Sure. If you’re doing soulless work to make some developer somewhere rich, Revit might be the right tool. I’m talking specifically about the luxury home market, and if that’s not your market, then how would you know what tools work best? I’ve seen homes that you or I could never afford all hand drafted. And the timelines in which they hand drafted those are less than the time you take to do it in CAD. That’s just a fact. Computers haven’t helped much.

I've seen homes you and I could never afford done in BIM. I've detailed homes you and I could never afford in AutoCAD. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

Currently working on a very large, very complicated, very expensive custom home. 100% revit including 3D details and 1:5 drawings.

I think we do agree that Revit is a poor tool for SFR. Personally I find ArchiCAD much more user friendly at that scale. Like I said, every job has a tool. If hand drafting works best for you, go ahead & do it. BIM works best for me.

Yes I’ve done them both in Revit and AutoCAD as well. In fact I’d advocate for archicad over Revit for this. But I do initial design 100% by hand. It’s much faster. I use CAD to produce documents.

I agree Revit is a documentation tool, not really a design tool.

I design with a 6mm 6B graphite stick first, then maybe some details in fountain pen or coloured markers. Then it's straight to BIM. No-one here is saying revit is a design tool. We're just saying you're a tool for thinking you could bend it.

Have you tried archicad? Consensus seems to be that it’s a better product.

I used archicad in the early days... like 2006 early. Was cool then, but it's so rarely used by anyone in my region.

In my experience ArchiCAD has issues scaling up and Revit has issues scaling down. Neither is universally better or worse (though I think ArchiCAD's graphic interface is way more intuitive)

@Sleepy (mostly) The firm I work in does almost exclusively high-end SFR. Almost fully in Revit (we're transitioning). This includes the architectural, LEM drawings, and interiors. All Revit. The biggest struggle was trying to figure out the best way to get things done in a way that was easy and also looked correct at scale. If you know how to use the tool, you can absolutely do high-end, complex, custom single family homes using Revit. Don't complain about the tool because you don't know how to use it well enough to suit your needs.

Yeah I've got as many complaints about Revit as the next monkey, but that is simply not how a north arrow is done.

I hope you realize the north arrow was just a small example and I don’t know why you fixate on it. No matter how fast you are, I can draw the north arrow faster by hand haha. 

As an example I think it sticks out as representative of a misunderstanding of the overall process.

I think maybe you don’t realize how much you’ve come to rely on your templates. Building anything new, whether a north arrow or gutter profile, finding something entirely new and making it, takes time. Revit has a functional north arrow out of the box. However, I can identify documents produced by Revit a mile away. They all look the same. They look awful. Bad line weights, bad drawing habits, ugly fonts. Sure it can be customized, and that’s my whole point. That customization is tedious. And it’s not really needed. Just 25 years ago, we built the world through hand drafting. Just a pencil and paper is all you need to do this job. But we’ve complicated it to the point where is seems the art in architecture has been almost forgotten.

I am not an Architect to produce drawings, I am an Architect to produce buildings. I have never had a client or contractor compliment my fucking lineweights, and mine are better than everyone else's.

Hey Pete... we got this far down the rabbit hole without having to whip out line weights and measure... let's keep it civil, there's a beverage in here.

Pete has a fair point, but at my firm drawing standards are considered part of the brand standards. We deliver our product via pdf so we want it to look good.

If your firm cares that much about brand they should hire a BIM Manager to make your north arrows for you.

Based on your OP I doubt it.

I meant this as a reply to the other guy who said I just don’t know the software. I do know it.

But yet you dont know how to put a north arrow on your sheet. Here is a tip: its a symbol

Yes that is obvious. Building one from scratch, nested into a title block, with directional parametric control and visibility parameters takes 20-30 minutes. Drawing it by hand takes seconds. 

-

Evidence points that you do not, in fact, have more exp than 95% of us.

Why build from scratch? Because you didn't understand how to load a family from one project into your current project. Again this is just user error. All you had to do was "edit the family" and load said family into your project. There are lots of ways to be fast with Revit. Don't blame the software. Learn about templates, and view templates.

I just made a N arrow from scratch. took less than 2mins.

Me too.

Lol. I built from scratch because I was making my own template, not using the firm template.

If you can build a parametric nested family in 2 minutes then great. Good for you. 

I can still sketch it by hand in less time. 

How fast can you sketch the construction documents for 6 storey seniors housing complex by hand?

And you built from scratch because you could not load it into your file. You already stated this fact.

" Revit wouldn’t let me copy from one family to a different type of family so I had to draft a new one and connect parameters for different directions"

I’ve done a few of those senior housing buildings, design and documentation. Memory care, assisted living, and independent living all in one with full amenities and nursing stations. It’s pretty soulless work. And yeah, for something with 150 units in it, obviously Revit would be faster and better. However I left that sort of work to go into Residential because it’s more interesting. Everything is more custom, especially in the luxury home market, where I work now. Iterating on these designs is much faster if you work by hand. We use both AutoCAD and Revit for the final deliverable. But honestly, I could draft it by hand faster. You don’t need a high level of detail. It’s not critical to get 1/16” accuracy. The builder is the one that will make it accurate as they build it. The job of the designer is to show design intent. This is how drawings were being done in the 90’s, the 80‘s, etc. So yes I could draft them by hand on the Concepts app much faster than Revit or cad.

I was copying from a generic annotation family into a symbol family and Revit couldn’t do it for “reasons”. I don’t remember the exact details, it was just a throwaway example. Just a small example of how you spend more time fixing Revit errors than you do actually getting work done. One time I had to fix over 150 walls that somebody grouped and Revit decided to delete because the element got “reversed” which is apparently a concept too complex for Revit to handle, reversing walls, lol. Some tasks that take seconds to do by hand take much longer on the computer. This is a simple concept, I didn’t expect to see people struggle so much to understand it. The distance between your idea and seeing your idea on paper is much greater in softwares like Revit. So you iterate less.

"you spend more time fixing Revit errors than you do actually getting work done" 

This is incorrect if you take the time to learn the tools. Revit will figure shit out by itself just as well as a pencil... meaning, it won't.  It's up to you to use it for what it's design to do.  Not the software's fault you're asking it to do things it's not design to... or worse, not the software's fault if you can't be bothered to do things correctly.  It's complicated, and there are many logical reasons behind these apparently dumb/obvious things you struggle with.

I think it’s clear that you work as a draftsman doing larger buildings, and not doing any design at all. Yes, for that, Revit is best. Maybe revisit this topic once you’ve worked on your own designs for a client directly, doing smaller projects like a house in the 1-10 million dollar range. Until then, you don’t really have the experience to reply with respect instead of being an edgy autodesk bootlicker.

Has it occurred to you that you're getting a cold response in this thread because you're acting unnecessarily cocky and condescending?

Sleepy, I use Revit better than you do, I do better projects than you do, and I hate Autodesk more than you do. Your attitude sucks.

Sleepy, I doubt you do anything worth while either. You can't even make a simple revit annotation family, so doubtful you can design anything more complicated than a garden shed. See... very easy to assume.

Right. Some idiot posts a middle finger north arrow, but I’m the one being condescending… and you totally obsess over my software skills instead of entertaining the ideas I’m trying to communicate. Have you even opened the newer iPad apps like Concepts or Morpholio? You can draft to scale. It’s very fast. No ruler needed. For a house, you can easily do a whole CD set in 2 weeks.

Tell me more about your house 2 week CD set in a proprietary ipad app.

I use the Sketchbook app on my phone or Ipad. Great to hash out ideas and it saves layers which are read by photoshop. Looked into morpholio a while back but I don't use it enough. Still prefer dirty graphite for design. (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/...)

edit... just noticed that app I use is owned by AutoDesk... oops. Fine, what's another few dollars between friends.

Although it’s been a year or so, I’ve tried nearly every drawing app on the market and Concepts was the best for me. Especially with the amount of flexibility it gives from importing custom brushes and patterns and making “blocks” to scale from existing drawings. It’s not perfect but it’s pretty good. Morpholio is not vector which is a dealbreaker. Not sure what the “proprietary” comment is about. Almost all software is proprietary. It exports to PDF that’s all that matters. I’ve just come to realize that for some, not all, projects…. Honestly I could simply hand draft it. You think the permit office cares if your 2’ closet scales in at 2” 0 1/2”? No they do not. This industry has become so bogged down by software, but somehow we’re not building houses any faster. We’re not completing drawing sets any faster. Nothing is faster.

Sleepy - please shut up. At this point you're just embarrassing yourself.

Interested to know your process. I’ve found revisions to be very quick. Using concepts app.

for as builts I use the LiDAR Scanner. Once over the whole house, and once each per room takes about 2 hours. 

I just saw you said AutoCAD app. Noooo no no. I would never. Autodesk is terrible at app development and UI.

And when you said hand drafted, i thought you were referring to actual paper... [i didnt read too closely either ]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think so many people here just haven’t tried simply drawing it by hand. So many headaches disappear and the process becomes more connected to the design intent I believe. I think I will always use it in SD and DD stages.

Revit demands decisions, and that holds ideas back and makes them slower. 

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"So many people here..."

Fuck your assumptions, tiny.

Jeez don’t take it personally my dude.

Indeed. I should not have.

There's a difference between sketching and hand drafting. You explore ideas by sketching. You do the technical drawings using CAD or BIM tools in this day and age. In Autocad, I don't need to concern myself with parametric crap for the north arrow. You can just rotate the arrow and if necessary the N gets adjust as you rotate from the center point of the arrow. Yes, drafting by hand is faster to do some things. Easy to do spline curves using a french curve or any those flexible things (forget the name of them but I think most here knows what I am referring to). Of course CAD or even BIM tools like Revit will do certain things faster. Computer tools makes editing faster. This is why, back in the day of hand drafting, you sketch first and even make a cleaner sketch but not perfect draft in pencil and erase and make corrections. When you are done editing, and this implies imposing protocols like deadlines for clients to state changes. Otherwise, you charge the client a hefty charge for change-orders after Design Development and especially during construction. Computer tools allows you to be lazy and sloppy in the designing because you can just edit and make changes 50 to 1000 times. You don't want to do that even 5 times with redrafting ink drawings. What some of the folks here think, it's very difficult to make changes. It's not but yes, it's easier with computers because of plotters because you don't have to make hand drafted technical drawings in ink anymore. The plotter does that for you. You just pencil and paper and sketch from more quick and dirty sketches to a more cleaner looking drawings still in pencil and paper. No pens are needed unless you have a shitty scanner. Then you can scan the drawing and make a copy and add a little darkness setting with your printer/scanner. Still editing a pencil and paper drawing is as simple as using an eraser and pencil. CAD (and BIM tools) are like Word Processors (Office software) software on computer are to old mechanical type writers. If you need to make a change in the manuscript, it's best done on your hand written manuscript and then once ALL editing is done, then type it out. Of course, if you need to make a change afterwards, you have to retype all of the document with the changes made. Software and computers allows for precision editing and modification.

With Autocad, you can produce any technical drawing you ever done in hand drafting. Yes, some tasks are not as intuitive as sketching on paper with a pencil. However, when you do something that makes the tasks simpler and quicker to do, you have to make things more sophisticated. We went from index card size forms to multiple full-page forms. Why? So the worker that inputs that data into the computers has something to do so they have a full-time job instead of a 2 hour work day. You don't want your employees just sitting around waiting for something to do or the next set of orders. We made things more sophisticated in part because of keeping the workers busy. It's more than that, of course. We also need to be putting the hours in for people to pay us what we want. If you aren't producing 250 hours worth of deliverables, and you are doing it in 25 hours, you know the clients going to catch on and demand a 1/10th the amount in what you are charging. You need to put in around the same amount of work to justify the same compensation.

Rcz- there *used* to be a difference between hand drafting and sketching. With newer apps on the tablet, they almost blend together because it’s the speed of sketching with assist tools like forcing the line the be orthogonal and inputting distance. It’s very handy. It’s a hybrid mode of working.

Rick's here. Pack it up everybody.

There was a term for that back in the days of yore. It's just what we might call a clean-line sketches or clean sketches where a little more care is taken in making lines straighter without quite the precise level of perfection of technical drawings. In these cases, you may cross your corners a little more than you would on the technical drawings. You might use your architectural scale so you are on mark. Now, we have some digital tools that we can do that sort of. When I do stuff with hand drafted modes, there is generally sketching, rough-level drafting and then the final drafting where more work is done in the diligence of the drafting where you would use line weights more (technical pens or ruling pens). In this age, most clients are wanting something digital so CAD or BIM tools would be used. Most residential projects, I may use CAD tools because there isn't often the need for those BIM features so much. I have tools where I can make the drafting in CAD more intuitive for me but CAD has it's limitations. I still haven't got to using my phone for drafting or such hybrid. I may sketch on it but the challenge is making sure the sketches actually are approximately in scale so if I note something as 40'-6" for the intended 1/4"=1'-0" then it should approximately that with a scale when printed out and something 20'-3" should be half the 40'-6" so one has to be careful more to keep proportional. Rough sketches can be very off of proportions. I could obviously draw it on paper and photograph it and adjust for camera's lens distortion and adjust the photographed image to be orthographic as the drawing was but sometimes the photo is off because you can't be perfectly centered on both x and y axis over the center point of the drawing and then you have potential barrel distortion due to lens curvature so yeah, you have to undistort the image. At that point, it would be comparably as accurate as a genuine blueprint may be (which can be off due to the changes to the paper caused by the blueprint process (usually soaking paper into water). If you are familiar with cyanotype process (actual blueprinting versus the later diazoprint process), you know what I am talking about. Therefore, it was more important to note the dimension and go by the noted dimensions and use math as appropriate then to measure off the blueprint but the master copy would be more accurate to the extent of the draftsman's skill. That's old school processes, now. It's kind of becoming a lost art because of the changes in the work flow processes of architecture in the computer/internet age.

If I am hand drafting/drawing, I might as well invest in a decent large format scanner to scan the large format drawings that a smaller scanner is not able to handle. This eliminates the need to use the camera to photograph the drawing and time spent "correcting" the photograph so it's more accurate. (NOTE: I am not saying it has to be absolutely perfect, it needs to be reasonably close enough). 

I needed that today. Covidiots are circling our airport... and just barged into a city meeting... and are threatening to drive slowly around schools at pick-up time. This fire is a good distraction.

Thanks. I tried to be thoughtful but it’s like herding cats. Everyone is so defensive of Revit… but everyone also hates Revit hahaha. I’m just trying to suggest maybe for smaller projects, hand drafting on a tablet is actually a decent proposition.

Dude, what? Your initial post was fine, and I agree with much of it (not that we need to back to the pencil, but whatever, that wasn't really the part that had me nodding anyhow.) Then you started taking literally every response personally and acting like a twat.

I'm also in a shit mood because the CLOUD sucks ballsack in every instance of its use.

Well if I’ve come across that way then I apologize.

If I was conducting the post-mortem on this thread, I'd point to this as the point where it went off the rails:

"I (probably) know more about Revit and AutoCAD than maybe 95% of you. Maybe you need to learn about the new hand drafting softwares that exist."

That comment, in terms of your audience here, was the spark that lit the blaze.

Also, another word of caution ... if you're not aware of who he is, it's best to ignore rcz1001. Even if you did everything right in this thread, it was still some pretty big bait for him to come in. And where ever he goes, a dumpster fire is almost guaranteed.

I guess I should’ve said I know it better than 95% of general users. I’m sure some people in here know it better than me, and this audience might be more knowledgeable than usual. I never wanted to be “the Revit guy” but by necessity I’ve had to spend a few years working in it exclusively. Nobody walks in to the office in the morning, excited to boot up Revit. It’s just a walking annoyance.

I think you've made a good point. The pencil isn't about nostalgia, it's about pragmatism, speed, and artistry, where relevant as you point out. Interesting to see the defensiveness when there are 6 days to Sunday.

A year or two back we uncovered the CDs for one of the first projects in our firm's history. This was a ~20 story glass office building. The entire set was about 12-15 pages. 

They don't make em like they used to.

Contractors wanting more drawings to reduce liabilities at their end ...

and architects trying to lock down the problems with assumptions too

I have done a lot more alterations and additions than ground-up new work in my career, and I have always been impressed by how much better the old record drawings are than most of the new work I see us turning out.

It's a different industry. Less to do with architecture and more to do with increased "efficiency" at the cost of craftsmanship and expertise. Slimmer budgets value "do" over "think" and so you need more and more specific instructions to make up for the lack of on-site problem solving. And somehow in the midst of all of this *our* fees went down.

i think the issue is that at one time the practice of architecture as an art was itself a craft focused on expressive drawings. that has largely disappeared. even the art architects we admire need to produce documentation to execute the work. it is less fun.

there can be a craft to digital modeling - i've seen amazing sketchup models and find rhino fun and intuitive. revit is much too far removed from exploration in creation to be a craft. everything in it needs to be premeditated, and there is no sense of feedback through the tool. it's the difference between driving a race car vs driving a subway train.

.

Valentine's Day is comin up.

*rimjob*

Er... *rimshot*

a la Wes Jones

A co-worker once put a set together by making a physical model, photographing it, and annotating in InDesign. Maybe took a few days and was enough to get the project priced, approved, and built. Of course it was more or less an open-air dining room with a small commercial kitchen, nothing complicated, but I was impressed

Love that BB! 

Tintt... what's keeping you from doing that? Don't you do your own projects? As BB points out, you could probably figure out a way to make it comply with any permit submittal requirements.

I do do this on more interiors focused jobs but not permit submittal drawings - site plans, wall sections, etc. And I just started leaving detail out of the drawing set and doing it in a detail book. Some of the problems are drawings must be scaled and accurate, not just a sketch, and area take-offs are needed, and consultant coordination/background. But yes, I'm experimenting with what I produce and will continue to do so as it works with the way I can produce work.

when I started college, I was a drafter at an architect's office, when I started working in Architecture, there were no more drafters, only computers and you had to learn. New tech keeps pushing people out of their middle income jobs, to low income jobs. When was the last time you had a secretary?

We have an admin team. 'Secretary' is no longer the preferred nomenclature, dude.

Fucking fascist!

Just because you have been through multiple projects where you understand that visibility settings can be hidden in 300 different places doesn’t make other people “stupid” for not having ever encountered it before.

I got thrown under a bus so hard one time I lost a close friend in the fallout. I wouldn't recommend that.

I use Revit so much that I use it to reply to dumb posts about Revit on Archinect.

I was just looking at old drawings for a 4 or 5 storey commercial building from the 1930s. The ENTIRE set was 7 pages. I think the last set of elevator shop drawings I reviewed was about 25. But somehow we seem to get paid less and less every year, while taking on complete liability.