Saturday, July 28, 2007

Pics of Model / Project continued...

The Food Court. :) The Food Court was fun to model in Revit, as it came about pretty late in the project. It originally wasn't in this location, and it looked nothing like this. As you can see, the FC originated from one of the typical Canopy Concourses. I think it was a great example of what Revit can do. Typically, when drafting in AutoCAD, i would have just done a "Save as" and ripped in to it. With a phased model, i was slowly turning the model back in time, before making the alterations


Another fun aspect (for me, in a masochistic way) was the floor tiling in this area. While arranging the floor tiles and the pattern around the GFRC's, we made good use of Revit and HatchKit. We assembled the tile patterns in Hatchkit, and modeled the tiles in as floors, to see how the patterns would mesh across the length of the Food Court. The real photograph doesn't show it, because they had the tiles covered up, but they followed the modeled tile pan almost to the 'T', only deviating by splitting a few tiles to compensate for an EJ, and in one other area where 2 rows of 4" tiles had to be made in to a single row, plus two rows of half tiles, to get the extra joint space.

While on site, i was checking out the FC, and someone saw me with the tile drawing, and they complemented us on it, saying it made laying out the tiles very easy for them. HatchKit was a life saver for this, with Revit. I wasn't patient enough to figure out the txt file for making the tile.pat's. HatchKit was great, and paid for itself in less than an hour of use, imho. If its drafting tools within the program get updated in the new release to be a LITTLE more friendly, i think it will be a huge asset. Currently its lacking a few things like Circular lines, and the snap feature is a little awkward. Still WELL worth the hassle.



*(Here is the Food Court with the seating installed...)


Here is a shot from the wings, where the actual vendors are. (My left side is to them, but there wasn't much to see there yet).


Its tough to see it all, as they didn't have power yet...









You can get the idea here... BTW, parametric Families and scheduling FOR THE WIN, when it comes to something like Seating. A chair in a table family (shared), plus a parametric Bar that automatically adds stools and counts them as the bar gets dragged longer... Such simple little tools that make seating counts so much easier. I know this can also be accomplished with an Area plan and a Calc. value (as shown at AU06), but we had the furniture selected, so why not ...






Here's a shot of the typical Corner Tower from up on the roof. Nothing exciting going on here, but this made me wonder about my other post on "Punchlisting with the Revit Model." This entire project made me think about that, especially as we get in to the concept of a revit model for the LIFE cycle of a building, and not just for construction. For that to work, i believe its important to have an accurate model when the building is completed. Its a minor issue, that the Access door got placed on the opposite side of the tower as was called for in the plans, but it gets me to wondering if there isn't a better way to document these changes in the field, other than writing them out in horribly scribbled shorthand, only to return home, retype them, and then tear through the model updating things to their as-built condition.








I know the better answer is right in front of our faces, i just haven't seen it yet. Between our export and import capabilities, and the API, there's got to be a better way.










I have a bunch more, but i haven't gotten all the model images yet. Its just more of the same though, so ill stop, hehe.
Here's the final shot from the site... Its the existing Mall next door, part of which was a part of this phase, and the piece you're looking at is the entire NEXT phase of construction, which we just wrapped up the Revit model for. That is what the Mall used to look like, with a normal roof over the concourse. (That's just the


temporary wall where they already demo'd a wing of the mall, however). Photo take from the roof of the new building next door, part of the phase included with all the pics above...
Here's the same area from the model. That line in the roof right by the Canopy End Wall, that's where the temporary wall is in the real photo. We used Phasing on this one... Worked great, until the model got too big for some of our stations to handle it. We learned a lot from it, and i cant wait for the next one.
Lots to go still! :)




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