I’ve run across a lot of nasty and usually false remarks about the abilities and downfalls of Revit and those of us that use Revit. Usually these remarks are made by AutoCAD diehards that can’t, or don’t want to, understand how to use Revit. What gets me is how they hold such a high level of double standards when comparing both software. The best example of this literally happened 10 minutes ago:

A coworker came up to me and asked me if the doors in Revit had frames. Knowing the full answer is a simple yes, I opted to ask why he wants to show the frames and why the openings that are provided in plan do not work. The response was a for instance; let’s say that you want to dimension to the end of the frame for ADA compliance. The plan now shows that the wall terminates 1′ from the face of the wall. The concern is that some contractor will take the wall out 1′ from the face of the perpendicular wall before placing the door, as opposed to having the swing line start at 1’0 from the face of wall. Reasonable explanation. However, I pointed out that the dimension clearly shows to the swing line of the door as it exists from Revit. This is where the story really begins. He explained that in Autocad he drew all the lines on all the doors in plan to show how the wall terminated into the door frame. I then explained that the reason that the door frames do not show in Revit is because people complained about putting too much information in a model, causing performance issues, and then asked him why it’s ok for AutoCAD drawings to contain every little detail but not Revit drawings. He quickly defended the fact that he is the kind of person that wants as much information in a drawings at all times, yada yada..

I was able to explain to him that we can show door frames, but I woul dneed to modify the door family to include that information.

I don’t understand why people have such a hard time letting go of what they know to learn something that may help them out. Revit is not a threat to your profession, it’s a tool meant to help increase productivity and remove the drawing from the equation to allow for more time to design, and even allow more time to design while producing drawings (I just made a design option for a bar setup that may be changing in the CDs… we’re at 90%. I didn’t have to make a new file or set up more layers that may or may not get accidentally printed. Literally took 5 minutes).

BTW, the REAL reason the door frames are not shown in plan is because the same door type may have multiple frame conditions throughout the project. This can be simply covered by having multiple shared frame Families available in the door family for the user to choose from. Probably as an instance parameter would be best.

Peace!