I apologize for the lack of post over the last few months.  In our defense, we have been mad busy and the BIM push has been crazy as well.  But, now that we have settled down into the initial shock and change introduced by Revit.

 Last year Ross & Baruzzini created the official “R&B BIM Committee” a group of Revit users from each department who meet monthly to discuss procedures and ongoing questions to keep the Revit push on track.  We took all of our current issues, as well as our user group feedback, and created an “outline of needs.”  We then contacted our trainers and gave them our list to create a three-day training session that would cover all of our needs.

This allowed us to tie up all of our loose ends, such as standard templates, sheet sets, automated scheduling and Revit 2011 nuances.  

This was a great next step in our commitment to Revit.  I cannot stress enough the importance of having your standards and templates in place before project kickoff.  Trying to fudge things at the last minute to make the sheets print correctly, knowing that the model integrity has suffered, is not acceptable. Proper templates, standards, family view sets and a BIM execution plan are necessary if you want to consider your organization a BIM shop. If not you are only producing 3D AutoCAD documents. Why bother with BIM if your organization is clearly not getting the point?

What is the next step?  Once the initial training is complete and everyone is up to speed with the new product’s systems and tutorials we will take the next step, bringing your BIM to the next level?  Once all of your templates and tools are in place you can focus on the process. A BIM Execution plan will help you with this process.

We were working on a project where the roof is at different elevations. Normally we would set the view range for the whole sheet at the lowest elevation and "hide in view" the elements we did not want to show.  That seemed like a lot of extra work, until we found the Plan Region tool. The Plan Region tool lets u select a region/view that is different from the overall view. (It can be found in the View tab, go to Plan Views and select Plan Region.)  It works like a sketch, so you are not limited to the shape or size of the area.  If you set your view range so that your elements are not showing, then you will no longer have to hide each one separately.  Saves a lot of time!

Recently I had the pleasure of presenting to the Electrical Board of Missouri and Illinois BIM Basics with Nathan Haas (Electrical Revit Manager) providing live Revit demonstrations for answering questions.  The presentation, “Building Information Modeling, Where Do We Begin?” discussed BIM and the implementation of Revit.  This was a very high level overview of the trials and tribulations, pros and cons, that Ross & Baruzzini faced during our Revit journey.  Through the years we have refined our processes by streamlining the training and implementation.  Sharing this information with the community helps everyone move forward in taking it to the next level.  The group discussed a wide range of BIM topics such as Bidirectional Associativity (a change anywhere is a change everywhere), IPD or Integrated Project Delivery and IFC Format for BIM program compatibility.

The meat of the presentation was spent discussing how to successfully ramp up the Revit initiative. Bottom line is for all of the “cons” we discussed we can always associate a “pro.”  For example, software cost could be seen as a hurdle, however, Autodesk allows you to download a free copy for a 30 day trial per system, giving you plenty of time to test and train.  Expensive systems to run the application could also be seen as a stumbling block; with the new i7 processor we have tested 64 bit systems that run at a fraction of the cost of our expensive Xeon systems. Training and more importantly, the timing of the training was discussed in detail along with our theory on pod training (all users in one room to train off each other) pre- and post-project to get our new users comfortable and confident with the application.

Another way to avoid purchasing and training your managers on Revit is Navisworks, an alternative to use for opening BIM files.  It can be used to open, print and present files without purchasing an expensive Revit license. 

For the past couple of years we have been partnering with a company in Florida called CADD Centers, Gregory Arkin being our key contact.  You may know him from his blog www.Revit3d.com.  For those of you who know Gregory, he is very passionate about his work, which happens to be anything tied to Revit and BIM. Once we started training with our new partners at the CADD Centers, everything started clicking (literally). We began by training our users the Revit basics with a three day on-site class for which we flew the trainer to St. Louis. We then followed up with an advanced class, as well as a Revit Family creation and editing course. 

Once the training was complete we were at a crossroads:   Trained users, but no project to start. Our Revit team met monthly to try to determine projects that we could target, but were struggling with the Owners, Clients and Designers on various items. The project was either too big, too small, too complex, or not complex enough.  We just could never get the go-ahead until recently. 

We have just completed a full Revit MEP project partnering with SOA architects. The project was a great success that I would like to share with you. It has been over a year since the original Revit training.   Our Revit team was working on families and training models to stay involved, but we had no actual projects, so most of the hands-on training was lost or forgotten.  We had to do something to get everyone back on track short of retraining the users. We contacted Gregory at CADD Centers of Florida and discussed our solution to have the trainers online with a live webcast while working on the billable project to save us money and time, and by only covering the areas we needed. 

 The plan was implemented, and the training (or work sessions) was scheduled for the beginning and end of the project. This way, we could get started on the project and have time to create a list of problems or areas that need to be addressed to maximize our time with the trainer. We would have another remote session again at the end of the project so we could address all of the outstanding questions to ensure that the final deliverables were complete.  

With Joe Vivirito running the sessions from the CADD Centers side, the process worked very well. Joe is another passionate individual who is driven by Revit knowledge and challenges. If you have a problem, Joe will find an answer. For collaboration purposes, we put all of the users in a conference room with a phone and projection screen so Joe could share his computer screen with us. With these simple capabilities, Joe was able to spend three days helping our guys through the Design Development phase of the project to get everyone’s deliverables out the door.  This was a great approach; we were not only learning, but doing, while on a billable project, hence creating a small return on investment. We then repeated the process with an additional two-day training webcast for the final document review before the project went out the door. The overall process was a great success due to the dedicated MEP Revit users along with the partnership of CADD Centers, proving that choosing the right Revit partner really makes the difference. 

Ross & Baruzzini is in the process of completing our first Revit MEP project. For those of you familiar with the process you understand what a great accomplishment this truly has become. Ross & Baruzzini has completed a few BIM or Revit models in the Architectural department over the past two years but have never been afforded the opportunity to dive into an MEP model.

The Revit committee has been meeting on a monthly basis to identify potential full service projects that our operators, engineers and owners would be comfortable starting. This proved to be a very difficult task since not everyone in the industry understands the benefits or even has the software and hardware to receive and open Revit files. With the recent addition of the Columbia College project we have been given the opportunity to show our capabilities and I am happy to say everything is moving along great. Nathan, Zak and Kent have taken on the challenge with open arms and not a minute to soon! It looks like we have another Revit project in the lineup for the San Diego Airport which will involve our AES group with Karen, Brad and Travis leading the way. Anyone wishing to learn Revit through the tutorials should give the IS team a call, we will install and configure the software on your system so you can follow the tutorials at your own speed. We are currently building a training and tutorial section on the intranet Revit Page.

I recently came across a unique feature in Revit.  It is called the I-drop drag and drop feature.  The feature works by clicking the thumbnail image of the file and dragging it onto the Revit plan, elevation, section, etc.  Release the file into the appropriate view.  See the image below showing the highlighted file on the right that was dragged into the Revit file on the left.  Revit does not link the file; it recognizes it as an object inserted into the current view only.  After placing the object, the user can explode it if they choose to do so.  Just a reminder that if the baseplan.dwg  layout changes, the modifications will not be automatically updated.  The user would have to perform the I-drop command again or decide to link the import.

• You can recreate that detail from scratch in Revit
• Import the 2D detail and draw over the top in Revit
• Import and explode the 2D detail
• Import and modify the layers to work better inside of Revit