Monday, May 6, 2013

Ladies & Gentlemen - The Magical Disappearing Revit.

So there I was, running Autodesk's flagship BIM software - the illustrious Revit 2013 'lets just dispense with pretending we give a fuck, and toss MEP into the Architectural/Structural software, continued to pretend like Civil doesn't exist, and act like it should all be sunshine and sparkle-ponies shooting out of our asses' that supposedly represents their absolute best effort.

Between Friday and today I am happy to say that I was able to quickly and effectively use Revit - to export the necessary files, and get two projects the fuck out of Revit so that I can make sure they get done on time, done on budget, and most inportantly - DONE CORRECTLY, in good old dinosaur ACAD.

But in the meantime, I'm sitting here fixing someone else's fuckups - and after waiting for this piece of crap to load, skipping past half a dozen apocryphal messages, making the necessary changes, and slapping a revision cloud on, when 'voila'.

No more Revit.

Now you see it, now you don't.

I've commented more than once on how great Revit is - at closing.  It can disappear faster than any program I have ever seen before in my life - especially when it is taking work with it.  Now, to be fair, this project is the aforementioned clusterfuck of interfucked files - and it did actually handle fairly stably while I was doing the project (besides the inordinate amount of time waiting for it to load/save/update links/etc.).

It's sad though, that while they have been doing better with not having their garbage crash quite as often - it wasn't even remotely surprising to me when it went 'poof'.  It didn't shock me, or make do a double-take, or even actually register on a level that made me mad.  It also didn't surprise me that Revit didn't seem to think anything was out of the ordinary when I restarted it, and re-opened the file.

It was only a few minutes of work - but it was as few minutes of work that I was done with, and certainly not the first time I have had to redo things simply because Revit decides to take a shit.  I got it back on track, and issued it (before anyone else - which may be a mistake, because if there's one thing that people who fuck up do well - it's fuck up some more.

I'll be going two different directions with the two projects I just exported - but fortunately I've done something similar to each, and now that I can apply my tools and processes without Revit getting in the way (besides having to be vigilant about updating my floor plans), there is a 100% chance of Construction Documents.

I might even be so nice as to import the ACAD drawings into the Revit model, put them on sheets, plot them out, and then hit 'explode' - because seriously.  Fuck these people.

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