Revit users often prefer when all teams are working in Revit. This allows coordination to be smooth and seamless. However, more often than not, the software for coordination is not specified, especially for smaller projects. This can potentially add disruptions turning a supposedly quick-and-dirty project into a not so quick-and-dirty project.
Consider this example when an architect wishes to design in CAD and the MEP engineer wishes to design in Revit to take advantage of their latest refined Revit Family Library. This misalignment in software can create significant issues for the MEP engineer especially if their new families were meant for placing onto Revit geometry. For example, if the MEP company had decided on face-hosted families as a standard, the engineer could not perform their duties because there were no Revit walls to place their families onto. This would require an alternative workflow, such as drawing the wall themselves and placing the families onto the wall they drew, then delete the walls leaving their families in place. To take this example further, revisions can be difficult especially when the now host-less family doesn’t want to move freely. It’s a mess, especially for Revit beginners. Leaving walls in the model, such as on a hidden workset, is out of the question, as each discipline should only model the elements they are responsible for. This would just cause more confusion and potentially add disruptions to the project.
How would the MEP engineer overcome this specific scenario? One solution is to recreate the families as floating and setting aside a special library for this specific situation. It should be noted that there is no checkbox option to simply swap between hosted and floating families, which means recreating the families on the spot will likely to cause a disruption to the business.
This scenario highlights how some critical decisions in Revit standards may affect the business. Building a robust Revit Family Library ahead of time, fit for all typical project scenarios is a strategic investment that pays off in efficiency, reducing risk, and improving overall project success no matter which software is used by the other teams.
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