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?
Building models need to clearly communicate the finished product of the building. So they should have dimensions with a design that articulates the building that the contractors want.
Readability. Making sure the design communicates exactly what the stakeholders want is the most important thing. The model doesn’t have to be beautiful, but it has to make the finished product turn out the way it should.
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?
The initial design should just be a basic layout. You don’t need much detail because you are likely going to change it.
As you develop it, you add more detail. Maybe one room at a time you add the detail needed.
Initial design - layout. Spacing of furniture/sections. Finish touches - editing. Adding annotations and dimensions - not altering the build.
As each stage goes on add more detail. The initial design has barely any detail while annotations have a lot of detail.
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
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...)
- 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?
The families from the manufacturers are real products. Placing in these real products can more accurately describe the final product of the building you are creating. Random websites may have nice furniture, but it isn’t necessarily the things that people use in real life and the main goal of a building model is to design a building that will be created in real life.