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 creation of a building model serves multiple purposes. It is a responsive model that any differences being made can be updated automatically on the graphical drawings and the 3D visualizations. To some extent, it is more than a model, but the techniques or platform that provides all parties involved to work on the same project at the same time. Therefore, there will be less errors or conflicts by sharing a model altogether. The quality of communication will be improved as the data exchange gets more convenient, and the efficiency will be increased at the same time.
The key stakeholders may include the owner, project management company (i.e., project manager), contractors (GS & SUBS), design team, suppliers of materials and equipment and the government. All the stakeholders care about whether the project can be finished on quality and on schedule. The owner, contractors and project manager also need to control the costs of the project within the budget as much as they can most of the time depending on the types of contracts.
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
- 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?
- Obviously, it is a great opportunity to advertise the manufacturers’ products by providing these families. When the designers start their work on the Revit or other BIM platforms, they usually have few ideas of what brands of doors or windows they want. As long as the manufacturers can offer the type of components that satisfy the requirement for specific size or materials, the designers are willing to pick any of them. Therefore, it is highly possible to keep that choice in the construction. Compared with putting on ads on search engines, this type of advertisement is more customer targeted.
- The families provided by these manufacturers do provide more choices for designers, which makes the designing process a little bit easier. Compared with the families provided in the Revit Library which are more conceptual, these activities are more realistic which are made from the doors and windows with precise dimensions. The designers are guaranteed to find the exact the same door or window in the market.
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 Revit component families directly from the manufacturer are more precise on dimensions, material, and other properties, as they are all made from real components. However, the families from other online sharing websites do not guarantee the precision or realness since some of them can be created by other designers. Also, the manufacturers should be responsible for the precision of the properties of these families they provided. Therefore, as long as there is no design mistake, the manufacturers have to take care of the extra costs for the failure of installation.