Pics of the Project / Model finally...

So in my last post i was getting ready to head down to Orlando for the punch list... Lemme tell you, it was HOT. It had to be 100 degrees, and we were up on the white roofs, yow! Needless to say, i came back tan. :) I got some great shots of the mall, even though heavy rains caused some delays on site during the last few weeks...

After coming home, i took a quick shot at approximating some of the pictures i took from our Revit model. I was personally surprised, when i arrived there, at how much it looked JUST like the model. When i used to do AutoCAD documents, i used to always think the projects looked different... But maybe that's because i never saw the projects in 3d beforehand then. Flat 2D elevations are a pet peeve of mine. A necessary thing in Construction Documents, perhaps... But looking at presentation images in the flat 2D realm... gah! Dont get me started. :)

I withheld the rendered images, as it wasn't in our scope, so we didn't have proper materials and textures applied. I have a few renderings where everything is simply a couple of soft colors, so the clients could see it in something other than wireframe... But its a lot of time to get all the images rendered.

Here is the Vending Alcove the occurs at a few places throughout the project.

We modeled these a few different ways, as the project went on. A few of them looked better than the image represented from our model, but this is the actual location in the picture.

Ive discovered modeling areas like this just takes some good communication throughout the project team. IE- If the wall is changing finishes, something in the wall itself should change. Either split face and paint, or use a different wall type (with a different finish material with the appropriate surface pattern, etc.

For the most part though, it worked well. The one pictured was much better explained in the documents, with Detail Lines/Items showing the differentiation in materials, which is lacking in modeled items here. But, i wanted to approximate the camera angle as best i could, so i gave up the Detail items...

Here is a shot of a typical Concourse taken from up on the roof. The GFRC's are missing from the End Wall of this particular location, I'm guessing because they still need to get the generators out of there... In the far left you can see the light fixtures mounted to light up the canopy roof. We modeled these lights working with the Electrical Engineer to verify that they couldn't be seen when standing in the upright position (not shown). We didn't put them in every canopy in the model, so they aren't shown in the modeled image. We used the widest concourse to project a worst case scenario for visibility...

This particular Canopy also represents an Expansion Joint where the Renovated Existing Building meets part of the new addition, which were different projects. As that's the case, this also represents the joint between two of our Models. We used Revit's Phasing capabilities where possible, but in this case the scopes of work remained completely separate, and simply juxtaposed.

We modeled in the structure for the canopy as it was an architectural feature. Our structural engineers were also working in a 3D model using RISA3D, but unfortunately this was not a collaborative 3D project. We transmitted documents and coordinate through 2D export to DWG. Hopefully next time we can take advantage of some better methodology... I would have loved to have brought their model and ours in to Navisworks Jetstream...

Here is a shot of a typical corner condition at one of the Concourses. This tower assembly was both a great learning exercise, and a great opportunity to play around with new features in RAC 2008 (near the end of the project, haha). I built one of these towers immediately after first learning Revit, and until "Wall by face of mass" occurred to me, making the chamfered wall corners was a pain! DOH!

This tower condition occurs about 10 times throughout the 5 Revit models. Once we upgraded to RAC 2008, i took the opportunity to use the new Group features to assemble this tower in its own RVT file, as a group. This brings up another interesting point (for me, anyway):

The groups, and the ability to transfer large assemblies built out of System Families is great... As long as all of your System families are congruent across multiple files. As i mentioned in one of my first posts, this troubles me. If i have a wall assembly in each project, that are the same physically, but are named differently, this becomes a nightmare (in my opinion). 2 or 3 different versions of the same walls, which generate Warnings if they have the same Type Mark, plus its redundant work to update things. So now, i place the Group in to a neutral blank file, and then also copy and paste the wall types and other system families from both projects (or all projects involved) and make sure the items in the group are appropriate for the project I'm shoving it in to. It seems tedious, but well worth it from a file maintenance perspective. In the last phase of the project, after the CD's were done, we swapped from Stl/Mtl Stud to Tilt-up Concrete, and not having duplicate wall types made it much more efficient of a change.

Continued in next post, because the formatting of this entry gets tweaked everytime i paste a picture, lol...