Revit Drawings
We are service provider of Revit Drawing, which is the world-class fully-parametric solid modeler and it shares proximity with such mechanical modeling tools. Hence, we get all the advantages of the sketch-based parametric solid modeling approach, yet with tools much better suited to modeling buildings and furniture than car engines. So other than lacking a lofting tool and the ability to generate complex surfaces we've found that the parametric modeling engine of Revit to be surprisingly powerful and well-suited to our needs.
We heavily leverage the BIM idea. BIM, or Building Information Modeling is what Revit was made to do; it's a process of rather than producing drawings of the building, or creating 'dumb' 3D Models, you create an intelligent parametric model of the whole project where the system “knows” what the parts are, what they are made of, and more, and then this model in turn produces the drawings. So, for example, rather than just modeling something that looks like a wall, in Revit we define the wall, tell Revit where it is, and then, from that, we not only get a floor plan, sections and elevations, we can know how much paint we need to buy to paint these walls. Or, we can model up a bit of furniture, and automatically get estimation on how much plywood we'll need to get. Or we can figure out if our day lighting scheme is going to work, or how much energy the building is going to use. Seeing that we do lot more than furniture, using BIM is a huge advantage; something we wouldn't get as easily with a manufacturing tool like Inventor, and couldn't get at all with Rhino or AutoCAD.
Revit Drawing helps in understanding what buildings are. So it also understands things like design options, material take-offs, construction Phases, and provides tools to manage these things efficiently. We find this to be a huge advantage both in speed and in ease of use, for all our projects deal with options, time, and price, and all of them are either within a room, interior, or someday will involve whole buildings (when we get the chance to do one). Other modeling tools, such as Inventor or Rhino, simply don't have any support for these common building industry practices and make it much more work to manage them.
Revit looks good in front of the clients. We bring our laptops to the meetings, and navigate and edit the model live in front of the client. Revit's very clear and direct UI really lends itself to this, for the client's don't get 'lost' in the model like they would if we tried to use a much more visually complex (and confusing frankly) tool like 3D Studio Max, AutoCAD/ADT, or Rhino. Being able to model live with the client to resolve issues and make decisions is a huge advantage, it lets us move much faster, and lets the client feel much more involved and invested into the project overall.
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