Revit MEP Now?

In the past I've found that a fair number of engineers considering Revit MEP were able to dismiss it fairly quickly for a several reasons, such as; no conduit, no cable tray, no flat oval duct, panel schedule inflexibility and overly simplistic demand factor concept. That is a fairly long list of things that a given HVAC designer or electrical designer could consider a deal breaker.

I think that the Revit MEP 2011 release represents a tipping point. Enough of the easy obstacles have been removed such that you can't dismiss it as easily. Sure you can still avoid it, dismiss it, disregard or marginalize the software and keep on doing what you've been doing even with the new features they've added. Doing so now though just appears less objective as much as subjective.

In past posts at AUGI, maybe even here, I've commented that Revit MEP is still youthful even though Revit just quietly celebrated its 10th birthday on April 5th. When Revit 5.0 came out I think it reached its own tipping point with architects. Prior to that it was still too strange and weird to go for it. The very idea that someone actually used earlier versions to do real work is nearly shocking to some. I know at least five people, off the top, that used release 1.0 to do jobs. Wow! Nutty eh? Not many considering but still, brave doing real projects with the very first release!

Well for comparison sake Revit MEP is at that same point, counting up the releases since the first one in 2006, the 2011 release is number 6. You can review the Revit Timeline hosted at AUGI but here's the sequence: Revit Systems 1, 2, Revit MEP 2008, 2009, 2010 and now 2011. The first release was in April 2006 (four years ago). Revit 5.0 was the ninth release but only two years young (excluding 1999 before the public release) at the time.

It has taken a little longer to get here with Revit MEP but architecture is just "one" discipline, Revit MEP is focused on three, four if you count Fire Protection as separate. Is it perfect, no. I think for MEP users this is an exceptionally strong release. We'll always want and find more to ask of it but I think we've reached that tipping point where the excuses to pass on it till later are just that now, excuses.

To steal a song lyric/title from Pablo Cruise - "Whatcha Gonna do"?

To focus on one of the new features that knock off an excuse, you can check out this Autodesk video narrated by Armundo Darling - Panel Schedule features.