22 March 2011

Revit 2012 is coming soon!

Autodesk exposed many of the new features of Revit 2012 during a worldwide webcast on Mar 21. It is all very exciting! Somewhat akin to Christmas, or a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get! Now the key question is what do these features mean for you, the everyday user? Well like anything else, you need to try it to find out. Now there are other blogs with more detailed info than mine (here is David Light’s http://autodesk-revit.blogspot.com/2011/03/autodesk-revit-architecture-2012.html) but everyone deserves an opinion so here is my take on some of these.

Revit Server gets add’l platform support. Yawn… yea, it’s great to see this improve but I don’t use Revit for that feature so it doesn’t really touch me.

Linking and tagging. Now we are talking! This one feature has potential to dramatically change how we all use Revit. My only concern is that we start to further break into more models now (because we can) and therefore tracking down *where* something is becomes more of a challenge. But yet, having the option to tag thru a linked model was something that has been needed from the beginning.

Work sharing. This is one of those features that at first seems like “oh, ok, that’s nice” and you don’t really care. But once you put this into practice you will find that they added visual insight will become so second nature if they took the feature away you would get angry.

DWG exports. At some point, it always happens. You have to provide DWG files and cringe at the thought of how messed up your purty drawing will become. This enhancement should remove most of your worry for now you can tweak and tweak to heart’s content. I guess the problem then is when to stop.

General improvements. There are a handful of other improvements that basically shine up a feature or two. Colors and graphics along with rendering styles all help Revit 2012 a little more refined, like a nice 6y old wine, rather than the brute 2y discounted wine. I really like the new assembly views features. I guess my problem now is plotting in color – I don’t have a large format color plotter.

Core modeling. Wow…neat and fun is all I have to say! I can’t wait to get a job where it is usable. Too bad most users don’t have a need for that level of Gehry type design. Of course all should benefit from the ability to cut into family files of all types. Punch holes in my beams? No problem! Donuts coming right up!

Revit parts. Every want to make a view of just one thing? Bingo, Revit parts to the rescue. I’m very excited about this because it finally frees up the modeler from having to worry about all the other junk in the mode polluting their view of a specific object. Who hasn’t produced a series of drawings only to find something stray in a series of views. Arg! This would help that a lot!

Massing. There are a number of improvements to massing although I don’t use it much it will help those that do. Especially curves and refinement of surfaces.

Materials. They are never perfect so they got tweaked again.

Point Cloud. This one is exciting and scary. I love the idea of being able to have this directly in my model, but what happens when I’m expected to model to the cloud precision with all the camber, sag, creep, in the existing structure. Painful to say the least. Hey, but at least I can see how much the building has sagged.

IFC. Industry Foundation Classes got improved. Until I have a need I don’t really know if this solves many problems.

That’s it for now. I think I’ll dive into more later.

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