What are the primary goals of creating a building model? Who are the key stakeholders?
- What do they need?
The primary goals of creating a building model are to tell a story through a series of 2D and 3D views. This story must be clear enough such that everyone involved in the construction process (the key stakeholders such as the owner, architect, structural engineer, contractor, even the mechanical and lighting engineers) can understand exactly what the building is intended to look like and do. The key stakeholders involved in building modeling need descriptive dimensions, labels, text, and geometry and layout.
- What do they care about most?
The key stakeholders care most about how to most efficiently communicate their designs, engineering, and big ideas across all other members of the construction process. This could be through section details that explicitely tell how a beam is connected to a column or through labels and dimensions of zoomed in spaces. With efficiency comes cost and the construction industry always cares most about the money involved.
How much detail should you include in your building model? How do you decide?
- As you develop your initial design?
As you develop your initial design, the most important level of design is schematic in that the floors, placement of walls, and overall layout of the model is accurately represented. This is because the most important aspect to figure out is the positioning before paying too close attention to windows, doors, and other components. This can be decided based on knowing how much the smaller components and details are going to change throughout the process.
- As you continue to iterate and develop on your design?
As you continue to iterate and develop on the design, the amount of detail can extend to when you start to add windows, doors, the roof and any other placement details. This is important to acknowledge fairly early on such that the other stakeholders in the design process know potential positioning for such components. For example, if a door is modeled appropriately the mechanical engineer knows that a large cooling tank cannot exist directly in front of it to block the passage way.
- What are the key stages?
The key stages of the design process include schematic design, design development, construction documents, bidding, and construction administration.
- And how much detail should you include at each stage?
As referenced above, the schematic design phase is when the development of the building in its bare bones takes place. The SD phase includes sketching the relative locations of walls, floors, and openings. This phase involves several different arrangements of what these walls and openings may look like. The design development phase is when the details of the building design really start to come together. The doors and windows and the furniture components start to come together such as the overall design is much more detailed. The last stage, the permit set, that includes construction administration and bidding should have the highest level of detail such that each of the smaller section cuts, connection details, lighting and furniture are included in the design. This set should accurately paint the whole picture and tell the story of the building.
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 advantages of getting REVIT component families directly from the manufacturer is the availability and level of reality of such piece of furniture, equipment, or fitting. By using an online sharing website, it is nearly impossible to fully replicate what the space will actually feel like in real life and with this, the true dimensions are not exact. Thus, by using the component families from the manufacturer you can more accurately represent the true state and size of the space.