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 the model is collaboration of different stakeholders at different phases of the life cycle of facility to insert, extract, update or modify information in the BIM to support and reflect the roles of stakeholders. The model allows to digitally design, construct and operate a structure over its entire life cycle. The key stakeholders are the owner, the designer and the contractor. They care about the most efficient design, construction and operation processes.
*Building Information Modeling, AGC of America
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 level of details depend on the phase of development. The level of details increases with the project development. There are several phases of development: pre-design, schematic, design, construction documents, bid phase, construction phase.
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 - Very few details, walls, floors and roof assemblies can be shown as symbols (LoD 100),
- Preliminary design - More details, but still not very detailed assemblies (approximate quantities, size, location, LoD 200),
- Design development - Specific system or assembly, materials and thicknesses are defined.
- Construction documentation - The most detailed assembly with specific locations and interfaces with other building systems.
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 is that by providing those families they increase the likelihood of their doors and windows to actually being installed in the buildings designed ⇒ increase sales.
- 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 advantage to the designer is that those doors and windows do need to be modified during design development.
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?
When you get the component from the manufacturer no changes to the object are required. Material quantities, layout, dimensions and visual representation are coming from the main source, therefore there is no need to adjust. The website like RevitCity.com offers a great variety of components however it is possible that over the design development those components will be replaced with the “real” ones which may lead to the conflicts in design.