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?
Creating a model is a lot more important for the team of designers and especially engineers, than the client. I think the client should be respected of course and they are the key shareholder, but if a client is really wanting a timeless piece instead of a run-of-the-mill luxury home or what have you then the render should not be used until the building is ready to be show cased. That is how I started my process on this design and when I was ready to hit Revit, it made much more sense and I was able to really enjoy the flow of design because I did all of the heavy conceptual lifting at the begining of the week.
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
I think it is okay to start rough and work your way from there. A sculptor doesn’t start with a finished product and won’t be able to see all the nuances of the work until they chisel it away. I think defining dimentions is an important step, because you have a target in mind and I think that sort of challenge makes us humans more interesting and allows us to think about problems in a really fun and fascinating way. Personally, in my future practice I want to use renders as little as possible. I stand with Tatiana Bilbao because I feel that 3-D modeling is daming. Clients can especially get hooked on the first idea and begin to really get a feel of how they want a building to be rather than what it desires to become. Rendering can be useful when the building is officially ready to be modeled.
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?
You can customize the the exact look of how you want it to be. The client can have a better idea of how the finished product will look like. As an architect you can also start building relationships with the manufacturers if you go directly to them for samples.