forum.datacad.com

Greetings,

We are working with another office that is using Revit (and possibly AutoCAD as well), and working in the resulting DWG's is ... interesting.

They had (apparently) imported a DWG (from someone else?) to start with, and then they seem to have "traced" over that with the Revit wall, and door and window elements.

This results in duplicate lines in my DataCAD file. Some of the Revit walls are filled with white SPB solid fill; with each straight section being its own rectangle. (Sheesh!) Other Revit walls show the stud face and the GWB face - and the GWB shows even on the inside of a closed void, like say, a column enclosure.

Most of the symbols are nearly unique - which kinda' defeats the purpose of symbols. Also, there are a lot of things that are symbols that you would never make into a symbol in DataCAD. Things like a short bit of GWB, with the outline and hatch. And lots of the lines are polylines.

In short, it is a bit of a pain. But workable.

But can't you see how all that BIM stuff makes things so much cleaner and easier?

Dave

The thing that make it harder to work with is they left the 2D lines in place and the BIM stuff overlays it. It even "cuts through" the 2D lines. So, mostly it is operator error, I think. They probably are not paying attention to layer control. And they don't use the Overlay (aka XRef's to the rest of us), which is just lousy practice.

They are using a lot of glass doors, with overhead concealed closers, and the hinges pivot ~2" in from the edge of the glass leaf. For things like HC clearances, it is important to show the way the doors are - they are shown pivoting just like a regular door. So, yes when BIM goes too far, or is not correctable, then it is a pain.

Another indicator that Revit is doing things that are less than optimal: there are offices with TV's on the wall, and there are two (slightly different!) symbols for each - and they float; apparently placed by the click the person made, and not "smart" enough to be on the face of the wall. Not only that, but if it is placed partially in the wall - the lines for the GWB and/or the face of the studs are cut, so that if the TV symbol lays is turned off - there is a gap in the wall.

Sheesh.

BIM is a pox and general plague upon the land.

...a POX? Yeah verily!

BIM certainly needs the people using it to understand more about how it exports things. From what I have seen from Revit, it is not all that accurate in how it "details" things. And it generates plans / sections etc. that kinda' sorta' look good at first, but often have errors that are just not accurate architecturally or how construction actually works.

The way that DataCAD Smart entities work is much better in that we still determine the details. But we still need to be able to use Smart entities for the whole building and all the major components; not just walls and doors and windows. We need smart floors and roofs (including roofs for commercial buildings) and stairs - and compound walls that change thicknesses by height and that have varied heights and bases on a given building story.

The interchange of building information between the plans and the "vertical" drawings is the key advantage we could gain from a full set of Smart entities in DataCAD.

Garbage in...garbage out. Doesn't make any difference if its Revit or DataCAD.

Robert Scott wrote:Garbage in...garbage out. Doesn't make any difference if its Revit or DataCAD.

Agreed. Just seems to take a lot more work to not get garbage out of Revit.