ACA to Revit Day 36

Have still had many distractions, but I am slugging along my discovery trail. Let me say I am still impressed with Revit's capability to update all things from any place. That interactive feature is the one thing ACA was desperately missing. That being said, there is a long way for Revit developers to go to get it ready for a full production software. I am astounded at the kinds of things that are not included in the OOTB. For example, the door families that I've seen so far do not have the ability to adjust the door swing angle built in. This is something that every single firm using Revit has to "customize." That seems ridiculous to me.

THAT being said, Revit is just another tool with advnatages and disadvantages like every other software out there. The current challenge (other than creating adjustable door swings) is to get the model looking the way we need on the plotted sheets. We have items that need to show dashed on floor plan and solid in RCP. But I'd like to able to make it so that end users don't have to go around changing these kinds of things. Architects and modellers need to just be able to focus on getting the building built so to speak, as opposed to getting things to display properly. So far this seems to be a tall order!

Revit Day 27

Not much progress made. Rolled over some ACA 2009 licenses and <> now I can't save my progress. But from what I've seen so far, the things I need to use in Revit 2010 have not changed.

Further observations about the transition: not everyone in our firm is going to be able to cross over. As it is said, Revit is more like building a building than drawing plans, so those folks who don't concern themselves with a half inch of sheathing when they are laying out walls are in for a rude awakening or a new line of work. For our first project, we'll likely have to concede that the lineweights and stuff won't look just like we want it.

ACA to Revit: Day 7

Okay, so I am counting weekends in my 90 days, since I at least think about this stuff all the time.

Received Paul Aubin's "Mastering." It is WAY better than anything I've looked at in the days leading up to the official countdown.

So far, I'm not too worried about learning copy, draw, and trim; those are the easy things. What I need to know is how to manage exceptions. For example, my firm includes cased openings in the door schedule, contrary to Aubin and out of the box content presumption. Am I going to be able to get a cased opening scheduled?

My thoughts so far regarding Revit itself: The biggest advantage I see so far is the paramentric whole-model editing. One of the biggest challenges for architectural firms is managing follow through. In Revit, if you need to change the space between floors fairly late in design, there's a whole lot less to worry about in sections, elevations, etc.

My thoughts about the transition process from ACA to Revit: Firstly, I equate the process to learning a new language. I know the new language has verbs and nouns like English does, but I don't quite know how they go together or the words for them. Similarly, I know there are levels, walls and a file structure, but I don't really know how they go together or what they are called.
Secondly, the part about the transition that messes with me the most is the initial inexactness of placing views and objects and things. Much of the time, it seems like I just have to "slop it in," then refine locations after they are in place. Granted, Revit makes it easy to fix and align later, but there's much less precision in it than us anal AutoCad people are comfortable. It's possible I haven't discovered how yet, but so far I am still twitching because my title block text isn't aligned within .00000001"!

ACA to Revit : Day 1

So what’s the biggest challenge so far? Interruptions! I have to learn Revit while still being a full service CAD manager. Wouldn’t you know it was a day where a user had registry issue and needed a complete re-install. Gaaah!

From another perspective, learning something from scratch helps me remember what it was like to know no CAD or at least no 3D. For example, I needed to know how to get line work to print in grayscale. Is it in the print settings? In the line weights? Elsewhere? Something so small becomes a challenge to ferret out.

Paul Aubin’s book Mastering Revit Architecture ought to be delivered tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it. (Thanks, Paul, for all you do.)

Subject Change!

In the words of Homer Simpson—“Doh!”

I was going to continue my thoughts about “do-overs” but something more pressing has come to the surface. I need to learn Revit and I need to learn it now. I knew this day was coming, but my plan was to casually learn it throughout the rest of this year and be ready for a project team to begin learning at the turn of the year. Not so much! I guess Autodesk has done wonderful marketing Revit to our clients somehow. Revit is great. Revit is the future. Revit is the only way to implement BIM. If the firm you hire isn’t using Revit, then they are behind the times. Any or all of this has been coming out the mouths of those chasing work for us. I fail to see why an organization who gets a building also needs a Revit model. I’d be curious to know what school districts and other institutions do with a Revit package. The only thing I can think of is that they do their own as-built or have grand designs on a facility management system. Anyway, competition is fierce and Revit is not an option, it’s the rule for more and more potential projects.

My point in blogging about this is to share day to day how I go about learning Revit and later implementing it under the duress of a non-existent budget and very short timelines. The problem in speaking to some people who have already gone through this particular fire is that the usual answer is, “I dunno, I just sort of did it!” If this whole thing is a bust and I don’t do so well, then you can see how not to do it and I’ll probably be advertising for a job. If I succeed under ridiculous demands, then you’ve got a decent model to follow if you need to do the same. My hope is to document one way to make the switch from ACA to Revit. Did I mention I’m attempting to do it 90 days without the assurance of formal training? Wish me luck!

"Do Overs" Part One

I recently read an article about the challenges and trends of firms moving from 2d to 3d. This is precisely the reason I was hired at my current workplace. Up until then, although they were on subscription, they were pretty much using cad the same way they had been since about 1999. Never having an official CAD manager, they welcomed whoever had interest or talent to set up the software. What they ended up with was a version of then-called Architectural Desktop, stripped down to say, AutoCAD release 12, and then built back up with very firm-specific customizations. The result for long time users of the tool was that they were very efficient, but also couldn’t use an out-of-the-box version to save their lives! Happily, the management group decided to take the plunge to 3D and leave the old version behind. That was when I arrived on the scene as the first full time CAD Manager ever staffed. Actually, this was a first for me as well. Up to this point, I had done CAD management only part time. So naturally there are some things I would have done differently.

Since 3D had been more of a conversation than an activity for several years, expectations were high. The new software needed to be ready and rolled out right away. If I could have a “do-over” I would have insisted that I learn the firm standards really well by playing drafter for an entire project with whoever the hot shot project team was. This didn’t sound like a good idea to me at the time because I was more than happy to be leaving production drafting behind at that point. So I learned the standards by trial and error, depending who I asked, and therefore had a lot of mini do-overs when creating tools and content.

Another thing I should have jettisoned right away was the order to keep the software as out of the box as possible. A bit too late I learned what that really meant was, “Use the out of the box content, but we don’t want the look of our plans to change”—an impossibility. I’m happy to say I was at least wise enough to leave all the menus, cui’s, and shortcut keys intact as installed. However, the tool palettes and the overall look and ease-of-use of the content had to be overhauled and customized. Two years later I’m still finding things that still need to be made available!

This is just the technical side of my “Foolish CAD Manager” woes. Part two of this train of thought will address the training process. (Oy!)

Stay to Play--and Contribute

Spring has sprung in sunny California and it’s extraordinarily hard to stay strapped to my chair! To be completely honest, spring always causes me to reflect on how much time our working lifestyles use up in America, mainly because there are so many things to do when it’s nice outside. Don’t get me wrong, I really love what I do for a living, but sometimes the grind and the complaints and the demand for evidence of productivity can have me wondering “what’s it all for?” I think to myself at times, “I could be comfortable going back to producing details for a living!” So why stay in the game? Why deal with user-error catastrophes, complaints about the new release, and teaching a particular tool nine times to the same person? It always goes back to this—contribution. This is what CAD Management is about for me. While making sure great buildings get built and serving client needs are noble causes, the investment in the individual life of a person can be even more enduring. While my favorite part of my job is “playing” with the software, the most rewarding part is when the light bulb goes on over someone’s head when I show them a particular function of CAD that makes their lives a little (or sometimes a lot) easier. Even when it’s the fourth or fifth time the same light bulb went off, it’s still a kick in the shorts!
But seriously, the teaching/training aspect of being a CAD manager can have lasting effects in our industry. I’ve had the tremendous opportunity to teach and train interns and drafters who are amidst their first or second job in our industry. They show up knowing what they’ve learned in school (circles and lines) and soon transform into very productive employees, even becoming “go-to” people for others. They will almost invariably be recognized for their productivity, and soon have others asking them questions about CAD. A solid knowledge base and a smart approach to the technical aspects of their careers will inevitably carry forward with them. The overall lasting affect is a more capable work force that can use the needed tools effectively to produce the great buildings and client satisfaction. All because people like you and me stay and “play.”