Why I Hate Sketchup

One of our biggest fights with our Revit deployment has got to be with the die hard Sketchup users.

I absolutely understand that Sketchup is easy and doing Revit properly is… not as easy. I get that, I totally do. And the really good Sketchup users, when they finish a model, everyone oohs and ahhs, because it looks so good and it’s so amazing. Then why is Sketchup a bad thing?

If you are reading this, you know part of the answer already.

Sketchup is 100% outside of the documentation process for most firms. Sketchup Master has spent all this time creating this elaborate beautiful model in Sketchup. Now let’s waste some time rebuilding the entire thing in Revit so we can actually put out a set of construction document, which is ultimately what we do. I find it interesting how, on a macro level, this issue with Sketchup reflects exactly the same issue that BIM as a whole process is trying to work past. In the “rainbows and unicorns” world of BIM, the passing of the model from designer to contractor to owner is an attempt to not lose valuable knowledge and information that has been put into that model through the process. The Sketchup to Revit shift is the exact same loss of information. It is a waste of time that is unnecessary.

I would submit another reason Skethchup is bad, bordering on evil. It is imaginary. Now, before you start yelling, I know you can make Revit do some pretty amazingly fake things. Things that completely defy the laws of physics and gravity. But if you use the tool correctly, Revit has checks in there to try to help you along the way and not design something that defies the laws of time and space. Sketchup is nothing but fantasy design. Hopefully the designer has enough experience and knowledge to be able to avoid the pitfalls of building a completely imaginary model, but this isn’t always the case. Sketchup makes it very easy to design something that simply cannot be built. And the owner loves it and it’s gonna be on the cover of some grand architectural review magazine! Except that it’s entirely fiction, and when you Revit guy starts duplicating the model in Revit (which is a waste of time – see above) he or she finds this discrepancy with reality and has to spend more time discussing a solution with the Sketchup designer to find a solution.

Sketchup has a place. That place is the first five minutes of predesign, schematic design or whatever you might want to call it. That’s it. The word “sketch” is in the name for a reason.

This is one of my big soapbox items. I could rant for much longer, but frankly this blog post has gotten too long. I will post again soon where I discuss what I have found with some Sketchup snobs users and how we are trying to deal with them.

Walls Have Tops Too

We have settled on never ever ever leaving the top constraint for walls to be “unconnected”.  Even if they are short, like partitions for cubicles or something, we still connect them to the level they are on and then offset them to the proper height.  Why would I be such a wall top constraint fascist?

Engineers.

Isn’t it always that way?

Seriously, they need the tops of the walls to be constrained to something.  For most of the walls.  So, it’s just plain good habit to get into to always pay attention to the tops of the walls.  Or the top of everything for that matter.  Remember, this isn’t CADD anymore.

“Model it right and your documents will follow.”  I think I read that on a fortune cookie once.

Contractor’s POV – Part 2

So, we had the talk from Harry McKinney of Clancy & Theys last week and I promised a follow-up, um, write-up.  And this is it!

The talk was great.  Harry did an excellent job of pointing out some specifics about how contractors are starting to use BIM and Revit and touched a little on how they are trying to work with designers to get the single model approach. 

One example would be the sandwich wall.  For simplicity and ease, the architect will typcially just create a wall type with all the materials sandwiched together – brick, air gap, insulation, CMU, etc.  Harry told us that they often will create individual wall types that line up together.  One reason is that they are using BIM for staging and construciton timelines and the different wall types let them simulate the construction cycle more accurately.  The other reason is more control over cost estimating.

I am not going to go recommend to my architects that they start breaking all their walls up to place as individual walls, that would be a waste of our time.  But if we have a design-build project, it is certainly something we will need to consider.

Or maybe Autodesk can build in a nice function that will break up a wall to its core components as separate walls, kind of like you can break up a stacked wall to its subwalls.

Anyway, Harry was very well informed and more importantly very excited about the topic.  I’d like to thank him for his time coming out and sharing his knowledge with us.

Rooms Are In Section – What About View Range?

So, Revit 2009 introduced the wonders of seeing rooms in sections.  Hooray!  That was terribly exciting for a couple minutes.  Now it’s time for something practical.

One item that would be so much easier to control graphically are view ranges.  All plans and RCPs have them.  You can control elevation “ranges” in a plan, why not give us some nice interface to control a plan’s view range in section?

Something like that?  A toggle at the top and bottom for UNLIMITED on TOP and VIEW DEPTH, or a draggable bar, and a draggable bar for the CUT PLANE and the BOTTOM.  How cool would that be?

Strange Observations

I find myself looking at anything in the Real World now and trying to figure out how to model it in good ole’ Revit. I imagine that it is some mental affliction with a complicated name.
“Solid-void perception integration disorder” us what I’ll call it. SVPID for short.

DWF Creation and More NDA Fun!

One of my biggest beefs with the current 3d export of DWFs is that you can only export a single view.  The ideal DWF exporting from Revit would allow you to create “channels” of different 3d views to export into a single DWF file.  You send the DWF to the not-so-Revit-capable folks on your team and they switch from “channel” to “channel” to look over the latest design issues.  Currently, in 2009 (the version, not the year), that is not possible.

I have mentioned already that I am under a nice NDA embargo for the 2010 beta – maybe, I haven’t read the stupid thing entirely because I cannot find a copy of it.  Well, I didn’t mention it outright, but come on…  This isn’t CSI here.  Anyway, I am not at liberty to discuss, since yes, features change blah blah blah, but man wouldn’t it be awesome if in 2010 (the version, not the year) you could export multiple 3d views into one DWF to allow “channels”?

Yes.  That would be awesome.  I do wonder if that might happen.  Hmmm…

It would be unfortunate if while creating those “channels” (or bookmarks, maybe) it would not create some way to maintain a “home” for the view.  So if, hypothetically, you switched to a bookmark view, rotated, but could not then somehow get back to the default view.  Wouldn’t that be a shame?

Yes.  That would be a shame.  In theory, I suppose, one could simply close and re-open the DWF, but that’s no fun.  The HOME button should, hypothetically, be tied to the initial bookmarked view.

It’s nice to have these hypothetical conversations, isn’t it?

I have not fully embraced DWFs in our firm, but I do believe that 2010 (again, version, not the year) might be when I make the switch.  I have always liked the file format, especially when compared to PDFs (which seem to HATE large format docs) but the software for DWF has not been up to snuff.  I think it might be there now.

Need For Better Documentation

So, there is a drop down under View Properties for DISCIPLINE.

Here it is!

I have NEVER been able to find proper and complete documentation about what gets turned on and off in your view when you change this.  We are learning by trial and error, but why oh why is there no list simply indicating what each of these shows.

Do a Google search on it and you’ll find people getting confused why their walls aren’t showing up, or why the hidden lines in ductwork suddenly goes away.

If aynone has a list, please point me to it.  Otherwise I’ll continue mentally documenting things that disappear when we notice them.

Wall Jogs and Tough Clean Ups

UPDATE – Please check out Bjorn’s quick and easy technique in the comments.  It’s one of those things that makes you say “no way!”  You still might need to do some “dancing” with some elaborate stacked walls, but the below tip is an excellent first step that should resolve a lot of the issues.

There comes a point in any Revit wall’s life that it just cannot clean up.  It’s not when the wall is too big, Revit LOVES big.

It’s when it gets too small.

Look at the below two wall strings.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

All set?  Great.  Now, they look fine, right?  Clean up nice and pretty.  But look what happens when I scoot that lower wall in both strings up just 1/8″.

What in the world happened to the wall string on the left?!  That jog got all messed up!  But the one on the right is fine!  What’s happened here?

Well, the overall width on the wall on the left is 1′-1 7/8″.  That’s the key.  Once a jog, or clean up length gets less than the overall width of the wall, the wall gets very confused and mad.  The top two “horizontal” walls are overlapping the lower “horizontal” wall, and making cleanup a nightmare.

Is there a solution?  Sort of.

First thing you need to do is think about how it would actually be built… you know… in the real world.  Would it really be jut the wall walking around this gap, or would it be a different wall type, etc?

From this point, there are a couple options, none of which are ideal.  We have tried them with mixed results.

You can make an architectural column and slap it on the wall.  We’ve done that.  Works… OK.

If you want to use walls, there is a very round about way to try and get these things to clean up.

First we need a frame of reference on our walls.

So, walls 1 and 5 are our major horizontals, 3 is the smallish horizontal, and 2 and 4 are our right and left verticals, respectively.  You’ll see from the above image that I have already started my work. 

The first step is to disallow the join between 2 and 3 and 3 and 4.  On the appropriate end for each wall, you need to right-click on the grip and select DISALLOW JOIN.  You’ll do this for the lower grips on 2 and 4, and both gripd on 3.

Then you need to do some aligning, and you will only figure this out with trial and error and a lot of undos.  For this case I ended up aligning and constraining the left face of wall 3 to the left (interior) face of wall 2 and the right face of wall 3 with the right (interior) face of wall 4.  Then I aligned and constrained the lower face of wall 2 to inside the finish material of wall 3.

The final step is to simply JOIN GEOMETRY on each combination of walls: 2 to 3 and 3 to 4.  And here’s the thing – THE ORDER THAT YOU SELECT WHAT WALL FIRST MATTERS.  In this case, I selected the “verticals” first, so I clicked 2 then 3, and then 4 then 3.  It “feels” like the first thing you select when you join geometry “wins”.  I have zero scientific data to back this claim up, but that’s what my gut tells me.

Poof!  Nice and clean.  And if I nudge or straight out move wall 3 up, the clean up stays with it.

This is definitely one of those cases where no one solution fits all problems but if you know the possible solutions, you can hopefully pick an appropriate response.

Getting Your Sheets in Order

Revit is always touted as a modeling application, not a documentation one.  I have even heard an Autodesk folk say that you should do your modeling in Revit and then print from AutoCrap… sorry, AutoCAD.  Well, that’s one horribly insane idea that we’ll file neatly in the “crazy person said it” category.

Still, Revit out of the box leaves a little to be desired on the documentation front.  We like to refer to it as the last 10%.  Revit almost gets you there, it gets you 90% of the way to amazing documents and gorgeous sheets that I would want to frame and hang on the wall, but that last 10% rears its head and bites you.

There are ways to work around the last 10%, thanks to customization and parameters that you can create.  One of the out of the box issues is ordering sheets.  The sheet index is an amazingly wonderful schedule that you can plunk on your index sheet or cover sheet and be done with it… as long as you want to list everything alphabetically.

If your firm is like ours, the A sheets don’t come first (they do in our hearts, but not in the set).  What is a Revit user to do?  Here’s where some parameters come in. 

Make a project parameter and call it Sort Order and apply that parameter to sheets.  Numerically determine what the order for each discipline is (general = 1, architectural = 6, etc) and then fill in the correct value for the sheet.  We also added a parameter called Sort Order Name which contains the discipline’s name.

Now, create a Drawing Index Schedule and add the Sort Order (and Sort Order Name) fields to it.  Hide Sort Order under the Appearance tab.  In the Sorting/Grouping tab, set the first sort by to Sort Order.  And for extra points, set the second one to Sort Order Name and mark it as Header.  The final sorting is done by Sheet Number.

This will organize and group your sheets by the numeric Sort Order and put a nice header of the Sort Order Name above them.

We may never fully make it past the last 10%, but we can get close.

Toilet Partitions

I know, it’s a fun topic.  But it is one that is debatable out there in Revit-land.

The best approach we have found is to simply have a wall type whose construction is 1″ formed plastic.  Then when it’s placed, our Revit modelers need to pay particular attention to the offsets to make sure it’s “hung” right.  We don’t model connectors or hangers, that’s just more junk to bog down our model.

The most complicated wall… EVER

Now, here comes the fun part.  If my cut plane is slicing through the partition, it’s going to show up with a nice fat line, just like any other wall.  We don’t want that.  We want our toilet partition to be a trim slim line.

So comes the beauty of view filters.  I love view filters.  Your view filter lives in the Visibility Graphics for your view (VG).  They can also be saved in view templates (which I am also in love with – don’t tell the view filters!)

On our plans, we add a view filter that looks for any wall type whose name includes the word “toilet” and we dial down the cut lines for it.  Voila.  Slim lines for our partitions.

Adding the filter…

… and applying it to the view

The only potential issue is that we have to make sure we name our wall types properly.  If any non toilet partition wall has the work “toilet” in its name, then it will show up thin.  But, this really really should never happen.  If it does, feel free to pull out your BIM Stick and beat the tar out of the person who did it.