Why use Revit as a Student?

Many teachers are not preaching with the BIM choir. Most of the teachers are still stuck in the flat world of AutoCAD. This makes us students use AutoCAD, especially when in a design studio. With the comfort and basic knowledge about how to draw a line with a mouse and the encouragement of professors most kids will stick with CAD. Without getting into the professional benefits of Revit, I want to point out a few advantages Revit will give the students using it:

Visualization

I am sure every student has gone through this process in the design studio. The process of having a great concept and sketching it out. Then you start drafting a beautiful 2D plan on AutoCAD. You are halfway through the semester and you begin to bring down lines for an elevation. You have your floor plan rotated and spun all over model space for all the guide lines. Your elevation begins to form on the screen. It's HIDEOUS! Nothing like what you had in your head. The professor finally gets a glimpse at your screen and critiques the hell out of your newly formed elevation... Now your back to square one.

If you were using Revit this problem would have been avoided or caught much early. Using Revit changes the way you think about a project before and during the design/drafting process. When drawing a single wall in Revit you are forced to think about the consequence of that wall in plan, sections, elevations, and 3-dimensional views.

Parametric Design and Models

The absolute worst part of design studio is making changes. After hours upon hours of work on a beautiful floor plan in CAD you finally show it to the class/professor. Fifteen minutes later your back on CAD for another few hours changing the plans to match all of the critiquing you just dealt with. You also must change all of your sections and elevations as well.

With the use of parametric families and Revit these changes become a breeze. Moving a window a couple feet over is as simple as clicking and dragging it two feet over. Viola! Your sections elevations and details are all up to date as well!

3D Model and Realistic Renderings

This advantage is pretty self explanatory. Your professor will be ecstatic to see a photo-realistic rendering of your exact building (especially after seeing one to many Sketchup and Playstation 1 graphic's AutoCAD renderings). The best part is... your making the 3D model as you create your plans, elevations, and sections.

Those are just a few of the many advantages that students will gain while using Revit in a design studio environment.

This video is the reason I decided to use Revit for the first time and I wanted to share it: