This creates issues with round-tripping, consultants using our files, and even ourselves trying to use our own files. At the point of writing this, it’s been 5 years.
Forget IFC4, Revit can’t even do IFC2x3 properly, even though IFC4 has been an ISO spec since 2013. Regardless of the IFC MVD, it will never allow modification of the IFC. Revit will develop a mapping and create a special Revit file just to read and perform the most rudimentary filtering on the IFC file. The simplest IFC of a few kB will take 15 seconds to import and in the process Revit will multiply the filesize by at least 10. Will your building element turn up at all? Will it even export? Will it import? Ah, the mysteries of the universe. Revit deals with IFCs very poorlyĮxporting to an IFC? Will your roofs become IfcRoof, or will Revit decide your roof is a slab instead? Will your windows become IfcWindow? Who knows. In contrast, the first thing that you do when you launch FreeCAD to create a BIM project is to define a building with storeys in that building that belong to a site. Have a shared site with mix-use buildings where two buildings merge? Now you’ve got a maintenance nightmare. No way of categorising a shape to represent a building or that some levels are part of building A and some are part of building B. If you have two buildings next to each other, Revit has no way of saying that some walls belong to building A, and some belong to building B. You can categorise walls, floors, roofs … but a building? Nope. Revit has failed to implement even the most basic of BIM concepts: a building. An example of Revit failing to consistently deal with openings in an irregularly shaped wall With this background, I hope to present a fair but critical list of issues I have faced with Revit.
I have also used a great deal of software on many platforms, including 3D modeling as practiced by the CG industry, point clouds, programmatic typesetting with Lilypond and LaTeX, and am also closely following OpenBIM initiatives.
Therefore, the concepts of decoupling, interfaces, modularity, Robert Martin’s famous code smells of fragility, rigidity, and so on, and technical debt, are all applicable in this field. There are ever-changing client requirements, lots of small pieces that interact, and domino effects of changing the design in one area. Software architects deal with many of the same issues as BIM data management. I have a background in software development, previously working as a software architect. However, I have certainly used it to document projects, and have used Revit’s API. I speak from the perspective of an architect working on large commercial projects across different building typologies, and therefore do not use the MEP aspects, which may be better than I have experienced here. Its function is to build a 3D “BIM” model of a building and lay out 2D documentation in the traditional form of drawing sheets. Revit is a proprietary software developed by the monopoly Autodesk for the AEC industry.
Join the OSArch community today and help drive community-driven AEC tools. It is under heavy development, but all early adopters are welcome.
We are now developing a 100% free and open-source native OpenBIM authoring tool called BlenderBIM. Black-box BIM data is no longer acceptable by companies with a large real-estate portfolio. Data about our built environment is a human right and should be transparent and not governed by a vendor.
Update: The popularity of this article has shown the industry needs to break out of the unethical behaviour by proprietary vendors, which result in proprietary incompatibility, proprietary obsolescence, and proprietary subscription.
I would play down the title to something more politically correct, but that would risk understating Revit’s limitations that I have to deal with on an almost daily basis.