Revit 2014 Overview

[Eduardo Rolon]

For those interested:

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

[Anonymous]

laszlonagy wrote:
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 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.

Hey Laz,
Tabs in Autodesk packages has been around for a long time (probably since they bought Navisworks), so probably not a rip off of ArchiCAD
Non-rectangular crops, has been on the wish list for ages, same with non-rectangular section boxes, which would be a direct rip of the non-rectangular marquee tool, still a ways off for Autodesk. FYI does support slanted lines, just no curves for now...
Temporary view properties, is an evolution of the existing view template functionaliyt. The addition of live default templates in 2013, annoyed a lot of people as they had their workarounds disrupted. This update addresses this and adds functionality instead of work around.
Selection, you never had to select each segment of a slab contour, one would do, which was a real :censored:. The new selection allows selection by face (like AC's magnet tool) which is a direct rip, yet hardly a surprise.
Alternate dims, is another long time wish, yet probably a rip from AC
As for Sort order, I think this is probably a rip of Adobe products, more than AC yet, you can definitely have that one if required.

There are some other serious under the hood changes that aren't being broadcast widely, like the change in their cloud tools engine. The performance is off the charts and the toolset is pretty cool. generating plane (wall, floor, ceiling, etc) from picking 3 points. Geometry can also be exported into 'Recap' which displays added geometry in the 3D scene.

As for IFC, there has been about 9 new iterations throughout the year for 2013 from Autodesk. With their 3013 release they also exposed IFC export with the API allowing users to create their own exporters. To my knowledge no one has made their own yet.

[Anonymous]

Guys...their secondary dimensions are better represented than ours

[Anonymous]

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

I guess if you have a big firm and you got CAD personnel that only know Revit and others that only know ArchiCAD you can get both and have the benefits of using both?

But for me I am just a single user who moved from Chief Architect to ArchiCAD, I would be happy with just Chief but ArchiCAD in Australia has our library parts for houses and many other benefits on board.

Yes Revit are good at copying other programs and they do boost their productivity when they do so?

From my perspective I only do houses so ArchiCAD is overkill for me in some ways. The start version of ArchiCAD does not have Lightworks and you can't export your templates from ArchiCAD so its not a goer for me.