Part 4 takes the conceptual forms you create in Part 3 and expands them to the real world using walls, floors, roofs, and other building components to create the elements behind a building.
Chapter 12, “Creating Walls and Curtain Walls,” delves into the use of the Wall and Curtain Wall tools.
Chapter 13, “Modeling Floors, Ceilings, and Roofs,” demonstrates a variety of ways to work with the horizontal components of a building: floors, ceilings, and roofs.
Chapter 14, “Designing with the Family Editor,” shows you how to work with parametric families to create a host of content for the building design.
Chapter 15, “Creating Stairs and Railings,” demonstrates a variety of ways and techniques to use the Stair and Railing tools – for their intended purpose and for others.
Once the building is designed, it becomes necessary to create the views and documents needed to build the project. This section shows you how to detail, document, and annotate the design.
Chapter 16, “Detailing Your Design,” works with the building design you created in previous chapters to add 2D components for documentation.
Chapter 17, “Documenting Your Design,” works with the newly created views and helps you organize them on sheets.
Chapter 18, “Annotating Your Design,” takes the next step in the documentation process and works with keynoting and dimensioning.
This section focuses on what to do once the design is resolved, taking it into the construction process and working with presentation tools.
Chapter 19, “Working in the Construction Phase,” focuses on the tools Revit has to keep track of changes during construction.
Chapter 20, “Presenting Your Design,” shows you how to take the completed design and display the results in a variety of 2D and 3D methods.
Chapter 21, “Working with Point Clouds,” teaches you how to leverage the emerging technology of LIDAR scanning and work with a point cloud in your Revit file.
Finally, three appendices supplement the chapters' coverage of Revit software features:
Appendix A, “The Bottom Line,” offers our solutions to the “Master It” questions in each chapter's “Bottom Line” section.
Appendix B, “Tips, Tricks, and Troubleshooting,” is just what the title describes – a collection of tips and tricks for troubleshooting and working effectively with Revit.
Appendix C, “Autodesk Revit Architecture Certification,” describes Autodesk's certification exam for Revit Architecture and how this book can be used as a supplementary tool for test preparation. Throughout the book, the symbol shown on the left marks significant coverage of exam objectives.
We welcome your feedback and comments. You can find the authors on Facebook at Mastering Revit, on Twitter @MasteringRevit, or via email at [email protected].
We hope you enjoy the book.
Part 1
Fundamentals
Although this book is focused on helping you master Autodesk® Revit® Architecture software, we recognize that not everyone will know how to find every tool or have a complete understanding of the workflow. The chapters in Part 1 will help you build a foundation of essential knowledge and may even give the veteran Revit user some additional insight into the basic tools and concepts of building information modeling (BIM).
● Chapter 1: Introduction: The Basics of BIM
● Chapter 2: Applying the Principles of the User Interface and Project Organization
● Chapter 3: The Basics of the Toolbox
● Chapter 4: Configuring Templates and Standards
Chapter 1
Introduction: The Basics of BIM
In this chapter, we cover principles of a successful building information modeling (BIM) approach within your office environment and summarize some of the many tactics possible using BIM in today’s design workflow. We explain the fundamental characteristics of maximizing your investment in BIM and moving beyond documentation with an information-rich model.
In this chapter, you’ll learn to:
● Understand a BIM workflow
● Leverage BIM processes
● Focus your investment in BIM
What Is Revit?
Autodesk® Revit® software is a BIM application that uses a parametric 3D model to generate plans, sections, elevations, perspectives, details, and schedules – all of the necessary instruments to document the design of a building. Drawings created using Revit are not a collection of 2D lines and shapes that are interpreted to represent a building; they are live views extracted from what is essentially a virtual building model. This model consists of a compilation of intelligent components that contain not only physical attributes but also functional behavior familiar in architectural design, engineering, and construction.
Elements in Revit are managed and manipulated through a hierarchy of parameters that we will discuss in greater detail throughout this book. These elements share a level of bidirectional associativity – if the elements are changed in one place within the model, those changes are visible in all the other views. If you move a door in a plan, that door is moved in all of the elevations, sections, perspectives, and so on in which it is visible. In addition, all of the properties and information about each element are stored within the elements themselves, which means that most annotation is merely applied to any view and is transient in nature. When contrasted with traditional CAD tools that store element information only in the annotation, Revit gives you the opportunity to more easily extract, report, and organize your project data for collaboration with others.
Before we get started with a detailed examination of Revit, let’s take a step back and develop a better understanding of the larger concepts of building information modeling and how they will affect your practice of architecture.
According to the National Institute of Building Sciences (www.nibs.org), a BIM is defined as “a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility” that serves as a “shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions during its life cycle from inception onward.” Although this is the definition of the noun used to represent the electronic data, the verb form of building information modeling is equally important. BIM is both a tool and a process, and one cannot realistically exist without the other. This book will help you to learn one BIM tool – Revit Architecture – but it will also teach you about the BIM process.
Building information modeling implies an increased attention to more informed design and enhanced collaboration. Simply installing an application like Revit and using it to replicate your current processes will yield limited success. In fact, it may even be more cumbersome than using traditional CAD tools.
Regardless of the design and production workflow you have established in the past, moving to BIM is going to be a change. To begin, we’ll cover some of the core differences between a CAD-based system and a BIM-based one.
Moving to BIM is a shift in how designers and contractors approach the design and documentation process throughout the entire life cycle of the project, from concept to occupancy. In a traditional CAD-based workflow, represented