


A Coordinated Approach

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If anyone was to ask what was the single greatest strength of Revit, I’d have to say it’s ability to co-ordinate written and drawn information.



With 2D (or 3D for that matter) “dumb” CAD systems, YOU have to do all the co-ordination of the information yourself. Let’s use an example to clarify the point.


If I was to produce some construction documents for a simple building using AutoCAD, I would have to draft out the plan, then draft out the elevations and sections, details, etc. It would be up to me to ensure that the windows I drew on the plan where an accurate representation of the position they are shown in any elevation or sectional views.


If I (or anybody else) moves a door or window in plan- then someone has to “manually” notes this change and ensure that any other drawing that is effected by this change is updated. This is a time consuming process and the room for error is quickly multiplied according to the scale of the project.


And it’s not just doors and windows, it’s everything in that set of documents: Schedules, Drainage Plans, datum heights- the list goes on.


Well Revit takes a totally different approach. Rather than you having to draw a representation of your design using lines, arcs, etc; you actually “model” your design (in full 3D) within Revit. Because you develop a single 3D model of your design that is stored within the Revit database, Revit can easily co-ordinate the relationship between the various elements.




So when you make a change to a Revit model (ie you move the position of a door in plan), Revit can easily update any view that the door appears in- be it plan, elevation, schedule, perspective, etc).


The “database” approach that Revit uses to store the model is also used to hold other (parametric) information about the model. So you can ask Revit to produce (say) a door schedule automatically from the model. So when you then decide to add (or remove) a door from the model, the schedule instantly updates to reflect these changes.


How many times have you moved a wall in AutoCAD and then (days or months later) realised that there are now drawings in your document set that don’t match correctly. Revit makes this a thing of the past for the reasons we have discussed above.
