Content is King! The right content, good content, smart content...
How the content is to be judged is subjective, evaluated against personal criteria, as well as objective. It doesn't take a lot of effort to find something to complain about when you use content created by others. It isn't even all that hard to return to our own content a little later and have a different opinion about how well we made it. Ever evolving, improving...hopefully.
I had the occasion recently to poke and prod some families shared via Autodesk Seek. The first example is from Belden, one of their equipment management products, this image is a 3D view at 1/8" = 1'-0" scale.
Another example is from Siemon, one of their punch down patch panels, also in a 3D view at 1/8" = 1'-0" scale. This is a bit blobby eh?
What you see in these images are what you see in the project environment, assuming a particular scale as mentioned before. There is a heck of a lot of detail in each of the families. The rack weighs in at 796 KB and the patch panel weighs in at 2.056 MB.
Taking a closer look at the punch down patch panel we find this, I had to use thin lines to see the detail.
The back side has the punch down blocks modelled too as well as sheet metal bends and kerfs. There are even small parts on the inside of the panel which nobody will ever be able to see in a Revit view.
Another family I had a closer look at is one of the Siemon Wire Management racks which weighs in at 2.9 MB.
It is nice looking but there are elements that have been modelled that nobody can see in a Revit project. Cutting a section through the cabinet will not yield the extra modeling effort that was put in. A simple rectangular shape would yield sufficient results in nearly all views except for a close up photoreal rendering perhaps.
These last two families don't take advantage of Revit's Detail Levels or Visibility options to manage the complexity or detail they contain. What's more troubling about these is that they are posted on Seek, suggesting that they are ideal or represent content that others should emulate. The wire management rack is the most "over the top".
I've hidden a hundred or more elements (solids/voids) to show this stuff.
Nearly everything you can see in that image is hidden behind something (except for the door handle) which means in a Revit project that nobody can ever see it because the category (Electrical Fixtures) doesn't have a cut representation. In a few cases I've run across data related equipment that have been assigned to the category Specialty Equipment, which doesn't even show up in Revit MEP views ordinarily (not included among the MEP categories listed in V/G, without showing all categories).
Where am I headed with this critique? It's still the wild west folks. Just downloading content from Seek is no guarantee that you won't have to spend some time tweaking or in the case of the wire management rack or punch down patch panel, abandoning them to create something simpler.
How the content is to be judged is subjective, evaluated against personal criteria, as well as objective. It doesn't take a lot of effort to find something to complain about when you use content created by others. It isn't even all that hard to return to our own content a little later and have a different opinion about how well we made it. Ever evolving, improving...hopefully.
I had the occasion recently to poke and prod some families shared via Autodesk Seek. The first example is from Belden, one of their equipment management products, this image is a 3D view at 1/8" = 1'-0" scale.
Another example is from Siemon, one of their punch down patch panels, also in a 3D view at 1/8" = 1'-0" scale. This is a bit blobby eh?
What you see in these images are what you see in the project environment, assuming a particular scale as mentioned before. There is a heck of a lot of detail in each of the families. The rack weighs in at 796 KB and the patch panel weighs in at 2.056 MB.
Taking a closer look at the punch down patch panel we find this, I had to use thin lines to see the detail.
The back side has the punch down blocks modelled too as well as sheet metal bends and kerfs. There are even small parts on the inside of the panel which nobody will ever be able to see in a Revit view.
Another family I had a closer look at is one of the Siemon Wire Management racks which weighs in at 2.9 MB.
It is nice looking but there are elements that have been modelled that nobody can see in a Revit project. Cutting a section through the cabinet will not yield the extra modeling effort that was put in. A simple rectangular shape would yield sufficient results in nearly all views except for a close up photoreal rendering perhaps.
These last two families don't take advantage of Revit's Detail Levels or Visibility options to manage the complexity or detail they contain. What's more troubling about these is that they are posted on Seek, suggesting that they are ideal or represent content that others should emulate. The wire management rack is the most "over the top".
I've hidden a hundred or more elements (solids/voids) to show this stuff.
Nearly everything you can see in that image is hidden behind something (except for the door handle) which means in a Revit project that nobody can ever see it because the category (Electrical Fixtures) doesn't have a cut representation. In a few cases I've run across data related equipment that have been assigned to the category Specialty Equipment, which doesn't even show up in Revit MEP views ordinarily (not included among the MEP categories listed in V/G, without showing all categories).
Where am I headed with this critique? It's still the wild west folks. Just downloading content from Seek is no guarantee that you won't have to spend some time tweaking or in the case of the wire management rack or punch down patch panel, abandoning them to create something simpler.
