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 stakeholders (client, engineer, architect, contractor) need to know the materials, dimensions, quantities, and layout of the building.
The stakeholders care most about money, safety, aesthetic design, and sustainability generally.
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?
The level of detail needed is not high. As long as the model physically makes sense, the initial design should be satisfactory.
The level of detail should be improved up to the point where there is no ambiguity when attempting to construct the building in real life.
The key stages are conceptual design, preliminary design, design development, and construction documentation.
This will probably vary by project and depend on the needs of client and contractor at each step. Each stage should have more detail than the previous one.
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?
The advantage is to provide accurate representations of their product in order to avoid confusion or dissatisfaction with the product if something is different than expected.
The benefit is that I can be sure of the dimensions of the elements from the manufacturer. If I use a family provided in the Revit library, I may have to make additional changes to reflect my needs.