What are the primary goals of creating a building model? Who are the key stakeholders?
A drawing is a picture of a building. A model is a description of one.
With a model, I can ask what happens to the rest of the building when I change one element. For example, moving a column is not just a visual change. It may affect the beams, loads, spaces, and other systems around it. A drawing can still be better when I need to communicate one specific thing clearly, such as a connection or reinforcement detail, without showing all the other information in the model.
This course splits the work across Forma, Revit and Forma Data Management.
Where should a building model actually live?
I would not want the main model to live only on one person’s laptop. I have worked on projects where files were exchanged back and forth and it can quickly become unclear which version is actually current. Keeping the model in the cloud gives the team one shared reference, makes updates easier to track, and reduces the risk of someone making decisions based on an outdated file.
You will make hundreds of modeling decisions this quarter.
I would slow down for decisions that are difficult to reverse or affect many things later, such as the structural grid, geometry, and main structural system. I would move faster on details that are easy to change without affecting the rest of the model. My rule would be the more things that depend on a decision, the more carefully I should make it.