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.
You need a cleanup routine to make the job faster and easier. Either you already have one for cleaning up architectural files for underlay in your CAD projects and can take that a bit further for Revit implementation. Or you start from scratch. I suggest getting your friendly IT person on task. Our custom command arch_underlay will explode every block and purge everything in the file and place all remaining items on one layer of grey color. We don't typically show all the toilets and sinks etc, so it's standard workflow to delete all undesired blocks prior to invoking the arch_underlay command. Failing to do so will result in time spent deleting the linework of these undesired elements in the CAD file.
Now, I'll be the first to admit, I don't always keep up with all the latest and greatest publications regarding every update for Revit, I'm a day in and day out Revit user, so I typically come across most of these things naturally. That being said, I'm really enjoying all the little tweaks and additions of the 2016 release and the 2015 update. I will cover these little additions over a couple of posts, today we’ll start with the search feature.
