What are the primary goals of creating a building model? Who are the key stakeholders?
Creating a building model helps to visualize what is proposed in a building project, it helps to coordinate and collaborate between the various disciplines required to complete the project, and it also serves as a consistent storage of information for all stakeholders. The stakeholders that can benefit from creating a building model are: owners, designers, contractors, and building operators. How are the different stakeholders benefited from a building model?
- Owners: the model helps them make decisions over the project they are investing in.
- Designers: through the model, all designers from various fields can coordinate and share their ideas to have a more consistent building design.
- Contractors: the model helps contractors to understand better the idea that the designers want them to build, so there are less errors in the final product.
- Building operators: after the construction phase, the operation phase can also take advantage of having the information of the building in one model. The maintenance portion of the new building might be easier by having this information.
How much detail should you include in your building model? How do you decide?
- As you develop your initial design?
An initial design does not necessarily need a lot of detail, but the main structures such as: walls, floor and roof. The main details that could provide a better understanding on this initial design might be doors, and windows.
- As you continue to iterate and develop on your design?
As we continue to iterate in the design, then elements become important, so our ideas can be understood in a better way by all stakeholders.
- What are the key stages?
The key stages are: build a proposed design (includes walls, doors and windows, floor, and roof), add elements (such as plumbing fixtures, and furniture), add annotations to the plan view (including dimensions, text, and door and window tags), and finally, create a set of plans with different views (for example, floor plan, roof plan, elevations, and sections).
- And how much detail should you include at each stage?
As we progress in stages, we add more and more details until we have a fully developed set of plans.
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...)
The main advantage of using provided families from the manufacturers is that there is a more accurate information provided to all stakeholders on elements that already exist in the manufacturer's database and product catalog. Therefore, this makes it easier for the contractor to obtain the elements. This can help in having less errors as the designer specifies what elements should be used.
- 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 main benefit is that my ideas can be transmitted more accurately, so there is a more visual advantage in communicating what I want in a model. The advantage of using the families provided by the manufacturer over the ones in the Revit library for me as a designer is that I can actually see how the final building will look like, and I can make design decisions based on the model. In other words, I do not have to wait until a building is fully constructed to see how it will look like.
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 component families from RevitCity.com are elements created by users, so they do not fully represent elements that are sold by the manufacturers and can even have errors within them. Therefore, acquiring Revit component families from manufacturers is always the best option when working on a real-life project, but if it is only for representation/visualization purposes, RevitCity.com helps a lot.