What are the primary goals of creating a building model? Who are the key stakeholders?
- What do they need?
- What do they care about most?
The primary goal of creating a building model is to give the viewer a better, more complete understanding of your building and how everything comes together. It’s a way of illustrating the overall concept and gaining a visual understanding of how the space would ultimately come together. Building models are one of the best ways for an architect to present a design to a client, because it allows them to interact with and move through the space, and experience what it might look like when built. The client needs to feel like they understand the design and are content with it before moving forward, and the architect needs a way to convey the image in their head, and a building model is ideal in this scenario.
How much detail should you include in your building model? How do you decide?
- As you develop your initial design?
- As you continue to iterate and develop on your design?
- What are the key stages?
- And how much detail should you include at each stage?
How much detail should you include about the composition (layers, materials, thicknesses) of your wall, floor, and roof assemblies at different stages of your design process?
- Conceptual design
- Preliminary design
- Design development
- Construction documentation
Detail about composition is not particularly important in the first stages of design and modeling. While you might begin thinking about materiality, it doesn’t need to be included in early models beyond the level of picking certain Revit preset materials for aesthetic purposes. Modeling joists isn’t practical if you’re still in the process of rearranging entire walls. As you really start to develop the design, including details like rafters, siding, etc. become more important, as they will likely affect things like the widths of walls and more precise measurements of spaces, which need to be solidified before you can be sure a design works.
Many door and window manufacturers provide Revit families for doors and windows that you can specify for your building design.
- 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?
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?
Getting Revit component families directly from the manufacturer means that you have assurance that those components are both detailed and precise, with the official measurements included. Components from online sharing websites generally work well for initial and conceptual models, but they are often estimates and might cause errors, particularly in very late stages of modeling where detail and accuracy become much more important.