What are the primary goals of creating a building model? Who are the key stakeholders?
The primary goals of creating a building model are to connect the ideas between the designers and the stakeholders. The key stakeholders are people like the owner, builder, and future occupants. Their goals are to cost-effective and sustainable buildings, understand and design the building, and feel thermal and spacial comfort and safety, respectively. Creating a building model assists in communicating these goals to one another and ensuring that their needs are all being met through this design.
Many door and window manufacturers provide Revit families for doors and windows that you can specify for your building design.
- What is the advantage to manufacturers for providing these families? (it's not free to create and provide them...)
The advantage to manufacturers for providing these families is to have designers become more familiar with their products. These products can contain a lot of detail on what it was made from, how it fits within a building, and the aesthetics compared to other doors and windows. It also is great marketing as the exposure effect can allow them to sell more doors and windows through their presence in Revit.
- What is the benefit to you as the designer of using these manufacturer-provided families? Is there an advantage to using them versus the families provided in the Revit library?
The families provided in the Revit library are simple and vague whereas the manufacturer-provided families have more up-to-date details on the products. This allows designers to make more concrete decisions on what products they will use, ultimately strengthening the communication between stakeholders. It also allows them to switch out products with more ease.
What are the advantages of getting the Revit component families (for furniture, equipment, and fittings) directly from the manufacturer versus from an online sharing website like RevitCity.com?
The biggest advantage of getting the Revit component families directly from the manufacturer compared to getting it from something like RevitCity is probably data quality. You can get the most relevant information from the manufacturers themselves where as RevitCity is a community-based product sharing site (kind of like Github) where it has a lot of types of components you may be looking for, but is not necessarily accurate in its use, dimensions, or material. Again, it helps the stakeholders know exactly what is in the design so that subsequent stages can be completed more efficiently once everyone agrees on the product.