Revit 2027 With Paul Aubin: Five Features Worth Your Time - Replay

 

Paul Aubin came back on BIM After Dark Live to walk through his favorite Revit 2027 features, and instead of a quick highlight reel we picked a handful and went deep on each one. If you want to know which 2027 updates actually change how you work, and which ones still have rough edges, this one is for you.

What We Covered

Parameters as a Service is not brand new, but plenty of people have missed it. Paul showed how to convert locally stored shared parameters into cloud-hosted ones, and the part that surprised him was how clean it was. He expected a second step to convert each parameter individually, and it just did the whole thing. If you are tired of chasing down a shared parameter text file that went missing years ago, this is worth a look.

Coordination Models were the sleeper of the night. Harlan Brumm pointed Paul to this one, and it clicked once we saw it. You can visually compare two published versions of a model directly inside Revit, with green for new, orange for modified, and red for deleted. Even better, version does not matter. You can link a model saved in 2026 into a project running in 2027. On the construction side, that cross-version workflow is a big deal.

The tag updates are small on paper and huge in practice. You can now grab a leader attachment point and move it, and in the family you can flag labels with exclude from leader outline so the leader always points to the part of the tag you care about. A live chat question from John even surfaced that you can associate that setting to a parameter, which opens up some clever tag swapping.

Hosted walls felt like the missing piece. Walls can now host to other walls, which finally makes separate finish walls behave the way most of us wanted all along. Paul put it best when he said the old way was twenty steps and the new way just works.

We closed on numbering rules and the Autodesk AI Assistant. Paul numbered solar panels using filters and partitioning, then handed off a renaming and sheet renumbering task to the Assistant. His big takeaway, and a good one, is to always tell it to show you what it plans to do before it touches your model. As he reminded everyone, nobody is going to fire the AI. They are going to fire you.

Watch the Replay Here...

Is AI the End of Dynamo? What's New in Dynamo 4.0 for Revit 2027 (Replay)

Last week I sat down with John Pierson from the Autodesk Dynamo team to walk through Dynamo 4.0 in Revit 2027 and answer the question a lot of us keep circling back to: with AI writing scripts and Revit Assistant baked right in, is there still a reason to learn visual programming? Short answer, yes, and the reasons are more interesting than I expected.

What We Covered

Dynamo 4.0 is mostly an under-the-hood release, and that's a good thing. It now runs on Python.NET 3 and .NET 10, with real performance gains in the geometry engine. If you work with topo solids or drape geometry, point projections are noticeably faster. The .NET 10 jump also unlocks add-in isolation in Revit 2027, which means the days of uninstalling plugins one by one to find the thing that broke Dynamo should finally be behind us.

A few quality-of-life wins stood out. Groups can now be resized and collapsed, and they only show the inputs and outputs that are actually connected instead of every possible port. Paneling nodes that lived in beta for years are now in the box. And here's the one I'd act on today: right-click almost any Revit node and you can open a built-in sample file. John actually built a lot of those samples himself before he joined Autodesk, and roughly 80 percent of Revit nodes now have coverage.

Then we got into AI. The biggest mental unlock for me was understanding that an MCP server is not the full Revit API. It only does what someone hardcoded it to do, which is why a public Revit MCP might only expose seven actions. But because every Dynamo node is already an API call wrapped in human-written documentation, running the assistant inside Dynamo can reach far more of Revit than a hand-built MCP. As John put it, you give the AI the tools to build the tools.

The most useful takeaway is a workflow you can use right now. Instead of having Claude write Python that you then have to deploy through PyRevit, have it write Dynamo-flavored Python, paste it into a node, and hit run. You get a visual feedback loop and a deployment framework for free, and you stay in control of your own work rather than depending on a third-party tool that might break the next time .NET changes.

Watch the Replay Here...

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Master Revit Topography (the right way) w/ Nehama Shechter-Baraban - Replay

Most of us were trained to think of a Revit site as one big topo surface with sub-regions carved out of it. In Episode 136 of BIM After Dark Live, landscape architect Nehama from Arc Intelligence made a strong case that we have it backwards, and showed how the Environment for Revit toolset is built around a completely different way of thinking about sites.

What We Covered

The biggest mindset shift in this episode was what Nehama calls the "quilt" approach. Instead of one continuous surface that you carve up, you start with the constraints (the road, the building entrance, anything that can't move), then build outward with separate topo solids for each surface type. Hardscape first, then infill. If you need to redesign a piece, you delete it and rebuild it without touching anything around it. The earthwork calculations still work as long as two surfaces overlap across phases, so you don't lose that capability.

She walked through the topography tools in Environment for Revit, which all come down to one thing: smarter ways to place a lot of points without losing your mind. The "from edge" tool, the headline tool with its preview before commit, and the smooth tool that adds points in a grid for Rhino-style surfaces. The preview before you place is the part that changes how you work. You stop guessing how many points you need and start seeing it.

The alignment tool was the one that surprised me most. Revit has had an "alignment" category sitting there for years, meant for Civil 3D imports, that almost nobody used. Arc Intelligence built an editable design workflow on top of it. You sketch a center line, drape it on adjacent surfaces, define cross-sections, and extract a topo solid. It's how you'd design a path or a road if you were thinking like a civil engineer, but with an interface anyone can use.

A practical heads-up worth pulling out: the earthwork calculation in Revit 2024 and 2025 has a math error. It's better in 2026 but still not perfect. If you're using Revit for cut and fill quantities in those versions, don't trust the native numbers.

We also got into LiDAR and point cloud workflows, the Scan to Model tool that knows how to exclude trees and walls from a topo extraction, and why landscape sections are still the hardest view type to get looking right in Revit.

Watch the Replay Here... 

Landscape Architects Using Revit?! Toposolids, Site Modeling, and BIM in 2026 - Replay

Most Revit content ignores landscape architects entirely. Episode 135 fixes that. Martin Powell, a landscape architect with roots in New Zealand and now based in Dublin, joins to share what's actually working in Revit for site design, and what still isn't.

What We Covered

The big shift in this conversation is the move from floors to topo solids. Martin explains how the old floor-based approach forced landscape architects into awkward workarounds, flat floors for texture and shaped floors for grading, and how topo solids have mostly eliminated that. He now builds residential site models almost entirely in topo solids, using subdivisions to define finished surface materials on top of a generic graded body underneath.

On the subdivision question, when to use them versus separate topo solids, Martin's rule of thumb is practical: simple, single-slope rear gardens stay as independent topo solids because you can't subdivide them once a slope is applied. More complex surfaces with multiple materials get the subdivision treatment. It's not a perfect system yet, but it's workable.

One of the more useful segments covers linked Civil 3D surfaces. Revit 2026 finally restored the break-line accuracy that existed before topo solids were introduced, though the 50,000-point limit still creates real constraints on larger road designs. Martin's workaround: work directly with your civil engineer to reduce corridor section frequency so you stay under the cap.

The cross-discipline coordination section is worth your time even if you're not a landscape architect. Martin makes the case that landscape architects should own the site model, not the architect. On large projects, a flattened DWG export from the architectural model is often more practical than a live Revit link. The practical advice: ask architects early to keep their site context elements on a dedicated workset so you can filter it out.

The session closes with a look at reality capture, drone-sourced point clouds processed in ReCap Pro and brought into Revit as meshes, to understand existing tree canopy and site conditions. Useful for projects where what's on the ground doesn't match the drawings.

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Revit Templates in 2026: What Changed Since 2021? w/ Aaron Maller - Replay

 

Five years is a long time in Revit. Five new versions, the arrival of ACC, and a whole wave of features that may or may not belong in your template... it's time to take stock. In Episode 134 of BIM After Dark Live, I brought back Aaron Maller of Parallax Team for a deep-dive on how template strategy has evolved and where most firms are still leaving efficiency on the table.

What We Covered

The new feature split. Aaron framed it well: every release has features that are fun to model with, and then a separate set that are actually template-relevant. Most people only think about the first bucket. The second one is where template work compounds over time.

ACC and cloud deployment changed the game. When Aaron was last on the show talking templates, ACC didn't exist. Now it's central to how templates get versioned, shared, and enforced across project teams. That has real implications for how you structure your starting files.

Phase filters and view templates still trip people up. These are some of the oldest pain points in Revit and they're still not resolved. Aaron walked through how a well-built template handles phasing setup so you're not redoing it on every project.

The Revit AI assistant conversation. This was one of the more honest moments in the stream. Aaron and his team are turning off Revit's built-in AI assistant on client deployments... not because it's a bad idea, but because nobody's taking accountability for the outputs yet. They tested it live and it miscounted nested shared families. That's the kind of thing that becomes a real problem in professional practice.

Template philosophy hasn't changed, even if the tools have. Aaron's been building templates since 2006. His core idea is still the same: if you find yourself doing the same thing on every job, it belongs in the template. That discipline compounds.

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Special thanks to our sponsor this season:  Guardian

Revit MEP Families: Plumbing, Mechanical & Electrical Tips - Replay

 

One of the topics I get asked about all the time is MEP in Revit.

So instead of bringing on one guest, I brought on three.

In last night's episode of BIM After Dark Live, I sat down with the team from RevX MEP to talk plumbing, mechanical, and electrical families in a way that was actually practical. Not theory. Not perfect-world BIM talk. Real workflows.

A few things that stood out for me:

- Connectors matter, but only if you understand what they are actually doing.

- Families do not need to be overbuilt to be useful.

- Nested content can make mechanical and electrical families way more flexible.

- Revit can do more with electrical loads and panel schedules than a lot of people realize.

- And maybe most importantly, good MEP content is still way too hard to find, which is exactly why conversations like this matter.

I also appreciated how honest the discussion was around LOD, conduit modeling, coordination, and the difference between what sounds impressive and what is actually helpful on a project.

If you work in Revit MEP, or even if you are on the architecture side and have ever wondered why MEP content feels like a different world, this is a good one to watch.

Click here to watch the replay now...

Guardian for Revit:

This season of BIM After Dark Live is being supported by Guardian for Revit.  Head on over to their website now to see how their tools can help BIM Managers and Revit users control standards, analyze their habits, and verify the health of their models... 

Cutting Walls into Foundation Walls in Revit (Office Hour Sessions)

In this week's office hour session we explore a few different options for dealing with integrating exterior walls and foundation walls (for things like window wells) in Revit... 

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Every other week I hold a private call with members of the BIM After Dark Community.  I thought it would be valuable to highlight some of the conversations here on the channel.

If you think you could benefit from an Office Hour like this one, Join the BIM After Dark Community for full courses, support, and sample files today !

Veras + Enscape + Nano-Banana: The Future of AI Rendering in Revit (replay)

 

Last night on BIM After Dark Live, I sat down with Bill Allen from Chaos (formerly EvolveLAB) to walk through the newest Veras updates… and honestly, this might be the biggest shift in AI-assisted visualization we’ve seen in AEC so far.

Here’s what we discussed:

• Veras is now integrated directly inside Enscape
Real-time to AI-enhanced renders without exporting, snipping, or jumping between tools.

• Select-by-Object + Select-by-Material
Finally—controlled AI editing. Swap a car, update materials, or refine a portion of a render without rebuilding the whole image.

• Image Interrogation + User Presets
Veras can now describe your image, reverse-engineer the stylistic prompt, and turn it into a reusable preset. Massive productivity boost for teams.

• Brand new Image-to-Video generation
Turn any still render into a 5-second animation—seasons changing, lights turning on, people walking. Zero animation skills required.

• The big one: a new Nano-Banana render engine
This new engine is a game-changer. Cleaner geometry, fewer artifacts, better retention of design intent—and for the first time, 2D inputs can generate 3D-looking outputs.

Not perfect yet… but the trajectory is undeniable.

If you’re curious where AI visualization is truly heading for architects, designers, and VDC teams, this episode is worth the watch.

▶️ Full Episode: https://youtube.com/live/MkKXJzgA-4M

Revit Curtain Wall HACKS You’ve Never Tried w/Philip Chan - Replay

 

In this episode of BIM After Dark Live, Philip Chan returns to the show to break down one of Revit’s most misunderstood and under-used tool: the Curtain Wall system.

Phil demonstrates 5 different out of the box methods to creating curtain walls and panels.  And, in typical Phil fashion, drops a couple of extremely useful "hacks".... like, custom cutting curtain panels?!

Click here to view the replay now...

Goodbye ACC, Hello Forma: What’s Really Changing at Autodesk? (Replat)

 

Autodesk recently announced that the Autodesk Construction Cloud is becoming Autodesk Forma, and everyone in the industry is asking what that really means.

Is Forma replacing ACC? Is it something totally new? And what happens to tools like Build, Docs, and Takeoff?

In this live episode of BIM After Dark Live, I’m joined by longtime friend of the show, Scott Davis from Autodesk, to talk about what’s actually happening and what it means for you and your projects.

Click here to view the replay... 

D5 Render: The Next Big Thing for Revit Visualizations?

 I’ve been getting a ton of comments asking about D5 Render, so I decided to see what all the buzz is about. Can it really compete with Enscape or Twinmotion for Revit visualization? Let’s find out. 

If you’ve been using Enscape or Twinmotion to visualize your Revit projects, you’ve probably heard about D5 Render. But what is it, and how does it actually fit into a Revit-based workflow? 

In this episode of BIM After Dark Live, I’m joined by Millie Yoshida from the D5 team to explore what makes this rendering engine stand out. We’ll talk about how D5 connects with Revit, what makes it so fast, and how it compares to tools you might already be using. 

We’ll look at live examples, discuss real project workflows, and take your questions throughout the stream. 

Whether you’re an architect, designer, or builder curious about new ways to bring your Revit models to life, this session will help you see what’s possible with D5 Render. 

Click here to view the episode now...

The Real Cost to Design + BIM + Build My Home Addition (The North Wing Project Update) - Replay

 

Ever wondered what it actually costs to design, BIM, and build a home addition? In this episode of BIM After Dark Live, I pull back the curtain on The North Wing Project, my own home addition that I designed, modeled in Revit, and built myself.

I’ll walk through:

-  A discussion about funding options for projects like this and what it means for architects and contractors. 

- A full cost breakdown of every trade and line item 💰

- The stories behind each scope of work with Revit visuals and site photos

- What I’d do differently next time

If you’re an architect, builder, or homeowner who’s curious about the real numbers behind a design-build project, this one’s for you.  

Click here to watch the episode now...