Of the three discipline-specific BIM solutions that are now available on the Revit platform, Revit Architecture is the one with the longest development history, as Revit started off being an architectural design tool all the way back in April 2000, when the first version of its parametric building modeler was released. With over seven years of development, it does, by now, have a fairly complete feature set of modeling tools for architectural design, allowing the development efforts to focus on other aspects of the application such as improved usability, robustness, and workflow. These improvements span across several tools and tasks of the application in Revit Architecture 2008.
Hopefully, some of these limitations can be addressed in future releases of the application. Also, I hope that Autodesk does not stay content with simply continuing to develop Revit with an incremental set of improvements in every release, but can also take a step back and explore the potential for some dramatically new ways of modeling and working. A case in point is the Groups feature. Even though it is an efficient way of modeling repeating units in a project, it does not actually reduce the file size since the geometry is being duplicated for each instance of the group. There should be a smarter way to represent repeating units so that the file size is reduced—with some kind of reference capability that still works with Revit's centralized data model rather than the distributed nature of Xrefs in AutoCAD. The idea of smart referencing can be applied at a much broader level as well. For example, does the geometry of a window really need to be repeatedly represented in the model each time it is inserted, increasing the size of the model? Can't it be represented just once in the model and then intelligently referenced from the other locations in which it is placed?
This was just one example of a possible change in the application that could have a radical impact on usability and performance. There could be several more, and it is important for BIM vendors like Autodesk to continue to invest some of their resources into broader R&D efforts rather than on simply improving what they have developed so far. The latter is undoubtedly important for day-to-day usability but it is the broader research and development that will lead to real innovation and ultimately shape the future of BIM.
Hopefully, some of these limitations can be addressed in future releases of the application. Also, I hope that Autodesk does not stay content with simply continuing to develop Revit with an incremental set of improvements in every release, but can also take a step back and explore the potential for some dramatically new ways of modeling and working. A case in point is the Groups feature. Even though it is an efficient way of modeling repeating units in a project, it does not actually reduce the file size since the geometry is being duplicated for each instance of the group. There should be a smarter way to represent repeating units so that the file size is reduced—with some kind of reference capability that still works with Revit's centralized data model rather than the distributed nature of Xrefs in AutoCAD. The idea of smart referencing can be applied at a much broader level as well. For example, does the geometry of a window really need to be repeatedly represented in the model each time it is inserted, increasing the size of the model? Can't it be represented just once in the model and then intelligently referenced from the other locations in which it is placed?
This was just one example of a possible change in the application that could have a radical impact on usability and performance. There could be several more, and it is important for BIM vendors like Autodesk to continue to invest some of their resources into broader R&D efforts rather than on simply improving what they have developed so far. The latter is undoubtedly important for day-to-day usability but it is the broader research and development that will lead to real innovation and ultimately shape the future of BIM.
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