Trypical

It's another day in Revit land - let me take you by the hand, and slam that fucking hand in a drawer.

I had intended my last post to discuss more about Revit content (or lack of content) and maybe trying to flesh out some kind of way of getting the fuck around all of the bullshit garbage nonsense and other shit, but it got a little off topic.  It also didn't help that I had someone else asking me to help bang their head into a project with typical units - which is what I'm going to start off talking about today and try to tie it back into the content suckhole.

As I discussed in a previous post - people in our office have been trying to figure out a way (after 7-8 years of sucking the Revit dick) of getting it to actually let them do a project with typical units - and assemble them into buildings.  They had tried this, and tried that, and failed miserably, generated fuckloads of duplicate work,  screwed multitudes of people over, burned money, and drug projects out far beyond their deadlines.

If history is any indication, this latest attempt will be more of the same. I mentioned laughing when I heard another discipline almost immediately start explaining reasons how this new method was incompatible with their design criteria - and after looking at what the guy who is working on our electrical drawings is doing, I'm seeing some of the same holes.

We start with a typical unit (we'll call it '1'), with a typical panel - we'll call it 'A'.  Okay - now there are variations of unit '1' all of which will be virtually identical from an electrical perspective and will all be using panel 'A' (and yet, each have to be manually laid out thanks to Revit), but once you've used 'A' in the first unit type, you have to call the next one something else, or it will vomit up an error about duplicate panel names.

Looking back at the last mongolian clusterfuck (that got done from scratch twice due to a total lack of communication) I saw where the guy who did it the second time simply drafted the typical units, with text instead of circuit tags, making it possible to have all variations on unit '1' show circuits on panel 'A'.  I didn't look too hard, but I assume at least one of these typical units had an actual panel hiding in it somewhere, and either they did actual Revit circuiting on it, or just connected the devices to it and faked in the homeruns and tags (the same for all of them).

I came up with two possible solutions - the first was to go ahead and put a panel in each variation and call them "A1", "A2", etc. (or what the fuck ever) and when we put the schedule for "A" on the sheet - simply overwrite the text for it with "A/A1/A2/etc.".  The next was to basically do the same thing, but instead of tagging the panels and homeruns on the other units, simply use text so the panel and homerun circuits could be tagged "A" (my reasoning being that as long as we're being fucked by Revit, we might as well make it do the homeruns, wire ticks, etc. even if we had to manually tag everything with text).

I think option two is what we will do - and (of course) this is all pointless and retarded, because at the end of the day, we won't be tallying up the loads for the buildings based on these panel loads anyway since there are calculations we run to determine demand load on buildings depending on the square footage of the units, the equipment in the units (including either cooling or heating - whichever is larger), and finally - a demand factor based the number of units per building.

This all comes from the code (which the Autodicks responsible for Revit obviously don't have any concept of) and I'm sure if you wanted to carefully wedge your entire cock 'n balls into the Revit grinder, you could probably figure out a way to extract this information and get it to automatically calculate, generate a schedule to let you enter this information and let it crank out the answer (or you can spend 5-10 minutes with a calculator and a functioning brain to do it manually.

As far as the layouts are concerned - my traditional (i.e. ACAD) way of going about it was to get all of the floor plan variations in front of me, lay out the first one, and then copy and adjust to the rest of them - now in Revit, you get to go through and lay out every single one from scratch - and that's before you get to all of the variations they want (or need) to have on the plans (primarily handicap accessible, but also owner driven options).

Add into that the fact that Revit files get tossed from moron to moron - and the next thing you know a plan that you had completely detailed out is now fubar because they decided to modify that plan for an alternate instead of going to a new unit (now we have to fix one plan and do another from scratch).  As usual 'workarounds' abound, all of which have their positives and negatives - but none of which address the actual problem.

We can try to cram as much as possible onto each plan to keep from having 12 sheets full of typical units (since the point in typical units is that you don't detail out the entire fucking building in the first place) but that could become cramped and illegible (even after considerable time is wasted trying to tweak it) - or, we can try to create a bunch of little details off to the side showing all of the variations and options and hope to God that it doesn't fuck us (again and again).

This, of course, will result in a bunch of partially detailed out plans in the overall model and individual unit models - and it won't surprise me if they are 1) not done fucking around with it or 2) bitch endlessly about us not Reviting properly (in which case they can suck my dick).  And, of course - all of this while we attempt to finish the rest of our details - and a site plan that won't stop shifting around because nobody took the time to lay it out properly in the first place.

Then work on the rest of these fucking projects.

Fuck these 'people' - fuck Autodesk, fuck Revit, fuck every single person responsible for 'developing', 'programming', marketing, re-selling, using, practicing apologetics for, or otherwise propagating this piece of fucking shit.

Balls Upon Their Faces.

-Skullfuck.