Largest project acchived in BIM.

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone. AC, Revit, VW, AP users. I work in construction company. Right now we came across big (1.2 mil sqft) hospital project, and together with architects looking for best BIM software that will be able to run this project. Right now we are testing Revit (mostly because of architect) but when project goes into 250 kilo sqft hardware starts to say NONO (experience from other projects). It's a big problem. Hardware is not the problem (state of the art for today standards). Any experiences in that area?

[Anonymous]

Revit doesn't have anything akin to MOD files -- only the major project file type, RVT. And between RVT files, you see lines between objects, even if they are the same material and are completely aligned.

So in Revit you'd have groups instead of MODs, but they're stored within the RVT file. Groups are fine for what they're intended. In the new version of Revit out shortly, you can turn groups into linked RVTs, but then you get lines everywhere and I think it's not a great improvement.

Modules are not meant for major portions of a project, right? So what happens when you link different PLN files together -- do you see lines between them?

[Anonymous]

All files are linked. Let me see if I can explain the setup. The module files (one for each tower because of differing story heights) are where the design takes place. Each different floor is on a story where you can work in 3D to see that connections clean up, modify materials, windows, etc. Multiple instances of each along with each story of the podium are hot-linked in to create the building. The module files are not huge; the one with all the hotlinks is the one that chokes. This way, you can have various people at various skill levels working and publishing on smaller files.

Since the podium has no repetitive floors, there are no modules, but it does have multi-story walls and columns that when linked into the overall file, clean up regardless of which story they reside in. For example, a wall will wrap around a column placed on a different story, even though it is a separate hotlink. This may be hard to follow, but basically, linked plans clean up. (Of course, there are exceptions.)

[Anonymous]

metanoia wrote:
Revit doesn't have anything akin to MOD files -- only the major project file type, RVT. And between RVT files, you see lines between objects, even if they are the same material and are completely aligned.

I posed this question to a Revit rep and was told first, it's better to work only in one file. But she said that the lines between RVT files could easily be made invisible. How does that work?

With a project that has 4 buildings with different story levels, but all circulation must connect, how would you even set up the project? And how would you manage repetitive floors (ie. 42 story tower made up of 12 variations) so that plans, sections, and elevations join seamlessly?

She also demonstrated how to insert a story in the middle of a tall building, involving locking walls above and their relationships with soffits, roofs, etc, splitting the story, adjusting their heights, then adding the actual story in a separate step. In ArchiCAD, inserting a story or adjusting the height of one (or more) is one step, a function that happens frequently, especially in the early stages of design. Stretching multi-story elements can also be simple, and if correctly done, generates no model conflicts or required adjustments.

This may be beyond the scope of this thread, but I will pursue this further as we compare Revit to get a better understanding of how it works as a design tool on large, multi-story projects.

Mabe

[Anonymous]

Your Revit rep is mistaken, unless she's using a version I don't know about 🙂 Get her to show you how it's done . The line between linked files in Revit and the fact that you cannot control individual lines of linked files puts me off the whole idea when it's all one building (sometimes you have no choice). When linking isn't going to be a problem graphically, then it's all good. We've got a project where I'm trying to convince the team to take the complicated curtain system skin and put it in a separate file. But they don't seem to mind a 200Mb file

If you did link anyway you would place the towers at their respective elevations when you link them into the podium file. You can move the whole tower up and down to suit -- no problem there. The elevation of the tower based on where it sits in Z can be published to the tower file itself so that in that file all datums report correct elevations. Linking in Revit works fine but does need refinement.

A great thing about Revit is that you can grab all the level datums and move them vertically, and all the stuff on those storeys moves with them. So you grab the levels above where you need to add a new one, and move 'em up. Add the new level in the two-storey gap you created; done!

[Anonymous]

The Revit rep left a set of CDs, supposedly a good example. We were very disappointed in the lack of line weight differentiation, the drawings were difficult to read. (Consensus of autocad & ArchiCAD users.) Perhaps, this was just a bad example. Can you describe how line weights can be controlled in various views? The Revit rep says that lines can be managed in the elevation & sections views. For a large project, that sounds cumbersome. In ArchiCAD, you can determine the appearance as you model how it will appear in plan, section, elevation & 3D, and in sections & elevations, the appearance beyond a specified distance can be set to a thinner line/grayscale to give a better sense of depth. To have to manage these in the destination views as opposed to once as it is modeled seems very time consuming & difficult to track. Pen control in any project, but especially in large projects, is critical. The ability to globally switch between line weights depending on scale or presentation preference is important.

Mabe

[Anonymous]

Line weights in Revit are completely defineable. OOTB they can appear quite sterile however. Like text, the line weights maintain their intended size regardless of the output, i.e. if the line thickness or text size is intended to plot at 1/16" then as the scale changes, so does the line/text so that a 1/2" scale or a 1-100 scale plot will still have line/text at 1/16". If you realize it's not appropriate for a given output, you can globally make the change to all of them. As for lighter background elements, Revit doesn't have anything yet to do that. There is a 'sillouette' function that will wrap the outline of the drawing with a user defined line weight but it's not perfect.

[Anonymous]

Revit 2008 improves the situation by allowing you to select all distant objects and quickly assign a lighter lineweight or grey tone to them. Not as automatic as ArchiCAD yet, but I suppose there are times where AC's automatic handling of this situation is a problem? I don't know. I would trade this new feature in for a feature that allows control of lineweights from the edges of objects in linked files. <Sigh>