Newby to Revit here, but old CAD hand steadily climbing the learning curve hill
So I was just following along with Balkan Architect's roofing tutorial, working through creating a number of roof types, including a simple gambrel roof via extrusion.
But I noted, from a practical design perspective, that what a good or even mediocre designer REALLY wants is for the roof panel WIDTHS to be the same, and of course the ANGLES between the panels to ALSO be equal. These seemingly REASONABLE expectations, unfortunately, led down a rabbit hole that fell out from under me, into an underlying CESSPOOL of despair, struggling for unsuccessful HOURS to usefully constrain this simple Revit profile!
Old Revit hands, is it fair to say that Revit really ISN'T a 'Computer-Aided Design program' -- that it's perhaps better described as a 'Construction Document Aggregator'? As an example of how BADLY Revit seems adapted to detailed design work, please consider this SIMPLE gambrel roof profile as evidence of utter design-intent frustration. Bottom-line: There simply doesn't seem to be a coherent set of CONSTRAINTS in the Revit profile drawing environment that will satisfy any but the most RUDIMENTARY design criteria!
After hours of effort, the profile sketch above STILL needs LOTS of work, but what little symmetry was achieved proved WAY too difficult, so I began searching for 'THE BETTER WAY'.
Fast forward 24 hours, and it seems to me the solution is use an actual COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN (CAD) program such as Autodesk Inventor, or even AutoCAD, to generate a 2D sketch, and then CAD-link the sketch back into the Revit construction document aggregator…
Once the reference sketch is positioned, it can be used as a tracing template for the roof profile. At first glance seemingly a bit of a pain, but upon reflection most of us can still appreciate professional software that doesn't lock-up big projects just because some newbie over-constrained a roof profile. 😀
So fast-forward another 24 hours, and note below the 2D sketch positioned as a template, and linked to an external DWG file that may be overwritten by the designer, engineer, vendor or whoever is responsible, which in turn will auto-update the link during whenever the Revit project is opened.
Use 'Manage Links' to force the reload of the link during a Revit session. Tweak the color of the linked sketch in the 'Imported Categories' of the 'Visibility/Graphical Overrides' dialogue, if needed for contrast.
In a SECTION view, we may note that the template has been updated, and thus can decide whether or not to incorporate changes by simply snapping working roof profile lines to the revised template vertices. This process is NOT automated, but like so many things in Revit, it's probably a GOOD thing, to help manage change-process chaos.
My question is "Am I on the right track here, and if so where is THIS taught/discussed!?" THIS namely being the best-practices workflow of designing complex stuff OUTSIDE of Revit (like for example structure, or the HVAC equipment rooms), and back-linking for coordinating/managing the collaborative process?
Does anyone have suggested tags, labels or search terms to help find more relevant information? Apologies for the lengthy aimlessness of this post, am using it for 'notes capture', in prep for launching a working Revit blog to help document design workflow complexity. 😀
Regards, and thanks
Brandon Nichols
BW Nichols PE
Seattle Washington
