By Howard Roman, IMAGINiT Building Solutions
Recently, I attended an excellent demonstration of the new Autodesk FormIT application at the New York Revit User Group by Tom Vollaro of Autodesk. Although the application is at the beginning of its development, one particular feature of FormIT appears to plug a hole in the existing workflow between the Revit conceptual massing environment and the Revit project environment.
In particular, there was simply no way to transfer any levels created in the conceptual massing environment into the project environment. When you loaded the conceptual mass into the project, you had to recreate the levels in the project environment from scratch. If there had been considerable work put into creating multiple levels and carefully establishing their location, this lapse in the workflow was frustrating.
The Autodesk FormIT application takes care of this workflow problem as well as providing an excellent design sketching environment that will compete favorably against the Revit conceptual massing environment. Whether you use web based or IPad based FormIT, you get a very easy to use sketching tool that connects very well with Revit. It’s still early but the development plans seem to be strong and it is usable today as is.
Here is the workflow from FormIT to Revit:
1. Either before or after sketching your building, click the Levels tab in FormIT. There are 5 default levels and you can either adjust their heights or delete them to start from scratch.
2. If you delete the default levels you should leave one level to work from.
3. Next, you can use the “Add Multiple Levels” button and specify how many levels you want to create as well as their spacing.
4. Now the new levels appear, but how do we make them visible in the model?
5. The next step is to activate the Properties tab so we can control the visibility of the levels. We can tab over the object to highlight the whole object and select it to see the object properties. Next, pick the “Area by Level” button. This will allow us to expand the levels to see the level list. Finally, we can choose “Check All” or choose just the levels we want to see in the model. When the model is converted into a Revit file, all levels will appear including any levels that are above or below the model. The FormIT levels do not have to intersect the modeled object to be converted into Revit.
6. Now the model can be saved to A360. This central cloud location manages model sharing and conversion to Revit.
7. Once the model is saved to A360, a Revit rvt file will automatically be generated. The rvt file can be downloaded and opened in Revit.
8. The result is a fully functioning Revit project with the model and all of the Levels present. The conversion process on A360 will include all levels even if they do not intersect the model itself.
The workflow from FormIT to Revit is a promising alternative to the conceptual massing environment. In addition to the level tools, there are a host of excellent sketching and materials features in FormIT that will ultimately result in a very strong workflow for building design.</p>
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