LMAO! Sentiments agreed.
I still haven't seen many architects manage project data structure well enough with AutoCAD,
so what can I really expect with Revit???
The thing that bothers me most is that we can't really paralell the project development with the Architect in a Revit environment.
They really have to be nearly complete for us to have enough data to bother beginning our work for their design changes. Either that, or we end up in a continuous design change cycle with improper data leading to just as much labor and progress as a normal system we already have in place.
BIM is not a gravy train, its a concept.
We can add to BIM data, but, honestly,
I haven't seen a project that was done according to the theory yet from our clients.
Of course our costs are rather high to accept working with a BIM project because the process is cost prohibitive still.
We will gladly take it into CAD, get the permits completed and let the client continue working with it, but other than that, its a cluster f*^& of data we can say is nice, but hasn't really inspired us or proven cost beneficial for our industry.
Sure the examples look nice, but to get those templates setup to work according to the clients needs would require many different template setups for many clients. As a CADD manager, it sounds great, I can work on other things, the designers can handle everything, there isn't any customizations outside the template... until we run into what it can't do.
Sure let's buy a black box the vendor can't guarantee to do what we need, troubleshoot it on live projects, patch with AutoCAD until we get to the next version and re-work our production work flow again every 6 months to compensate for it and lose valuable time with interpretation rather than concentrate on making money predictably with what we already have in place :ugly:
I don't mean to come off as obtuse or locked into one mentality, I do like the aspects of working smarter and not harder, but so far, it still appears to be working harder than smarter. Plus all of my experienced guys, will go back
to what they know under the deadline gun on multiple fronts everytime. I still have some of the most experienced and reliable guys running AutoCAD 2007 by choice because they are used to it. And I'm not going to force them through change for the sake of the software vendors pocketbooks.