Topic: Revit VS ADT

[duh]

I seem to have started a small firestorm on AutoDesk's bulletin board, and thought ...hey, why not here too

So, after reading reams of rants claiming the aurgument redundant and repugnant I've narrowed down the questions to:

How many firms do you know of that are actually using Revit?
How many have decided to just stick it out with ADT after evaluating it..or actually trying it as the main brain?
Is Revit really the way things are likely to go...or do you feel Revit may die on the vine, a victim of too much too soon?
Seems many ACAD/ADT users feel that they'd be throwing away everything they've learned to go Revit.....and so, loathe it...okay, they have some other valid reasons as well.

I'd like to hear the aurguments if it's not too painful for those in the know to go there again.

Cheers,
Duh

[LE]

How many firms do you know of that are actually using Revit?

One - trying

How many have decided to just stick it out with ADT after evaluating it..or actually trying it as the main brain?

One - and quit and went back to vanilla

Is Revit really the way things are likely to go...or do you feel Revit may die on the vine, a victim of too much too soon?

No.

[Kerry]

Is Revit really the way things are likely to go...or do you feel Revit may die on the vine, a victim of too much too soon?

Excuse me for being a pedant. This may need to be reworded, logically it begs the question.

and .. If I answer yes, does that mean I  think it's the way to go, or, that I think it will die.

[Bob Wahr]

How many firms do you know of that are actually using Revit?

One

How many have decided to just stick it out with ADT after evaluating it..or actually trying it as the main brain?

None that I know of.  I'm sure that there are some but I'm not privvy to their thought processes and am not sure who has evaluated it

Is Revit really the way things are likely to go...or do you feel Revit may die on the vine, a victim of too much too soon?

Autodesk wants it to be Revit, They are going to phase ADT out in favor of Revit, Revit is the likely future

Seems many ACAD/ADT users feel that they'd be throwing away everything they've learned to go Revit.....and so, loathe it...okay, they have some other valid reasons as well.

A lot of that attitude is because people fear change and Revit is change.  I have demoed Resvit Structure and while there are many things about it that are slick, it isn't CAD.  It will be a change in the way projects are done for me but I plan on making the move.

[MP]

Excuse me for being a pedant. This may need to be reworded, logically it begs the question.

and .. If I answer yes, does that mean I think it's the way to go, or, that I think it will die.

Bwaaaaa, snort! If you only knew the poster!

[Kerry]

Ooops, am I in trouble again ?

[MP]

No, but Duh surely has to see the humour in being corrected in that manner (an inside joke if you will).

Kerry on ...

[DinØsaur]

There is a similar debate going on with the civil folk regarding Civil 3D vs Land Desktop.  Revit at this point seems to be enjoying a much warmer reception amongst the architectural community than Civil 3D is getting from those in my industry.  In all fairness, Revit has had a longer run to get its users familiar with the style based design approach, while Civil 3D is only slightly over a year out of its BETA release (although a very persuasive case has been made that it is still in BETA).  AUGI has an entire Revit community of fans boosting the product and proudly displaying their efforts.  They are absolutely rabid in their praises when compared to the commentaries about Civil 3D which usually range from recognizing that even though it has long range potential if Autodesk would ever get all of the tools needed for a completed project functioning and stable to speculation that the darn thing will never work, is too difficult to use and that legions of Civil Engineers will abandon Autodesk for having the arrogance to kill off their beloved Land Desktop.

Revit is a shoe-in to stay around compared to Civil 3D.  I have not heard of any Architects giving up on Revit and reverting to ADT.  Perhaps they are naturally more artistic and less constrained (or possibly less anal) than their Civil Engineer counterparts who insist on calculations accurate to 1/100 of a foot for a 400 foot run of sewer pipe add spot elevations to the the same 1/100 at four evenly spaced locations around the curb at a street corner to insure that water will indeed flow down the hill.  I have heard of only a handfull of companies that have NOT abandoned Civil 3D at least once and I know of only two or three projects being completed while making extensive use of the product.

[duh]

Excuse me for being a pedant. This may need to be reworded, logically it begs the question.

and .. If I answer yes, does that mean I think it's the way to go, or, that I think it will die.

Bwaaaaa, snort! If you only knew the poster!

Alas MP, I stand corrected, Kerry is Korrect. Poor use of grammar to say the least.

Regarding Dino's comment:
I'm not sure how widely Revit has been received warmly...perhaps places other than in the Vancouver/Victoria market it has...yesterday I did a local phone survey and found very few firms had made the plunge. A number have the demo software and are "interested," but seem to prefer slugging it out with ACAD and ADT. I did find one firm that had 10 machines going full bore with it.

However, a Vancouver reseller stated that the vast majority of firms that considered a major upgrade this year "ALL" went Revit...I'm going to get a list and see how many actually have. My understanding is that ADT has about 450K licenses sold globally...and Revit about 20K....so far.

[GDF]

I would like to hear more on this dicussion. I really have not used ADT or Revit, but have seen demos and played with it some.
As an AutoCAD user since R11, I have customised the program and developed proceedures for putting together architectural
construction douments. What I would like to see is how ADT and Revit users put together a progect.

In AutoCAD I can easily put together an apartment building made up of many xrefed mirrored and rotated unit plans. How would
this be done in Revit?

I can see that Revit could have a bright future if more thought was given to actual project examples and help files on how to set
up a project for construction documents.

I would also like to know how Revit is used for details that require expanded views <not drawn to scale> to better
illustrate how for example flashing is installed.

I worked at RTKL years ago, and I have heard that they are trying out Revit on a limited basis.

Another question I have is how many people can work on the same job using Revit <is it one large data file>?

When I upgraded to AutoCAD 2006, the first thing I turned off was the Dynmode setting. When I played around with Revit
years ago the flashing curser drove me nuts.

Gary

[Dilbert]

How many firms do you know of that are actually using Revit?

I know of 5 firms that currently use Revit in my city which is St Louis. One of them is HOK one of the largest Architectural firms in the world.

How many have decided to just stick it out with ADT after evaluating it..or actually trying it as the main brain?

I know many companies that actually have ADT, but only 3 that use it for its full abilities.

Is Revit really the way things are likely to go...or do you feel Revit may die on the vine, a victim of too much too soon?

Well, Revit really isn't a young program... it's been around I believe 8 years, it just wasn't part of Autodesk before that. Revit will be around for a long time too. I know this for several reasons.

First, Autodesk as a company whole is putting major funding into their Lifecycle Management programs. Yes, its separate from their Entertainment division and Manufacturing divisions, but its really the core to Autodesk's future business model. Revit is the "center piece" of Autodesk's BSD initiative. BSD is what Autodesk calls "Building Solutions Division" and BSD is the total of their Architectural product line. In turn, this BSD division is the centerpiece of the Autodesk Lifecycle Management  programs.

So Autodesk wants their lifecycle management initiatives to succeed, to do this requires their BSD division to succeed, which requires Revit to succeed.

ADT is now being build as AutoCAD for Architects, frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the next ADT release was actually named that.  While under the BSD banner, its thought of as more of a transitional program between AutoCAD and Revit in terms of client needs. Its long term status will be determined by how long 2D drafting and services will be profitable in the industry.

Yet, the rest of the Autodesk product line is gearing up toward a transition to data information sharing. This goes well beyond Revit Building, Revit Structure, and Revit Systems. Autodesk is currently working on products designed to tie in this building model to the construction process as well as long term building management solutions... all based on this digital model.

Seems many ACAD/ADT users feel that they'd be throwing away everything they've learned to go Revit.....and so, loathe it...okay, they have some other valid reasons as well.

You'll fall in love with Revit if you actually use it for any length of time. I've been using AutoCAD since 1989 and ADT since it came out... my introduction to Revit over the past few months has been amazing. Yes, some people won't like it as its different, but all in all its a great program if you use it the right way. The right way is to model everything you need to model and don't model the things you don't need to model.  In other words, there are times where you may have a standard 2D detail you've used for years in AutoCAD... don't redraw it in Revit unless you are bored. Just use it.  Yet overall I find it to be a nice program. Some people call it intuitive.. I don't think it is. But it is a very comfortable program to design/draw in once you learn it. Its a program that becomes more intuitive the more you use it and break your old AutoCAD habits.

I think it will do well.

(Ps. Behind AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, Inventor is the highest selling product in the Autodesk portfolio. Revit out-sold Inventor in the last quarter.)

[Dilbert]

I would like to hear more on this dicussion. I really have not used ADT or Revit, but have seen demos and played with it some.

I could answer these questions, but frankly you would be better off going to the Revit section of the AUGI forums. There are people there that have used it much longer than me in exactly the situations you describe.  AUGI is at www.augi.com

Just go there and enter the Forums. You'll need to register (like you did here) to post these questions.  I'm not trying to push your questions off, just there are some members over there that have used it since the start... even the original creators still visit it and answer questions. Yes, they love their program..yes they are biased toward it... yes they will give you honest answers to if something is easy or not (they are not afraid to criticize Revit when its needed).

I hope this helps.

[M-dub]

Great first and second posts!
Welcome to theSwamp, Dilbert

[Dilbert]

Great first and second posts!
Welcome to theSwamp, Dilbert

Thanks, glad to be here! 

[Draftek]

I have a question.

I work for a commercial curtain wall, storefront, window manufacturer.

I haven't had time to dig into Revit yet but have been approached by 3rd party companies to provide content for revit users based on our products.

I'm thinking kind of like an electronics Sweets catalog.

Does that work well or do most architects using Revit just use generic styles in thier design.

We would consider customization if we get something back - like BOM's or cost estimates for the architects for our products. We would be very interested if we could extract shop drawing type details from the models.

Thanks