Chapter 2: Principles of Revit

Understand Revit project organization. Revit has been available for about 10 years, and yet, after a decade, it remains unique in its approach to “whole-building BIM.” The compelling advantage of being able to design, document, and manage your project across multiple disciplines—the architect, structural, and mechanical disciplines—is something that you can only do in Revit, and understanding project workflow in Revit is key to getting off on the right foot.

Master It Thinking back to the Revit organization chart shown in Figure 2.1, what are the main components of a Revit project, and how can you apply them to your design process? How do these categories directly affect your design workflow?

Solution The top-level categories of a Revit project are Datum, Content, Views, and Management. They correspond to the design process of maintaining relationships, repetition, representations, and restrictions. Keep these corollaries in mind as you move sequentially from schematic design, design development, construction documentation, and construction management.

Understand Revit interface organization. In addition to understanding how your project is organized, to use Revit well you must understand how the user interface is organized. Once you grasp both these concepts, you'll be ready to move ahead.

Master It The “big” areas of the Revit UI are the ribbon, properties, the Project Browser, and the drawing area. How do these areas work together, and what tabs correspond to an iterative design process?

Solution The Home tab is where you'll turn in your early design process since it contains datum, system families, component families, and spaces. As the design develops, you'll establish your views from the View tab. When you start to get into documentation, you'll work from the Annotate tab. Having panels from the Modify tab pulled off and close at hand will keep you from having to go between one contextual tab and another.