Module 2 - Points to Ponder

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?

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: I’m new to anything CEE related, but from a general design standpoint, anything that is too refined in the early stages can be intimidating to the customer. I would say that it’s good to have the details for all of your non-negotiable requirements (for this project that was the ADA bathroom, storage, desk spaces, lab bench, conference area, natural venting, lighting, etc.). The extras are things designers can throw in to make it more appealing — bike racks, innovative profiles, etc.
• Preliminary design: I look at this as the outline or rough draft that will be embellished. It’s the skeleton and will most likely have heavy changes, so the detail level here should still be the big important take aways (and maybe goals).
• I added more notes about some of the door features because it would have been confusing without those notes (since I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for, and I’m not advanced enough yet to make my own families from scratch). Things I would generally include are dimensions, angles, slopes, differences in terrain, heights, etc.

Many door and window manufacturers provide Revit families for doors and windows that you can specify for your building design.

• It allows the designer to incorporate them with specific dimensions and requirements for installation programmed into them. This may highlight any issues earlier in the design process and produce a better design sooner than without them being provided. It’s also much easier to incorporate changes around these items in the design phase vs. finding some issue in the build phase that could be very expensive to address.

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?

Similarly to the above question, this allows specific dimensions and requirements to be incorporated in each item file (how much of an offset is needed, how much space above and around an item is needed, etc.). These items should also be to scale and give the designer & customer a more realistic virtual model to base a build off of. RevitCity is good for visualization purposes, but might fall short with how it actually translates to the build and real life model.