Revit tortures me. It tortures me every ... single ... day. Why?
I've given this a lot of thought. I studied Architecture back in the '80's. The first CAD software I ever used was AutoCAD. I started with version 2.18 and followed the upgrade path with 2.5, 2.6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 2000, 2002, 2004. The early days of AutoCAD were best described as an electronic drawing board. Line, Arc, Circile ... Move, Copy, Erase ... Zoom Window, Zoom Previous, Zoom All ... Dimensions and DText .... Blocks and WBlocks ... Layers ... there just wasn't much more to it than that.
It was also a relaxed way to work. If you needed the area of your building you didn't reach for the calculator. All you needed was a PLine around your building and List it or use the Area command. I always had time for a coffee before starting work because I could make one in the time it took AutoCAD 2.18 to load the average 80KB Food Plus job. Yes, the whole job was stored in a 80KB file ... that's kilobytes. On the IBM 80286 that would take about 3 mintues to load. In those days we had PCs with 640KB ram and 20MB hard disks ... yes ... just 20MB .... "Who'd ever fill that?" my CAD dealer used to joke !!!
As a CAD manager in the early days I used to boast that I could have architects drawing buildings within a day. And I did. It was easy because the concepts we had all used as architects for years of drawing plans, sections, and elevations with lines, arcs and circles was easily migrated from the drawing board to AutoCAD.
During the life of AutoCAD 14 I started my own practice. I hired draftsmen. They used AutoCAD with a commercially available add-on that drew Walls, Windows, and Doors instead of Lines, Arcs, and Circles. It would extrude elevations and sections, but we still had a fair bit of editing to do. My draftsmen were like typists in a typing pool, only they churned out drawings instead of written documents.
Then, after about 5 years of private practice, I stuck my head up and took a look at what Autodesk was doing. Revit had arrived. I was sold after seeing how plan, section, and elevation were all related. Move a door in plan and the elevation and section were automatically changed as well. That one feature was enough for me. One of my biggest time wasters was marking up drawings where plan and section did not corrolate and having the draftsmen fix it in AutoCAD ... not anymore!
The first shock with bringing Revit into the practice was that no one knew how to use it. The second shock was that no one wanted to use it. The third shock was that I, with 20 years CAD experience, could not learn it in a day. Revit sat on the shelf for a year ... then two ... while I made sevaral attempts to grasp the fundamentals of the software. Then, a couple of my draftsmen moved on and I was hiring staff. I noticed that one young lad claimed he could use Revit. So I hired him. He was only with me for a year but we were able to document a few smaller projects with satisfaction. But none of my draftsmen could learn the software. So I continued hiring younger people who were studying part time or had just graduated.
As the draftsmen moved on I replaced them with fewer, younger, and cheaper recent graduates. Heck, they could draw better than me on Revit. By 2009 we were 100% Revit. The key is younger staff. Staff who have never drawn with a drawing board. The best staff I've had can't even use AutoCAD!!! Revit doesn't bother them. They've only ever known Revit. I needed fewer staff and fewer computers. They worked as fast as the draftsmen, but with fewer errors. These staff were better qualified too. Just as the days of a typing pool are over, so were the days of a drafting office, at least, in my practice.
I'm certainly not going to complain about Revit or suggest that it doesn't have a future. It continues to torture me because I know how easy it was for me to document a project in AutoCAD. Revit works with building elements. For me, these elements don't always display on a drawing the way I would like to see them. For example, in elevation it isn't easy to make parts of the elevation that are further away print out in a thinner pen. I end up outlining the things that are closer with detail lines to beef them up a bit. I also can't draw a leader arrow with an angle greater than 90°. So drawings do look as "artistic" or "architectural" as I would like. But to a young graduate, they look just fine.
Consider, for example, drawings produced in the 1920's and 1930's. To me they are works of art. Yet I remember explaining to my grandfather, who had the luxury as a young graduate of spending a whole three days drafting a cover sheet for a large institutional project that he was working on in those days, how computers had changed Architecture. He argued that the drawings were sterile and denude of any Architectural style that might indicate the author of the work or which practice it had come from, for each practice in those days had its own style. I argued for speed and accuracy, and not having to calculate dimensions. My grandfather shouted at me that he could do the math in his head ... I must admit, so could I ... but it was a skill that I no longer needed.
Likeways, Revit delivers a whole range of new features. BIM is quite different to CAD drafting, and that's what we've got to get our head around. Young people get that, just one of my pregnant staff considers it completely normal to have an "app" for her phone for timing the contractions during labour. Apparently these days a wrist watch just won't cut it. Whereas I use my phone as ... well ... a phone.
Yes, Revit continues to torture me. But I'm learning to cope. My office standards can change to match what I consider to be limitations of the software. Instead of struggling with the model, I frequently use a few detail lines in an elevation. It works. No one knows. I allow time to outline parts of my elevations to make them look better. I draw my leader arrows as detail lines to get the wider arrow spacing and save it as a group. It becomes second nature ... if you let it.
The problem is us. We are getting old, technologically speaking. The problems I'm having with Revit are torturing me just as my grandmother struggled with trying to use a microwave and my grandfather never learned to record his favourite show on the VCR. That's just how it is.
Revit has another 15 years or so ahead of it, I would guess, before something bigger, bolder, and better usurps it. Younger professionals will grasp that new technology too, just as they have Revit. Those who learn Revit now, will be complaining about that new type of software in 20 years time.
It's called progress ... and that's just how it is !!!!
