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?
A building model helps us to share detailed plan with our clients, planners, subcontractors and other project members, which means that gaps of images between these stakeholders can be closed beforehand. What they need is to make communication with other stake holders much easier, so the most important thing when we create a building model is to define what we want to discuss about by using the model.
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 detailed should be the model depends on project phases, so we should clarify the detailedness of the model, otherwise we would lose money and time. When I develop my initial design, I only focus on determining number of rooms and each location. As I develop the design, I add windows, doors, equipment and furniture. Key stages are conceptual design and developing design. In the conceptual design, we only need to include walls, floors and roofs to describe the whole shape of the building. In the development of design, I give more detailed information such as types of doors, windows and walls. I provide material information of walls and roofs as well and add equipment.
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?
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 from the manufacturer can enhance reality and modeling accuracy. On the other hand, online sharing website is useful to search component families we want.