Revit 2014 Overview

[Eduardo Rolon]

For those interested:

autodesk-revit.blogspot.com/2013/03/whats-new-in-revit-2014.html

[Anonymous]

It seems like Autodesk has given up the pursuit of catching up to Archicad. I feel bad for the Revit user. This release only consists of minor enhancements but no new features. It's up to Graphisoft if they will give the final blow with the upcoming release or put everything on cruise control. Either way, Graphisoft is leaping with joy now as they have finally won the BIM battle.

[Dwight]

As if having a better product was a path to success.

[JaredBanks]

Dwight, thanks for the best laugh of the day.

[Eduardo Rolon]

Dwight wrote:
As if having a better product was a path to success.

AllPlan or Chief Architect?

[Laszlo Nagy]

blobmeister wrote:
It seems like Autodesk has given up the pursuit of catching up to Archicad. I feel bad for the Revit user. This release only consists of minor enhancements but no new features. It's up to Graphisoft if they will give the final blow with the upcoming release or put everything on cruise control. Either way, Graphisoft is leaping with joy now as they have finally won the BIM battle.

This is fully my personal opinion:
I checked the listed new features and had several times the feeling that Revit is taking features from ArchiCAD and incorporating them into their own software (I base this on the somewhat limited info I have from blogs and RevitWiki - no demo version yet - so I hope I understood everything right):

Project Browser can have tabs: Similar to the organization of our Navigator where you can have the Project Map, View Map etc. in one Palette and switch among them. They have various palettes and these can now be docked so they become Tab pages of a single Project Browser: saves display real estate.
Non-rectangular Viewport: Seems to me this achieves the same as AC's polygon contour of a Drawing placed on a Layout. But the contour must still consist of orthogonal straight lines, no slanted lines or curves as part of the contour.
Schedules formatting: You can now separately format the Text of various fields of schedules (like Headline, Value etc.) Actually, here they have a bit more options like cell background color, border, highlighting etc.
Temporary View Properties: This kind of serves the same purpose as our Project Map in ArchiCAD. In Revit if you wanted to display your project in a certain way, you always had to have a Saved View for it. You couldn't just change the "layers" (they don't have layers, they have Categories) or scale or model view options etc. You had to redefine the saved View and show it that way. This is now a solution to be able to to do that, makes it more flexible and saves you from having to have lots of Saved Views just for in-progress project states.
Selection: There is now a feature that does the same as the Area Selection in ArchiCAD. You don't have to select each segment of a Slab contour, for example to edit them; you can just find the surface of the Slab and click that to select its boundary polygon.
Alternate Dimension units: You can now have a secondary dimension displayed on your dimensions. We had something similar for a long time with the Secondary Dimensions Add-On.
Change sort order of multiple items: You can now select multiple elements and use the Send to Back, Send Backward, Bring to Front, or Bring Forward commands on them. You don't have to do it one by one.


A slightly related topic: ArchiCAD, Revit, Nemetschek Allplan and Nemetschek Scia all achieved BuildingSMART Certification 2.0 for IFC Export, the first 4 applications to do so:

http://www10.aeccafe.com/nbc/articles/1/1173341/First-four-successes-buildingSMARTs-Certification-2....

It is worth reading the quote from the Autodesk guy:

Jim Lynch, vice president, building and collaboration products of Autodesk, said: “We have many customers worldwide that mandate a neutral IFC file format and rely on it to ease the design, construction and maintenance of new and existing buildings. BuildingSMART’s IFC certification will allow our customers to facilitate more efficient, collaborative workflows; increase project team collaboration; and encourage data exchange and interoperability within a BIM workflow.”

To me this says Autodesk finally could not push IFC and open collaboration aside any longer because now their customers are demanding it to such a degree they can no longer ignore it. Which is great news to the whole Open BIM collaboration cause and puts a huge dent into their effort to put everyone on their own single platform. And with IFC exchange being the order of the day it will be much easier for companies to actually evaluate the available choices of BIM software, and not just go with Revit because everyone else is using it and they won't be able to exchanged data without data loss. This is all we can ask for: for companies to actually look at these softwares side by side and compare them: we know what many of them will choose after that.

[Dennis Lee]

I'm shocked that they STILL don't have perspective views for working in 3d!

[stefan]

There are a few nice features to improve productivity, which is a good indication that the product is maturing to a level that big new features are less relevant. People are working in BIM in different tools. They do their work today, but demand stability, productivity and scalability. If the new version of Revit has little new features, I do hope for the users for it to be a solid, stable and productivity increasing release.

You know what people are complaining here about ArchiCAD? New features are nice, but they need to be refined over two or three versions. And after that, they hardly ever change anymore. And people start demanding feature freeze and a strong and solid and stable release.

It would be good to alternate between a feature-packed update and a productivity and stability packed update.

Glad that IFC is considered a 'must' for Revit too. Rightfully so.

[James B]

It's interesting to see some of the comments since the announcement and some disappointment from users. The exploded view feature looks nice though.

If you have time, it's worth reading some of the comments and forums, I've still read comparisons to AC, complaining they still don't have slanted walls or perspective editing, about the new logo and that users need to buy the complete suite to get Revit...

Revit Forum - what's not new revit 2014

[Anonymous]

laszlonagy wrote:
A slightly related topic: ArchiCAD, Revit, Nemetschek Allplan and Nemetschek Scia all achieved BuildingSMART Certification 2.0 for IFC Export, the first 4 applications to do so:

http://www10.aeccafe.com/nbc/articles/1/1173341/First-four-successes-buildingSMARTs-Certification-2....

It is worth reading the quote from the Autodesk guy:

Jim Lynch, vice president, building and collaboration products of Autodesk, said: “We have many customers worldwide that mandate a neutral IFC file format and rely on it to ease the design, construction and maintenance of new and existing buildings. BuildingSMART’s IFC certification will allow our customers to facilitate more efficient, collaborative workflows; increase project team collaboration; and encourage data exchange and interoperability within a BIM workflow.”

To me this says Autodesk finally could not push IFC and open collaboration aside any longer because now their customers are demanding it to such a degree they can no longer ignore it. Which is great news to the whole Open BIM collaboration cause and puts a huge dent into their effort to put everyone of their own single platform. And with IFC exchange being the order of the day it will be much easier for companies to actually evaluate the available choices of BIM software, and not just go with Revit because everyone else is using it and they won't be able to exchanged data without data loss. This is all we can ask for: for companies to actually look at these softwares side by side and compare them: we know what many of them will choose after that.

I think the "B-side" of your post was the most important part