What are the primary goals of creating a building model? Who are the key stakeholders?

The primary goals of creating a building model are to help the future users of the construction get a clear visual of what their space might look like. Depending on their construction requests, what they care about most will vary. In general, I think when it comes to a building model what they would care about most is having their concerns heard (i.e. is the ADA bathroom considered) and getting a picture of what their construction could look like so they can also address issues they might not have noticed/considered until it was built and too late.

How much detail should you include in your building model? How do you decide?

As you develop your initial design, there will probably not be as much detail since you’re still mapping everything out and tinkering with the spacing. Once you nail down where you want everything to be, you would start to consider how you want it to look and therefore incorporating more detail as you choose materials and designs. From there, annotating and clearly marking the model to make it easily understandable to any viewer rounds out the amount of detail in the model.

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

The advantage for manufacturers who provide Revit families is they’re potentially gaining new customers. It is almost the equivalent of the “see how it looks on you/in your home” A.I. filters that show products in your house using your phone. By allowing customers to visualize their products in their space, they’re potentially selling that product. The benefit for the designer using these instead of families in the Revit library is that you can get more specific designs out of them. If you are modeling something that you plan to build it can also help to use items that exist and you can buy which will save you time once you bring it all to life (as opposed to using generic placeholders).