I’d class myself as a very experienced user of AutoCAD (as an Architectural Technologist), how long do you think it would it take me to get up to speed with Revit?

Revit and AutoCad are very different. Autocad is lines arcs and circles, where as Revit you are working with virtual objects, walls, doors, windows etc. (Family’s)
Without training, Even if you use Revit as much as possible eg everyday, it could be 3-6 months.
With training and using as much as possible then that could be as little as a month.
It all depends if you can block out the Autocad way of working.

Fishccake

I would definitely err towards the quicker side of things given your experience – obviously you will continue to find out little things for years and years but you should get the basics in a couple of weeks. There’s a fair bit of crossover (at least the interface is similar) because they’re both Autodesk.

Thanks guys, I’m fairly familiar with Architectural Desktop which uses objects and so on rather than just AutoCAD lines etc.
Sadly we have no reason to use Revit in our practice (only three of us of which I’m the only CAD user..) which means I’m rapidly becoming unemployable with regard to bigger companies!

It’s taken me a 3 day ‘autodesk’ approved training session, and then a month of intermittent use (I’m a senior architect so mostly should be doing other stuff!) to be able to produce drawings… although getting them to look like my autocad stuff is hard. I’m very competent in autocad, but going to take a while to get to the same point in revit.

Revit rely so heavily on pre made objects without them it’d be harder

As a self employed architectural designer I am in a very similar position. Have just started a live test project in revit to test the water and potentially make the transition. For me it’s about not being left behind with technology as I am still in the process of completing my part 3 and may look to go back in to practice. Interested to hear how you get on op.

I was in this position 5 years ago when I was made redundant. Had been a ACAD user for 10 years when I started learning.
as a background, I always switched what ever version of ACAD I was using to a classic layout with ALL the icons around my drawing window (had a workspace saved and that carried over when upgrading versions)

Revit forces you to use the Ribbon, there is no alternative view.

to begin with if you are used to working with ACAD Architecture – then like ACADA, there are buttons for walls, doors, windows floors, roofs etc. so fairly quickly you can start to build something up.
One of the exercises i did was to take one of my projects and import the cad files into Revit, then trace over them with Revit objects.

I’d say a couple of weeks using it and you’d have the basics. 3-6 months (depending on how frequently you start using it) you’d be ok and start to ‘get’ revits rules. Then another 6-12 months learning how to break those rules, and learning how far to take a model in terms of detailing.

One thing i found very useful to learn was that – in ACAD you can select a command by typing a word in the command line (like “line” “Pline” etc. i never learnt the text commands, icons were quicker for me) clicking an icon or selecting something in a dropdown menu.
Revit you either click on the icon in the Ribbon or type a 2 letter shortcode. So:

Wall – WA
Door – DR
Floor – DL
Detail Line – DL
Dimension – DI
Align – AL
and to find the short cut, hover your mouse over the command on the ribbon and it’ll pop up with the short cut.
Comes to the point where I barely use the ribbon now.

oh, quick tip: to complete a run of dimensions to have to click in clear space: Esc cancels the command and loses all the dimensions you’ve just clicked on. I still make that mistake occasionally after 4 years!

Couple of books that might get you started: ‘Revit, No Experience Required’, ‘Introducing Revit’ and ‘Mastering Revit’

and some vids from Autodesk University this year:
Switching from AutoCAD to Revit A Discussion about Various Approaches & Work Flows
The Time Is Now—Switching from AutoCAD Architecture to Revit—The Right Attitude Is Everything
AutoCAD to Revit and Beyond: An Introductory Guide for Architects and Engineers

The two things that convinced me how great Revit was, 1. after being at the practice i am at now for a couple of months (this being the first practice that had more or less fully converted to Revit apart from some of the smaller projects) and i had to help out one of the architects on a small school, which had been drawn up in ACAD (just lines, now AEC items). Was just about to print the planning set of drawings when the architect decided he wanted to move a door 600mm so they could continue shelving in teh store right up to the wall.
That resulted in having to modify about 12 drawings, individually! open each drawing, move by 600mm save and close… and print each drawing individually.

Had it been modelled in Revit, i would have moved the door once. ctl+P, select all the planning drawings and printed. approx 30secs to do.

2. was working on a multi million bottling plant scheme for a cosmetics company – massive model, 3 people in the office all working on the model, daily sharing of the model with SE and M&E. The Tank Farm, where bulk materials were delivered needed to increase in height to suit the client’s amended tank size – we needed to increase the floor to floor height between level 2 and 3, while keeping the other levels above level 3 the same.
locked the dimensions to the upper levels, made the change to the F2F as required – everything changed for me: for example the stairs adjusted to the new F2F height as it was recalculated within the max riser set for the stair style. I think, all told, it took about 2 hours to make the change and check that nothing had broken in the process. Then could package the model up and send over to the S.E. We had an updated steelwork model the next day.

Sorry, nothing to add (at the moment), but got Revit/MEP training booked for end of next month…. so book marking….

Gonna check out LSI’s videos.

Trained last month, it’s easy enough to find your way around (followed some You Tube tutorials prior to course) but struggling to find much of a use for it tbh.

The guy who lead the course even suggested you’re better off detailing in AutoCAD, which for me is where most of the work is.

Will persevere though…

I taught myself revitalise a couple of years ago….. Well tbh I’m still learning. I did it completely off my own back with just you tube and some tutorial apps I downloaded and I reckon it took around 6 months of infrequent playing around.

The difference for me is in electrical with a bit of mechanical bias not architectural so had no real reason to learn other than I liked the principal. The company ended up buying a licence which pained them greatly and we really didn’t see any return in it until we got a big pipework co-ordination and design project about 6 months ago. We started in cad because we hadn’t priced for anything else but it wasn’t working out so it modelled it all up including the steel support work and it paid every penny back. The only thing is we have 2014 and nearly all the architects have moved to 2015 so I’m going to have to explain to our Luddite employers that it’s not backward compatable like cad so we need to upgrade.

It’s still going to be a few years till revit gets used for wholesale electrical design which is a shame because I really want to bin off cad but revits just not up there yet… Schematics and plans is our main output

The guy who lead the course even suggested you’re better off detailing in AutoCAD, which for me is where most of the work is.

if you have a load of standard cad details, then yep: you could link them into a detail view, then reference a call out to that detail view. To save you having to redraw it.

but if you don’t have those CAD details, then to me, its quicker to just pull a call out of the bit i need to detail and just add a few 2D detail components over the model, add the text – that way it’s detailing the exact bit i’ve modelled.
If i have several details the same, then i can add call outs that reference the original detail.

This is what i’ve been doing on a current project: a Supermarket extension to a shopping mall. we have all the standard details in CAD from the supermarket’s Architect, but there are changes to accommodate the restrictions of linking up with the existing building/site constraints. As such steel sizes differ in places – so the modelled information is an amalgamation of the standard CAD details, CAD details with additional 2D or 3D information from the Revit model, pure Revit details.
TBH – the CAD details are the ones that are causing the issues, as you forget they aren’t live, and dont update when there is a change in the model.

to the OP – working in a small practice, its going to be hard to convince the other guys. There is a bit more front end work before the drawings start to come forward – but once that’s done, you will race ahead – quickly pulling any section you need, adjustments to the plans, additional plans (just right click on a plan, duplicate… hey presto, you have a new plan that can be set to a GA plan scale, or detail plan scale)
But compared to the AutoCAD guys, you’ll beable to pull a 3D view of the model with a click of a button, you can create 3D sections by right clicking on the viewcube (when in a 3D view) and orienting to a section through the model.
you can quickly pull together door schedules, sanitary schedules which all update when you make changes to the model.

Revit, or the Bentley equivalent is basically just a big database with a graphical interface… like Windows is a graphical interface to navigate DOS. So while you see a wall… a door… a window…look at the properties, you can add a huge amount of data in there. you can grab many ready made families from the likes of the National NBS library, BIM Store, Autodesk Seek, ARCAT from big name manufacturers – the likes of Armatige Shanks/Ideal Standard, Kawneer, Schuco, Dorma etc. have created Parametric families of their products that you can just load into your revit model and place in the model and with a NBS plug in automatically populate your specifications

you can sign up to Project Expo (via Autodesk Labs) and in a click of a button export your model into a viewer that lets you walk around your building like it was a first person shooter game, or you could export the model into Lumion and quickly render up a still shot, or a short movie to walk through your project to communicate your design to your clients.

Going forward – April 2016 is the date that all Government procured projects need to be collaborative BIM (so called Level 2 BIM) i.e. there is a database of information they can use for Facilities Management for the ongoing maintenance of the building. Some clients and contractors are demanding the same thing now, (tho we did have a private client who demanded that we work to Level 3 BIM for his home build project, having read about the levels on the internet… we did have to point out that no one knows what Level 3 is yet, its a theory thats yet to be pinned down… tho the government is still aiming to get the industry to be working to Level 3 by 2020)

Finally – Railings in Revit suck. they are a pain in the backside. the interface to design a railing needs a major overhaul. Most of the time now we just have a basic railing and no posts, and draw the posts in, in 2D details.
And Topo – still really clunky, I will still visualise a site from a 2D cad topo survey with text markers noting the level. but it sometimes does help to be able to build up a 3D topo surface, so long as you understand it’s limitations

if you have a load of standard cad details, then yep: you could link them into a detail view, then reference a call out to that detail view. To save you having to redraw it.

but if you don’t have those CAD details, then to me, its quicker to just pull a call out of the bit i need to detail and just add a few 2D detail components over the model, add the text – that way it’s detailing the exact bit i’ve modelled

Thanks LS,

Our details are similar but rarely identical, we also have a few ancillary components that are required towards making the detail work.

It’s the extent to which these are included in the model that I think we need to establish. Some of these may be better adding in 2D to a callout as suggested.

You can fumble around for weeks/months trying to learn it yourself but the time (and money) you will save by attending a proper training course makes it a no brainer. 3 day course and then use the software as much as possible and within a month you will save so much time on every job, you will be thinking why didn’t you learn Revit sooner.

The thing is that Revit isn’t appropriate for the kind of work we do here so they will never buy it!

Thanks for the detailed answer Lord, very helpful.

it was the same for me: the company i was at didnt want to buy the software – but they were looking at ways they could say they “did BIM” on tender forms as they did a lot of schools, and had started to lose out on tenders because they only had Autocad LT.
I paid for myself to go on a 2 day Revit course at the local Autodesk training centre, not cheap tho @ £800! but it was 1 to 1, and tailored to my skill level at the time, was pretty useful – and within 3 months i’d got a new job at my present practice that made the switch to Revit in 2008

Haze these might help with the detailing side:
First video is from AU 2012, so some bits are out of date, second is from this year’s AU. The vid isnt up yet, but the hand out is available to download
Using Autodesk® Revit® Architecture for 2D and 3D Building Enclosure Detailing
Attention to Detail: Creating Construction Details in Revit

Thanks again LS, will take a look at those.

Hopefully they’ll fill in a few blanks in determining what’s important and what isn’t, I don’t particularly want to bog models down with fixings etc.