Friday, September 13, 2019

Giant Bag o' Dicks

It's the 200th Post!!!! Holy fuck!!!  Oh well who fucking cares?

It's been a while, but people insist on continuing to shit out complete garbage with their Revit boxes, meaning I get to waste time cleaning them up so that I can have something passable to use as backgrounds for my drawings.

Combine this with a dipshit salesman that sends me useless information (when he actually sends me information) and what could be done in a few days ends up taking 2-3 times as long, since I have to beat information out of people.

My current project is a massive aerospace production facility - and goddamned did the architects and engineers responsible for designing this thing consume a lot of Revit penis.  The electrical revit-bot in particular seemed to be having a lot of difficulty with it - which isn't surprising, because (as I experienced first hand) the software sucks ass for doing electrical design.

The first files I got were architectural reflected ceiling plans - as if those were going to be of any use whatsoever.  I managed to dig up a set of electrical plans - which were better, and which ended up being the drawings I used to generate a floor plan.

They were some of the shittiest looking drawings I had ever seen - bathrooms in particular seem to escape Revitards ability to get right, with equipment inside walls, random objects (and/or lack of ability to comprehend the astronomical number of view range settings) wiping out little things like 'doors' and 'walls'.

I was able to fill in bits of information, including missing or incorrect room designations from the RCP's and a set of sprinkler drawings (that were equally useless, as they showed four risers - but only three details, and NOTHING telling you which one(s) occurred where.

The salesman kept claiming he was getting HVAC drawings so I could show equipment for those - but after a few days of getting jack and shit, I decided to take matters into my own hands, went directly to the Architect (since they were the only company that I could find a phone number for) and convinced them to give me a full set of .pdfs.

My first concern had been the lack of any second floor drawings in any of the sets I had received (but the existence of stairwells/elevators allowed me to infer the existence of).  I was able to convert the second floor plans from the .pdfs (which I'm still cleaning up).

I had made a few attempts at laying out some equipment in the high bay areas - but it was only when I got this full set of .pdfs that I actually had elevations (what are those?) showing the bottom of the structure at 52 goddamned feet off the ground.

This meant that any device layouts, circuits, or calculations I had done all had to be scrapped as I derated all of the devices for ridiculous mounting heights - which will result in a buttfuckload of circuits, power supplies to feed those circuits, plus - just.... shitloads of extra wire.

It's par for the course for projects that come from this particular salesman  I was talking to another designer who had been arguing with the same guy about how many circuits a project was going to need, despite it being obvious that the salesman had underestimated what it would take to handle the sheer amount of devices.

Then there was the fact that the building (a hotel) is four stories high, so it made sense to run one circuit per floor for these devices for ease of design,  installation, commissioning, and troubleshooting.  The guy seemed content with loading every circuit - instead of leaving at least a little spare capacity (which is a recipe for total fucking disaster down the road (or right away, depending on how much additional shit gets added as we find out that other people dropped the ball.

I just had a guy duck his head in on another project where we left a lot of spare capacity (at the owner's request we actually left more than usual) but where they are wanting to add a minor fuckload of devices to handle a number of fire/smoke dampers (this project having gone through dozens and dozens of internal reviews, before being reviewed by a third party engineering firm.

It's fucking amateur hour, as usual - with the only saving grace being that I'm not Reviting any of this bullshit (which has already irked a few people who wanted us to show our equipment for 'coordination').  This being bullshit as usual though, as they move our shit around in the field regardless of whether it is 'coordinated' or not.

Just... fuck Revit.  Fuck the useless garbage that people using Revit crank out (and then pat themselves on the back for being so awesome), fuck those people, anyone else involved in the process, and fuck Autodesk (whose stock continues to nose-dive).

Fuck the world.

Sincerely.
-Skullfuck

Next Time - the 201st post.  Or not. Who gives a shit anymore?