A BIM filled week

It has been long week already, and it's only Wednesday!

Monday was the first meeting of the Madison MEP User's Group that I have attended. Being new to the area it was great to be invited. Thanks to Westphal Electric for hosting and thanks to Scott Brisk (Revit MEP blog) for facilitating (thanks for the invite Scott!!) There was no particular application affinity in this group, although it seemed to be weighted towards Autodesk products. This seems like a great group of folks and it's always nice to see what other BIM users are doing out there. Model to fabrication, and Model to total station "round tripping" are two topics that were mentioned a number of times (and probably deserve a follow up post.)

This morning, Ed Deal (AEC Building Technical Specialist for Autodesk) presented a seminar in two sessions. The first was titled Construction Documents and Beyond. The focus was on breaking out of the Construction Document (CD) trap. While Revit can produce 2D printed documents that rival anything ever produced in CAD (when set up well,) it is at heart a design tool and in it's soul is a BIM authoring tool. Needless to say, lots of ideas about verifying programming, quantifying design iterations and schematic analysis were presented. My kinda topics.

The second session was geared towards the MEP crowd ( it was nice to see faces from the Madison MEP User's Group again so soon.) The topic was analysis tools that leverage the Revit Model. Starting with a very schematic model (approx 45 mins of modeling) Ed analyzed various design iterations using the tools available natively in Revit, Green Building Studio, and Ecotect. Some of the things that Ed did I'm not sure you can even DO with CAD drawings (certainly not with the level of accuracy and in the same amount of time.) I'll try to post links to the White Papers referenced. Thanks ED!

Tomorrow we (Cogdell Spencer Erdman-Madison Office) host the Madison Revit Managers Group. So hopefully we will have some useful blog-fodder from that meeting as well.

In the next couple of weeks, expect posts about:

Ceilings (the videos are already on my YouTube Channel) note: would have posted about these earlier, but my laptop went 10 rounds with a small dog and lost it's "C" key. I just can't "see" posting about Ceilings without a "C." :P

An update to Plumbing "Fixture Unit" Flow. (Hint: I think we found a way to make it work.)

Is Revit faster than CAD? (a definitive answer...?)

etc etc.

If you don't see these soon, you need to get on here and nag me till they show up.

Thanks all,

E