Revit Community

James Vandezande AUGI Revit Community Chair Email:

Welcome to the AUGI Revit Community. Revit is Autodesk's premier Building Information Modeling solution, but did you know it was originally developed by a startup company called Charles River Software (founded 1997) - later renamed Revit Technologies. Autodesk succesfully acquired Revit Technologies on April 1, 2002. You can click here to brush up on the full history. If this is your first time here, be sure you become familiar with the Six Phases of a Revit User as made popular by Revit moderator and forum godfather, Chris Zoog.

The 2009 series of Revit products is also on the horizon and is sure to be a big hit with the community at large. Although Autodesk still hasn't allowed us to customize the elevation tags, here are some of the exciting new features:

• Mental Ray rendering
• Using linked elements for room bounding
• Swept blends
• VSTA programming interface
• Revision Schedule improvements
• Dimension overrides
• Color fills in sections and elevations
• True volume rooms
• View Cube and Steering Wheels
• Concatenated Parameters
• ...and much more!

More information on the 2009 features can be found at Imaginit, BIMBoom or MasterGraphics. New features for Revit Structure 2009 are listed on All About Revit and Synergis. Last, but not least, Revit MEP 2009 enhancements can be seen at CAD Digest.

Sustainable Design

On the sustainability front, be sure to pay a visit to Autodesk's site for "Green Research" and check out the fantastic idea presentation of Project Chicago. Autodesk has also recently announced the acquistion of Green Building Studio, a web-based tool for whole building energy design. Using gbXML exported from Revit, results can be obtained in minutes - making it quite useful during early phases of design. The latest version of GBS also allows general assumptions to be iterated to find the most energy-efficient design principals related to your submitted project.

In The Lab

Finally, you might want to check out a new web-based content search tool - called Autodesk Seek - under development at the Autodesk Labs. Seek indexes content from Autodesk's stock Revit libraries as well as BIMWorld and Sweets. In addition to Revit families, Seek can return results for DWG, DGN, DWF, SKP and other formats and allows you to drag-and-drop content into your Autodesk applications using iDrop technology. Feel free to give it a try at http://cs.labs.autodesk.com or use the Content Search toolbar in the Revit 2009 products.

• Revit Architecture
• Revit Structure
• Revit MEP

AUGI Revit Community Chair
~James Vandezande