Here are some comments on the Revit Assignment after completing the grading. Overall the class did a fine job, causing me to be quite lenient in the grading.

Novices:

  • Most said they were able to follow the tutorials without too much difficulty
    • The yearly update of Revit inevitably means that some item locations on the menu changed causing some problems
  • Several lost some points for not including all the assignment requirements
  • It appeared that there was still some confusion that Revit is just a super-Autocad. It's not. It's a very different approach that can produce similar-looking output, and much more.

Intermediate - Families
  • Several didn't fully understand that once you create a single family you can create many "types" of that family. They created multiple families instead.
  • I was surprised that no one commented on not being able to extract the dimensions of the bookcase into the schedule
    • That is a result of the tutorial video choosing the "easy" way of creating parameters following the video. The message that appears when creating a parameter name in R-2017 says that you have to create a different type to have the parameter appear in schedules. That clearly takes some extra steps.
  • Some recognized Revit's power of the single model being instantly updated in all views whenever a change is made in one.
  • Because several students had questions and difficulties I created this post last year defining the key concepts of creating families. It addresses the question of scheduling dimensions specifically.

Intermediate - Dynamo
  • Everyone who attempted the Dynamo option was successful, with the most common problem being Microsoft Excel licensing issues.
  • Not everyone realized that Dynamo can do almost anything a human operator of Revit can do. Ours was only a very limited example of the power available.
  • I was surprised that only one person commented on the potential messiness of a Dynamo graph.
  • Almost everyone commented on how useful a production tool Dynamo can be in an office.