit, while some smaller condo / commercial wood framing buildings are still CAD.  This is a very general observation, because just like ourselves, some architects are well-versed in Revit or are even Revit only offices.  This means, we need to work with both types of software and produce an identical finished product and this requires two very different processes.

The second challenge of wood framed projects is graphics.  Whether incorporating CAD or Revit plans, there are necessary workarounds required to graphically display backgrounds and structural elements cohesively.  Thirdly, what revisions and additions to the Revit content will simply your workflow and help get the project done quickly.

Next time, we'll dive right in beginning with CAD plans as Revit backgrounds.

Revit Gifts

 Simple things that amuse simple minds continues....

Here's another sweet little addition to the ribbon.  This is definitely not helpful for everyone, but I definitely have a habit of editing content on the fly. Especially those new things I've just made and need tweaks,  I can have dozens of families open on a template editing day, now which I no longer be manually going back (scrolling that windows list) and then closing each one.

I'm all for eliminating repetitive work, so how about only writing SECTION once, instead of 200 times for everyone of those sections details you made?  Yes please.  So here we have title on sheet, now with the pull-down containing previously used text.