Structured Data in Revit

Further to my post about Universal Shared Parameters, we were questioned about why we needed such very structured data in our authoring environment. Why couldn’t we use the limited IFC properties available for our parameter names, or make do with IFC parameters that have TEXT or LABEL datatypes, or indeed use the Shared Parameters provided by National BIM Library. The answer is that if you want to unlock the true power of the data in BIM, the data has to be much better structured than those schemas accommodate.

Example 1 – IFC4 properties

Here is an example of how IFC4 handles Reaction to Fire (Surface Spread of Flame):

This entire definition consists of a property name, a data type, and a description (in several languages). The crudeness of referring to a nebulous ‘national building code’ is a good example of a bad starting point.

• Do we use BS or EN values?
• EN values are in 3 parts: class, smoke, droplets. How are they handled?
• Is this a limiting value, if so a max or a min?
• Is this a manufacturer’s value? How does it relate to the limiting value?
• Is this value certified, if so by which body?

It’s clear that if you really want to document Reaction to Fire of an element, you’re going to need a bunch of parameters, OR maybe fewer parameters from a schema that declares these criteria. Neither IFC nor NBL parameters are fit for this purpose.

 

Universal Shared Parameters

This post began not so much as a blog piece, but more a means of contributing to a discussion that isn’t limited to 140 character chunks…. (fix it Twitter!). I’m happy to be corrected / contradicted using the comments section, or back over on Twitter @pumphousebim

There is currently a healthy discussion on Twitter about the best way to resolve the ‘Shared Parameter Problem’. Although this is Revit terminology (and I will largely use Revit terminology throughout this post), this is part of a broader BIM discussion.

The problem is this – there is no universal list of Shared Parameters for the construction industry, either in the UK or worldwide. People may try and tell you otherwise, usually people who aren’t day-to-day Revit users – believing that COBie or IFC or National BIM Library (NBL – a UK body) offer a solution to this. They don’t.

This matters because – without Universal Shared Parameters, BIM in Revit doesn’t work very well. Conflicting lists of Shared Parameters, used by conflicting object publishers, cause massive problems for users and BIM Managers, problems which are passed on to Contractors, Subcontractors and Clients

BROKEN REVIT: Legends

I’m putting together a series of posts following the release of Revit 2018 and the update of the Revit Roadmap.

It focuses on the low level broken bits of Revit that haven’t been fixed for years on end, and the Factory continually ignores, as they focus more on adding niche cutting-edge functionality instead of helping the bread-and-butter firms that pay their subs and whose time is being wasted on workarounds and inefficiency.

These posts will be submitted on Revit Ideas. Look for the prefix UK19.

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LEGENDS

Revit’s Legends feature has been broken for many years, and despite countless wishlist posts and Revit Ideas submissions, the feature remains unfixed, off the roadmap, and fundamentally unusable.

Legends may not be a glamourous part of Revit development, but they represent an area that absorbs thousands of wasted hours in workarounds and inefficiency. It’s one big area of Revit that simply isn’t BIM at all, because we can’t leverage the I in the M! None of this can be solved by Dymamo or Third-Party solutions – they’re all just time-wasting workarounds.

Here are a dozen areas that need fixing:

Is Revit the No.1* BIM** Platform?

Yesterday I published our ‘LandCADD for Revit’ manifesto and casually mentioned that Revit is the leading BIM platform. OK, OK, I said it was the no. 1 platform ‘by a long way’…  

Rob Jackson (Bond Bryan), who I have a lot of respect for, called me out on this. It happens that Rob’s practice use ArchiCAD as their main BIM platform, but it’s their Open BIM evangelism that they’re known for. Rob asked me to justify my claim about Revit, so here goes:

LandCADD or Keyscape for Revit?

An extract from a Revit planting plan created using the Areas tool (a bit of a hack…)

We learned recently that UK-based Keysoft Solutions has purchased LANDCADD from developer Eagle Point. LANDCADD is a landscape software package largely based around AutoCAD, but which also (until recently) had some limited Revit integration. We reached out to the new owners to ask about future Revit integration, and got a positive response. They responded by asking what we’d like to see in any future Revit version, so this post is our manifesto.

The TL;DR version is this:
Revit needs some Softscape tools, some Hardscape tools, and every Landscape designer needs a great Plants Database!

UPDATE, June 2016:

Keysoft have now merged Keyscape with LandCADD to become ‘Keyscape LandCADD’, but it’s AutoCAD only, and they have ‘no plans’ to bring it to Revit.

Check out CS Artisan RV instead, for a Revit-based landscape application.