Wednesday, August 2, 2017

An Open Letter To The Revitards Who Designed This Fucking Hotel

Cheerio - Pip Pip!

I spent a few days playing 'catch-up' with the never-ending barrage of comments coming from the layers and layers of bureaucracy involved on the half-dozen or so government projects I've been trying to finish for the last year or so - and then got started on a seven story, 50,000+ s.f. hotel.

Unlike the last project I worked on, it was immediately evident this one had been modeled by a team of Revitards operating at maybe 35% brain function.  Fortunately, having spent years unfucking Revitized garbage for my use, it wasn't too difficult to get them cleaned up.

That didn't mean they weren't chock full of just... fucking sad attempts at forcing Revit to vomit up something resembling floor plans (including importing linework for kitchen/bar plans - but not bothering to look at them closely enough to actually provide a coordinated set of plans.

Then on top of that, other discipline's engineers/designers had gotten their hands on it, meaning piles of overlapping, conflicting, and otherwise view-range challenged garbage strewn everywhere.  On the upside, rather than extract 'typical' plans, the equipment I needed was all on the overall plans.

As usual, it was extremely difficult to suss out which units were accessible - since it is apparently impossible to simply label them as such (although they did have symbols denoting which ones were hearing impaired - one of which was comically disappearing under a bed).

Also, as usual, the equipment shown in the guest units didn't make logical sense - meaning that no matter how much thought I put into my design, it will be extremely surprising if I don't end up revisiting the project at least once (minimum).

I'm going to second-guess at least one thing that would require considerable reworking if the AHJ rejects the current design (which I'm almost certain they will) by calculating a heavier load for some devices, then going back and lowering it to match what they show.

I've mentioned doing this before - when equally retarded fucksticks were simply leaving necessary equipment off.  The repetition necessary to recreate the same systems unit after unit (whether doing typical units - or overall as in this case) always shows cracks.

The irony being that Revit is supposed to make it easier/faster (lies/damned lies) but as always, I go unit to unit and floor to floor and find where instead of being able to simply copy and tweak, every single device is placed in every single unit, meaning every time is a chance to overlook something.


I'm seeing lights disappear beneath sink counters (because they are mounted at the wrong height), receptacles and other devices strewn everywhere as they attached to things other than the walls they should have been attached to.  Things floating in space, things stuck halfway in walls.

And that's before you get to the myriad minor (unnecessary, and almost certainly unintended) changes from unit to unit/floor to floor - that only become clear when a template is applied to them.  Again - every wall has to be drawn, every window inserted, every piece of millwork placed.

Many times, when dealing with architects, I was able to show them that their Reviteers were fucking this type of stuff up - and in almost every case, they would make them go back and fix it (but only after it was pointed out).

There were a few project managers (that were still stuck Reviting because they wanted their projects not to be complete suckholes) who knew how to use tools in Revit to keep things consistent, but that had more to do with their experience in architecture, rather than reliance on software.

They were definitely in the minority though, as the vast majority of Revit cheerleaders were obviously having to cut any number of corners to pretend like they were successfully turning out work on par with what their non-Revit predecessors had done.


You've probably heard the old saying 'to err is human, but to really fuck things up requires a computer'.  Well - burying something in shit and destroying any chance at ever digging your way out definitely requires Revit.

It also doesn't hurt if you never leave the office, and never have to see the result of your fucktarded 'designs' being implemented by people who have to figure out how to unfuck them as millwork, countertops, and entire sections of rooms have to be custom built and/or modified.

Anyone bidding a job would do well to find out if it was designed in Revit, and include a little extra in their bid for exactly these types of contingencies.  In years past, if you were doing multiple 'identical' units, you could simply figure out the first one, and reuse those calculations.

This made for considerably faster and more consistent work - but enter the Revitized building, and every trade is having to make countless adjustments as 'coordinated' plans turn out to be sad attempts by Reviteers at cramming everything into a model at the last second.

The people in the field are left with a dilemma - build as shown (i.e. - wrong), or correct, and risk causing problems that require them to go back and adjust to what was shown (at their own expense).  I know if I were doing it, every single fuckup would be written up as a change order.

Knowing where those fuckups stemmed from would be key - as would getting past the first layer of Revit apologists who are going to try to hide those fuckups from their superiors (after adamantly denying that the fuckups exist in the first place).

Fuck inconsistency.  Fuck the Revit lies - and fuck anyone selling those lies.

And if you don't like it - Fuck You.

-SF

Next Time: A Revit Fan Chimes In.

6 comments:

  1. Yup. The Revittardiliers have my VP of mechanical convinced we don't need training on how to make families. Ya know, because the internet is full of families that schedule perfectly every time.

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  2. Oh yeah - tons of families out there. And the people who made them also had bosses who didn't think they needed training on how to make families either.

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  3. Let me just say that I read your blog religiously because I love it. I've been doing architecture for more than 30 years and you sardonic humor is completely in sync with an industry that is a skullf*ck whether you use pencils, rapidographs, versacad, microstation, autocad or Revit. I have used all of those by the way and they all suck, especially if you’re an idiot.

    But of all of those, Autocad was the worst. How many f*cking layers does it take to design an outhouse? And all of the customization! Every F*cking Acad file is it's own world of crap. Line styles, hidden settings 0 for this / 1 for that, text styles & block attributes by the hundreds, xrefs, paper space, model space, plot tables, color-based plotting / style-based plotting (it's amazing that no one who uses ACAD even knows that you don't need to plot based on colors, which dates back to monitors that can display 16 colors if you buy that Hercules card). It’s why people try to do a whole project in ACAD with 1 file using a few hundred weird things floating in model space, then dragged into 25 paper space views in whatever way with notes and dimensions here and there. If only there was a program that was designed from the ground up for that!

    Thank god there are standards for those layers. Each sheet gets another 500 layers! And that’s before new/existing/phases (Thank god I left ACAD before they strapped on that Renovation Mode onto the Architecture/ADT Strap-On (somewhere deep down you know it’s adding another 500 layers to your project)). Not to worry if you’re an engineer though. Just set that base plan to gray and set all you stuff to plot with an 0.25 pen, Easy peasy you’re the best, Bill the Client, Blame the Architect!

    But hey, I feel your pain. I love Revit. I’ve spent a lot of time learning it. My plans look fantastic. All sheets are coordinated at all times. My Revit plans are well modeled in Revit and not faked with a bunch of imported linework from… that other program. My productivity has been hugely boosted by Revit, it’s an Architect’s dream. My plans are accurate, coordinated and graphically consistent from the first to the last sheet.

    In fact, I just had to re-issue an old project in ACAD from 2006. And was it a skullf*ck. All those F*cking xref’s, all broken. None of the font’s were displaying properly, all these pieces were plotting in color even thought all was right for them to be black. There was no easy fix, so I had to drill into every ref and sheet set one thing after another to black black black black one by one. It took hours, in Revit it would have been 15 seconds. God forbid I have to make any design revisions. If it comes to that, it might make sense to re-build it in Revit, I’ve gotten pretty F*cking fast with it.

    But I’ll give you this, Architects DO just send our plans out to the Engineers and we don’t really think too much about it. Only occasionally do I find an engineer who has an even remote idea of how CAD files I send them work anyway (PGP file?), most are stuck in a Designer/Draftsman setup. They honestly don’t understand or care, they throw that PGP file away and set all the layers to 0.25 / black or gray and they’re done. When they have trouble I offer to help them and it’s quickly apparent they are not conversant in ACAD, let alone Revit. Mostly they don’t give a F*ck.

    If only they did care! - They do not seem to be like you.

    In the meantime, I’ve never met an MEP who used Revit and I wonder when I will. Around here, Engineers are always the last ones to sign up for any new way of doing business. When I do, I would need their help to figure out how to set mine up to make theirs work better, because I like to put out a good set of plans. But it sounds like it will be a total pain, so I’m quite happy if my engineers stick with ACAD and just put their lines on my Sh*tty backgrounds until I can get out of this SkullF*ck business.

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  4. I appreciate your refreshing take on Revit - especially in light of your extensive experience in the field of Architecture. I am going to give your comments a thorough examination in my next post (and since I am no longer buried up to my neck in Revitards, I might even be capable of being somewhat fair about it).

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    Replies
    1. Oh, and one more thing (I must have blocked it out), I did pin bar mylar drafting once or twice.

      I'll give some ground on this point: That was the worst thing ever, easily worse than AutoCAD or anything else...

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