Tuesday 9 August 2011

L.O.D What does this mean to me?

So... LOD... Level of Development how does this affect the typical Revit User?
In the old 2D drafting days we would draw lines to represent objects such as walls doors, windows roofs etc... remember that? We use to draw two lines representing a complete (and often complex) wall assemblies. Often these lines didn't even represent the true dimensions of the assembly either!
Drawings got done and buildings still got built.! Amazing times.....

Now with BIM were adding more information to our drawings by adding more information to our Building Information Model. for the majority of us the end result is a set of documents that someone can build from. Don't loose sight of that. we are in danger of Over Modeling....
We get so wrapped up in creating content and families for everything that sometimes we loose sight of why we are creating this model in the first place. Remember your creating drawings (and hopefully get paid for them) within a specific time limit. If you go over this time limit you are burning up your profit margin, when we first are introduced to Revit we think to ourselves "wow, this is going to save me a bunch of time", "I no longer have to draw elevation, sections" etc... however my experience is that we get seduced... yes seduced! by Revit and we want to build a complete model down to the nuts and bolts.....
Now before I get a bunch of emails and comments I'm not proposing that we get stoopid and just model the exterior walls and just draw lines for the interior.... no we need to model what is appropriate to the project. If your doing a residential home do you really need to model the gutters and drains? Do you need to model the gas meter on the side of the house? For larger projects do you need to model the tactile strip at the top of the stairs? Would detail lines in the view be sufficient. There is a huge difference in resources between the two. Do you need to use the roof top mechanical unit from the supplier that is detailed down to the nut and bolt? Why not use a generic placeholder.

Try to use families that are smaller in file size this will help your project file size to stay manageable.

So try and stick to a LOD of 300 (Precise Geometry) instead of LOD 400 (Fabrication)......

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