[off topic] Revit feedback to Autodesk
Through my work we've been invited to give examples supporting our assertion that Revit is increasing in cost and stagnating in features. I have prepared the following text and I'm happy to get some feedback. I don't know how big a customer we are, but we are an engineering company with around 16500 employees across the world.
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Autodesk has plenty of example of what users think are problems, and have been thinking for years as the diminishing returns diagram shows. Autodesk even has a letter from over a thousand architectural offices. I think it’s a bit cheeky to ask us to spend time collecting examples for them when there are many lists of examples already. Here is the harshest and then most polite list I know of.
All sorts of more-or-less serious limitations and bugs in Revit:
https://thinkmoult.com/why-revit-is-shit.html
Autodesks own Revit wishlist appears to contain 499 pages of suggestions, but they have not shown any overview so it's hard to know how effective the system is for consolidating suggestions to gain useful insights. (In fact it seems suspicious that there are 499 pages and after that the next button does not work.)
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/idb-p/302
There is also a variety of non-public user groups collecting feedback.
Lack of IFC 4 support is a scandal. Vectorworks, Tekla and ArchiCAD have been certified since mid to late 2019. Revit has been trying since August 2017. They have opened development of the exporter to a non-autodesk community which has improved transparency but which sees very little activity with only 7 contributors, one very active one one half as active) and 150+ unresolved issues.
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Comments
A time based measure is useful to quote. In the past month, 5 commits were made by 2 contributors. In contrast, in the past month, IfcOpenShell had 55 commits made by 5 contributors. See this graph vs this graph.
Also, as a good case study, see the Revit results for the Geolocation MicroMVD and in particular how it takes a thousand word essay (excluding supplementary articles) to describe how to geolocate in Revit.
Or, something as basic as "can I call this object an IfcWall" is unreliable in Revit. The ability to export objects of a particular IFC class, which is as basic as BIM gets, requires a 7-part essay describing all of the issues. Honestly, even just writing that was a huge pain because none of it is documented.
By the way, I've been through a similar exercise to what you describe. I've sat down with Autodesk enterprise support staff, walked them through my bugreports on their tracker, demo'ed and recreated problems in front of them, to no result. I wish you the best of luck.
Unless demand comes right from dev department with a clear wish to fix issues - and means to do so, you will loose your time with sell / issue management people and it will never be reported in a usefull fashion to people able to actually make something realy happen.
But let's dream.
is there somewhere a recommendation or tutorial for revit-users to make them able to export a usable ifc out of Revit. An ifc file that would open in BlenderBIm (like the ArchiCAD documentation for Revit-user to make Revit-ifc usable in Archicad).
Is BlenderBIM by now capable of transforming a extruded ifcspace to a brep ifcspace (or the other way round).
In fact I would like to have a tutorial for optimal Revit-ifc export for DDS-CAD import or Dialux import.
Even if Walls and other geometries are present, most of the room (ifcspace?) definitions are omitted or wrong.. I would be happy to present our partner architects a howto/tutorial for compatible ifc-export (as close as OpenBIM as possible / should say BlenderBIM/Ifcopenshell).
Thanks
Lukas
@lukas Blender has support for transforming extrusions, regardless of IfcSpace or any entity, to and from breps. The userfriendlyness of it can be improved significantly, though.
The Revit category on the wiki explains best practices for getting OpenBIM out of Revit: https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=Category:Autodesk_Revit - beware, it is not easy.