What are the primary goals of creating a building model? Who are the key stakeholders?
- What do they need?
Goals of creating a building model include being able to share a design to stakeholders. This is important to ensure there is clear communication between the client, engineers, architects, contractors, and other stakeholders.
- What do they care about most?
Clear communication of detail and design is what people care about most. Design aspects can be communicated to ensure all stakeholders understand the design, can suggest changes, and ultimately agree to a design submission.
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?
Building models at the initial design should include basic design information like the size of rooms, the size of the building and any important considerations to the shape or architecture. Main stages include the conceptual stage, the design stage, and construction development. Each stage should include more information - the design stage in particular is important for including key information on material, thickness, and other composition of the design. How much detail usually depends on the stakeholder using your building model will be - contractors might need more detailed information on the composition of walls, floors, and roofs, while a community member at a planning meeting might need less detail about that and high quality rendering.
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?
Manufacturers can use providing door and window families as a tool to attract potential customers. Designs that use a specific manufactured window may be difficult to have an alternative if more complex analyses that depend on certain materials are conducted. The advantage to designers is that these types of analyses are facilitated.